Monkeystone to port Red Faction to N-Gage

THQ Wireless has signed John Romero and Tom Hall's Monkeystone Games to develop Red Faction for the Nokia N-Gage portable.

Monkeystone Games began life in 2001, founded by Id Software and Ion Storm veterans Romero and Hall, and has developed a number of games - including Hyperspace Delivery Boy - for portable platforms including the PocketPC. Earlier this month, they put up a notice on their website seeking programmers to work out small handhelds and handheld platforms, including GBA, N-Gage, BREW, J2ME, Symbian, Pocket PC, Smartphone and Palm.

It seems that Romero and co. plan to emulate the original Red Faction as fully as they can on Nokia's mobile games phone, but we still don't really know just how powerful N-Gage will be, so it's difficult to say how it will turn out. However, Nokia's Iikka Raiskinen commented that the game would take advantage of N-Gage's unique features, "like the near distance gaming over Bluetooth".

Other than that, all we really know is that as Chief Technical Officer at Monkeystone, Mr. Romero is "thrilled to be working on a 3D shooter for one of the biggest publishers in wireless gaming. It's a real challenge to create a fast 3D game on such cutting-edge hardware, and I am loving every minute of it."