We had the chance to talk to Randi Fabi and recieve a briefing on the up and coming X-Men Legends 2 title for the Nokia N-Gage.

Have you made any noteworthy improvements to the friendly AI.

We’ve added functionality and intelligence to our characters making them smarter in combat and able to heal/replenish their health or energy while in combat. This reduces the number of pauses to game play in order to work your way through the pause menu to check on and replenish your various characters.

Have you done anything to improve on the excellent Bluetooth multiplayer of the original.

Didn’t want to mess with a good thing. Only minor tweaks were done to compensate for the increased healing functionality of the characters.

How do you feel about moving so clearly away from the "pick up and play" titles you might expect on a mobile phone.

I think this gets back to what consumers are familiar with on a phone which is usually simple, easy to get into Java games. Our N-Gage games are closer to console quality and thus require somewhat longer loading times. That being said, we recognize the way consumers use their phones and what they expect out of their applications. We try very hard to stream line menus, shorten load times, make the save/load functionality as simple as possible requiring the fewest amount of key presses and menu surfing.

Does the game do anything to top the well executed story of the Original.

The X-Men games are all about the characters and maintaining their integrity wrt their Marvel histories. We have added many more Marvel characters from the X-Men universe that were not in the first Legends game. We’re also allowing the user to combine X-Men and Brotherhood characters on the same team. Basically there are more characters to select from and more to fight. And all of the characters are much more customizable allowing their mutant personalities to be more prominent.

I have read rumours that turn-based N-Gage Arena play will be a feature, how will this differ from Bluetooth Multiplayer.

Bluetooth multi player will be the same game play experience as single player – action/adventure style. The difference being that other users can assume control of characters within your team.

Arena play is turn based between two head to head participants.

Will we be seeing any new characters introduced into the game? New villains perhaps.

The characters we can reveal now are Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Magneto, Juggernaut, Bishop, and Nightcrawler. However, there will be more new characters that I can't reveal yet due to exclusives with Activision.

Can we expect any N-Gage exclusive features in the game.

Certainly the mobile wireless game play through Bluetooth and GPRS/Arena. No one can do that but us.

Are there any console elements of the game you have had to leave out or cut back on which you would have liked to include or improve.

We had to cut back a few movies do to the shear size of the game and our memory constraints. We did not want to compromise the game play experience over something the user will probably only watch once.

If you could pick one defining feature from the game which would it be.

The game play depth. This game is much less linear than the previous X-Men game with more puzzles, more breakable objects, more customizing of characters, more exploration, more items and equipment to find – basically you’re always busy.

And if you could pick one major downer you wish you could change what would it be.

From the software side I’d love to be able to put this on a bigger MMC. We could have put substantially more content – art, special effects, audio, movies. We had so many assets to work with we could have released something more like a multimedia DVD.

If you could change one thing about the N-Gage to allow you to produce a better game, what would you change?

Shoulder buttons. Would add so much more functionality. I’m not sure what Nokia will do next with the hardware but they are always trying to push the envelope.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to tell the Marvel fans, lovers of the original X-Men Legends and prospective new players?

This game will appeal to hard core X-Men fans and casual Marvel fans alike because of the rich game play and character development.

Our thanks goes our to Randi for giving us the opportunity to interview him. That's all for now, but rest assured we'll bring you more information about X-Men Legends 2 as it surfaces.

Philip Howard