Nom 2 E3 2005 Hands-On Report

Korean mobile games developer Gamevil isn't unknown in the US, though it's developed some important mobile games for big publishers, like Mforma's mobile baseball titles. However, most of its really original stuff has stayed behind on the peninsula. One of the developer's newest games, Nom 2, has only been out in Korea for a week, but it's already pulling thousands of downloads a day. Heck, we'd download it too, if we could. How else are we going to transmit an important message into deep space from our mobile phone?

Let us explain. First of all, the word "nom" is the rough Korean equivalent to "guy" or "dude." And, in fact, that's exactly who you play in Nom 2, a little man who runs at a constant rate of speed from the left side of the screen to the right. All you need to do is hit the action key when the game tells you to, and your dude will perform some kind of acrobatic maneuver over or around an approaching obstacle, be it a smoothly choreographed flip or a dive through a burning hoop. He'll also boot certain items out of the way, too, if you time things right. If you don't perform maneuvers fast enough, your guy will stumble; if you stumble too many times, the game's over. The landscape itself is totally featureless, other than a psychedelic montage of background colors that are supposed to denote the inside of someone's mind, apparently.

That's not even remotely the best part of Nom 2, however. After running in a single direction for a while, your man will encounter the vertical boundary of the level, which is also the edge of the screen. What is there to do other than leap onto the wall and keep on running, turning the phone around 90 degrees to keep the floor pointing down? Yes, that's right! The original Nom game pioneered this mechanic, and Nom 2 improves upon it. Later in the game, you'll encounter levels with sloped ceilings and pits. Your dude will even split into two at one point, at which time the game goes split-screen and you have to keep both guys running up walls and over ceilings. There are some really strange boss sequences, too. You might have to pick up a girl and frantically tap the action button to lift her over your head, for instance. You'll also run into a giant female face with a lolling tongue. You defeat this apparition by running up the tongue and kicking the face in the nose until it throws in the towel.

All this probably makes a good deal more sense in Korea, yes. But that's not even the weirdest of it. Once you finish the game, you're able to write a short message or draw a small picture, which is uploaded to Gamevil's server and then transmitted in a batch to NSAU, the Ukrainian version of NASA. Gamevil's contracted with the space agency to beam a large group of these messages into space every few months. The developer tried to sign a similar contract with Korea's National University, but regulations prevented the deal from going through. A Gamevil representative told us that the game's message is about universal peace and love, so it figured it would do well to broadcast this message to aliens, too. Makes sense to us!

Gamevil has a demonstrated knack for making crazy little minigames (Skipping Stone is another example) that are somehow more fun to play than 95 percent of the mobile games consumers can download in this country...full stop. It's sad, but it's absolutely true, and that means American publishers need to get with the program and start seeking this solid gold material on a more regular basis. Apparently, Gamevil's seen a lot of interest in Nom 2 from publishers here, so it seems very likely the game will be coming out here at some point in the future. We can't wait until it does, so we'll keep you posted on any developments regarding the game in the meantime.