Cue the Odd Couple theme: Palladium Books and Nokia share presence at Gen Con

Now this is just weird: Palladium will be sharing their Gen Con booth with Nokia – yes, the Finnish cell phone empire and makers of the thus-far lackluster game deck N-Gage. The form-factor problems with the N-Gage have been at least partially solved, but the bigger problem was a games selection so utterly mundane as to interest no one. Nokia appears to have swung to the other extreme – they’ll be previewing a Rifts RPG for N-Gage. I think it’s fair to call Rifts fans a niche market within a niche market – but I suppose if Nokia hits enough niches, and finally fires up the online play that the N-Gage cries out for, they might have something. (As an aside, I bet their new hire had something to do with this booth-share.) I think it’s unlikely we’ll see online play out of this game, or indeed anything other than a demo video, but one thing’s for sure: Rifts for N-Gage will have characters that’d snap your neck like a toothpick if you so much as say “side-talkin’.”