It is easy to feel sorry for the N-Gage.

"Er," you interject, "the N-what?"

Exactly.

The N-Gage is a new handheld video game system made by Nokia, the Finnish company that makes cell phones and sponsors that big curling tournament every spring. If Nokia's promotional rhetoric is correct, one day soon all the gamers of the world will happily sport N-Gage decks on their hips. The N-Gage is technically advanced! The N-Gage does wireless gaming! The N-Gage supports true multiplayer action! The N-Gage is more than just a game deck! The N-Gage is a cellphone! The N-Gage is a personal organizer! The N-Gage is all that and many, many bags of chips!

The N-Gage is about as big as a cellphone, which is appropriate, for it is a cellphone. It has a number keypad and a microphone and a speaker and a cluster of buttons for navigating menus and inboxes and whatnot. Were it not for the little four-directional thumbpad on the left, you would have no reason to think it was a game machine at all. This describes the brand new N-Gage QD, by the way. The original N-Gage, which launched last fall and did not make a splash of any kind, was a bit clunkier to hold and a bit more obviously styled for gamer appeal. It also required you to pull off the back cover and remove the battery to change the game card, however. Win some lose some.

But on to The Sims: Bustin' Out. The Sims is the best selling computer game of all time, for reasons that will utterly elude the uninitiated. It is a game about building a little collection of virtual people ("Sims"), and also about managing their suburban lives in the name of construction and fashion and interior design. You must help your Sims to make friends, you must make sure they clean themselves and their living spaces regularly, you must see to it that they eat, and you must get them to the washroom before they wet themselves. It is a bit like having pets, except that these pets look a bit like people and act a bit like them too.

The N-Gage version of the game is a bit stripped down from the computer experience. Where in the original you were basically free to fritter away your time as you pleased, here you must accomplish "Missions." As you begin, you are on a mission to meet your Uncle Hayseed. Then you are on a mission to give him a photo album. Then you are on a mission to dig a lost cellphone out of a haystack. Perhaps you are also wondering at this point if "mission" is really the right word.

At its heart, The Sims: Bustin' Out is the sort of game you would wind up with if you took an ordinary role-playing title and removed all the magic and swordfighting and left only the parts about learning a trade and walking around chatting to the locals. It is an agreeable enough time-killer, true, but as a game it is sadly short on, you know, play.

The good news for you, new N-Gage owner, is that when you are bored with Bustin' Out, you can always save your progress and listen to some music instead. Or, rather, you could have done that had you bought the original N-Gage. It played MP3s. The new N-Gage QD does not. It would have been fun to sit in on the meeting where that decision got executive approval.

"We've got it, sir! Our extensive research has revealed that there is no overlap whatsoever between the fan base for video games and the fan base for downloaded music! We can remove the MP3 player with impunity!"

"You sure?"

"Uh..."

"..."

"Uh..."

"Hey, that's good enough for me. Shall we break for salmiakki?