NOKIA GAMES

Asphalt 3.v1.2.7 N-GAGE SymbianOS9.1 Cr@cked-BiNPDA


Gameplay

Asphalt 3 is the follow-up to the Asphalt series of games from the first generation N-Gage and the Nintendo DS. This is a third party title from , who specialise in phone games and have supported N-Gage since its first generation. (The Asphalt brand is also used on Java titles from , but these aren't really the same games, they just have similar names and themes.)



The Asphalt games are arcade racers, i.e. they're not realistic in the slightest. Their purpose isn't to simulate driving, but to let you pretend you're in a car chase from films like "The Fast And The Furious", doing ridiculously over-the-top driving that would never be possible in real life. The gameplay revolves around illegal street racing, and the emphasis is firmly on doing stuff you shouldn't do: knocking other cars off the road, driving too fast, smashing into crates etc. The score you get for a race is far more influenced by what you do during the race than where you finish in the race, so if you come first but do very little else then you'll get a very low score.

To get by in Asphalt 3 you have to master two things: nitro boosts and "drifting". In general you should drift on every corner and use nitro boosts on every straight, which if done carefully should get you to the head of the pack fairly quickly. Nitros can be picked up from certain points on the track, and they can also be earned by drifting and other activities.



Of course illegal activity means the police will be after you, and if you do too many bad things you'll see a police badge on the screen to indicate that a police car or bike are on your tail. If they catch you there's a hefty penalty to pay, so you can either try to outrun them or nudge them off the road, both of which earn you bonuses. Illegal activity also attracts the attention of news helicopters and you'll sometimes find yourself looking through the camera of a news report, which means you briefly have to steer the car from above (rather like the original gen N-Gage game Glimmerati).



You start the game with just a couple of tracks unlocked, but as you earn money you can unlock the others, making a total of seven tracks (in order of unlocking): Honolulu, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Rome, St. Petersburg, Mumbai and Tokyo.



The game can be played in both vertical/portrait and horizontal/landscape modes, and can also be flipped if you want to use the controls on the other side of the phone. Because it's a racing game it felt slightly more comfortable to play in horizontal/landscape mode, but it was still perfectly okay in vertical/portrait mode, especially if you use the camera keys to zoom out a bit before the race begins.



Three of the twelve vehicles in the game

Graphics & Sound

Before we discuss the graphics in Asphalt 3, it should be remembered that this isn't a 50 euro console game, it's a 10 euro phone game. As a phone game, the graphics are very very good. They're not perfect, and they'd be better if they used the graphics accelerator chip on certain N-Gage models, but in general the game looks extremely pretty and detailed. As well as you and the other racers, the streets are populated with other traffic, police cars, trams and even press helicopters, which really adds to the atmosphere. Perhaps the biggest graphical glitch is the strangely wobbly camera at the beginning, but once the race begins the camera is fine.

The look of each tracks is very different thanks to the globe-trotting nature of the game. The 3D is a lot more detailed than on previous Asphalt games, and the game world on each track feels a lot more real. However, it would have been nice to see more variety on each track through the use of different times of day and different weather conditions (the snow on the St. Petersburg track is a tantalising glimpse of how much this could have added to the game).

The feeling of speed conveyed by the graphics varies from track to track and situation to situation. Sometimes, especially when you're using the bikes, the game feels incredibly fast, but in other situations the game starts to slow down because there are too many objects near each other at once. In general though the game is playably smooth. A higher frame rate is always welcome of course, but the current frame rate is perfectly adequate.

Sound is pretty much what you'd expect from this kind of game, the music is straight out of a Hollywood film with a mixture of pop, rock and hip-hop. The title screen has a rather nice rendition of Misirilou in the style of **** Dale. The soundtrack and sound effects are all recorded in high quality, and suit the game very well. Whether you like them depends on your taste, but if you enjoy arcade racers then you'll probably enjoy Asphalt 3's sound.

The one problem audiowise was the volume control, which didn't seem to vary the volume properly.



Four of the seven tracks: Honolulu, Tokyo, Mumbai (aka Bombay), Rome




For now there are a few phones compatible with n-gage:
N81 (8GB), N82 and N95 (8GB). More will come soon.
First of all, make sure you have TRK (included in this release) installed and connected to your pc via USB.
s60_3_0_app_trk_2_7.sisx is for SymbianOS9 devices WITHOUT FP1
s60_3_1_app_trk_2_7.sisx is for SymbianOS9 devices WITH FP1Also you have to be sure that the n-gage application from
w*w.n-gage.com is installed on your device.
Start the .exe which is included in this release. This is an
installer which will guide you trough the installation process of the game.
NOTE: After installing, in the n-gage app, the games are listed as trial games. If that annoys you, install the included
patch.sis to remove the trial stamp from all games.
You only need to do this ONCE for ALL the games!
NOTE: Don't start the n-gage when you have enabled the platformhack. The game will mess up your savegames or even worse.
Have fun with this release from team BiNPDA



download here