The best N-Gage games of 2008 revealed

It won't come as a surprise, but Nokia's Reset Generation was the most critically acclaimed N-Gage game of 2008, according to our analysis of reviews on a range of popular websites.

The game scored an impressive 9.28 out of 10 on the sites tracked in our inaugural N-Gage Quality Index, which include Pocket Gamer, All About N-Gage, N-Gager, NokNok, Handy-Player, MeriStation and Mobile Game FAQs.

In fact, Nokia takes four of the top five slots in our chart. Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep is joint second with Konami's Metal Gear Solid Mobile, both with an average score of 8.83. Fourth is ONE with 8.78, and fifth is System Rush Evolution with 8.33.

However, it's not such good news for Gameloft and EA Mobile in the lower reaches of the chart, with their respective virtual dog games turning out to be, well, dogs.

The full list is below, containing games reviewed on three or more websites. For added interest, we've included as a separate column each game's N-Gage Arena rating, which shows what actual players thought. We've scaled that up from Nokia's five-star system to a mark out of ten to aid the comparison.

Pos	Game	Publisher	Revs	Avg	Arena Score
1	Reset Generation	Nokia	5	9.28	8.00
2=	Creatures Of The Deep	Nokia	4	8.83	9.00
2=	Metal Gear Solid Mobile	Konami	4	8.83	8.00
4	ONE	Nokia	5	8.78	9.00
5	System Rush Evolution	Nokia	3	8.33	8.00
6	Star Wars: The Force Unleashed	THQ	5	8.26	8.00
7	Space Impact Kappa Base	Nokia	3	8.20	8.00
8	Pro Series Golf	Nokia	4	8.15	7.00
9	Asphalt 3: Street Rules	Gameloft	3	8.10	8.00
10	Bounce Boing Voyage	Nokia	4	8.00	8.00
11	Resident Evil: Degeneration	Capcom	4	7.80	8.00
12	Midnight Pool	Gameloft	3	7.43	7.00
13	FIFA 08	EA Mobile	3	7.37	8.00
14	Cafe Solitaire	Digital Chocolate	3	7.27	8.00
15	FIFA 09	EA Mobile	3	7.17	7.00
16	Block Breaker Deluxe	Gameloft	4	7.15	7.00
17	Brain Challenge	Gameloft	3	6.93	7.00
18	Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol	Nokia	4	6.88	8.00
19	Brothers In Arms	Gameloft	4	6.85	8.00
20	Boom Blox	EA Mobile	4	6.45	7.00
21	Snakes Subsonic	Nokia	3	5.63	6.00
22	The Sims 2 Pets	EA Mobile	3	4.83	7.00
23	Dogz	Gameloft	3	4.20	6.00

 
For the record, the titles that didn't make it into the chart were Mile High Pinball (7.75 from two reviews), Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D (7.50 from one review so far), Tetris (6.15 from two reviews) and World Series of Poker: Pro Challenge (5.00 from one review).

We haven't really broken the chart up by publishers as we do for the main PocketGamer.biz Quality Index, as only three have released a significant number of N-Gage titles so far.

However, if you're keen to know their results, Nokia scored an average of 8.10 from 37 reviews of its games, Gameloft scored 6.80 from 20 reviews, and EA Mobile scored 6.41 from 15 reviews.