Oh Nokia, how far you’ve fallen from your once-lofty mobile gaming ambitions. The Nokia Mosh repository carried so many wild and wacky games — until you threw away your entire developer community in favor of your clean and shiny Ovi app store. Now you can barely give away top-tier titles for free. N-Gage held so much promise as a mobile online gaming service, boasting such big titles as Tomb Raider and The Sims and Metal Gear Solid — until you unceremoniously killed the whole thing.

Now, to demonstrate the gaming capabilities of your new N900 smartphone, you’ve resorted to running classic games on retro console emulators. Never mind the sheer absurdity of using software emulation to sell the native capabilities of a piece of hardware. Sure, emulators are legal, and hardcore mobile gaming aficionados love emulators, but the game ROMs in your promo video are of questionable legality.

Now Nintendo’s thinking of taking you to court for copyright infringement. Considering that you’re the world’s largest cellphone manufacturer, that’s pretty frickin’ embarrassing.

Originally posted on November 29, 2009 @ 2:51 pm