Nokia's ill-fated N-Gage was, and still is, a weird little gadget to behold. An awkward halfway house between mobile phone and handheld gaming system, the taco-shaped handset was undeniably a mobile gaming trailblazer – albeit one with horrible controls and bewildering design choices. Nokia’s early emphasis on mobile gaming was spot-on, but virtually every other decision the Finnish company made regarding the device was a comedy of errors.

I was a proud N-Gage owner back in the day, and I decided to dig it out to see how it stands up in 2015 – 10 years on from its official discontinuation. I managed to track down and playtest 28 of the N-Gage’s 58 released games, all for your entertainment. Pray for me.

But here’s the surprising thing – at least three of the N-Gage games I tested were actually good, including a couple of N-Gage exclusives.

Read on to see which three games actually manage the impressive feat of overcoming the hardware’s issues to remain playable today, and, for good measure, three games that made me want to hurl the thing across the room in despair. Enjoy!

Surprisingly good – Splinter Cell: Team Stealth Action

Okay, so this is hardly up there for Game of the Year 2004, but Team Stealth Action is still a solid little game. The smart decision to opt for 2D visuals means that it hasn't aged as poorly as many of its more show-offish counterparts (we're looking at you, Chaos Theory) and a straightforward side-scrolling stealth game makes infinitely more sense for the hardware than attempting to ape Fisher's console exploits. A game of ducking into shadowy nooks and smartly dodging pesky vision cones, it's an early reminder that stealth games can work perfectly well in 2D – and that even the N-Gage had the occasional bright spark in its library.

Unsurprisingly poor – Splinter Cell Chaos Theory

This is the game.

Everything that Team Stealth Action gets right, Chaos Theory ignores. This is a full 3D effort that does a superb job of neatly encompassing all the system's flaws: camera control is a nightmare on the bunched-up keypad, the screen's too small to properly display the game's environments, and the hardware isn't strong enough to prevent flickbook-esque framerate and grainy, sub-PlayStation visuals. You can't fault the developers on ambition, and one can sympathise with the unenviable assignment to create an N-Gage outing for Sam Fisher, but this is a case of trying to recreate the Mona Lisa using fingerpaints.

Surprisingly good – Operation Shadow: Theatres of War

Operation Shadow is unashamedly balls-out nonsense, and I love it. You play Jay Solano, a self-aware stereotype and generally overpowered gun-lover who blows stuff up at the behest of a stern and moustachioed military General. You run through nondescript deserts, gun down baddies with various weapons and explosives, reduce buildings to rubble, and occasionally get to drive around in jeeps, tanks, and helicopters. There's no real subtlety here, and the reviewers at the time really didn't seem to like it – its review average on GameRankings is a lowly 43.75% – but Operation Shadow is dumbly entertaining, and knows that it isn’t anything more or less than that. Understanding the limitations of both its platform and its own creativity, the game compensates by giving you plenty of firepower – and I, for one, am okay with that.

Unsurprisingly poor – Ashen

If there's one genre that the N-Gage is definitely not set up for, it's the first-person shooter. If you've ever played a game like Modern Combat or the Bioshock iOS port and complained about the touchscreen controls, then perhaps you should play Ashen to get some perspective. I think you'll quickly conclude that virtual sticks are preferable to a horrid 8-way d-pad, tiny screen, and approximately a million face buttons with no triggers. This (relatively) high-concept FPS actually runs quite smoothly, and probably would've been impressive to behold back in 2004, but it still seems to me a futile exercise to create something that almost kinda-sorta works.

Surprisingly good – Glimmerati

A top-down street racer from Bugbear Entertainment, the team behind Ridge Racer Unbounded and the FlatOut games, Glimmerati has you rising through the ranks at an exclusive and sexy club for celebrity racing drivers and rich bastards. It's ridiculously camp, completely drenched in 80s-style glamour and all the ostentation that you'd expect of a group with more money than fashion sense. The bizarre storyline, the minutiae of the club's intimate politics and affairs, becomes just as entertaining as the thoroughly competent top-down racing upon which it is built. There's nothing quite like Glimmerati, and it's still very playable today – it is, and I can't believe I'm saying this, a killer N-Gage exclusive.

Unsurprisingly poor – Spider-Man 2

Ah, the good old days when a movie tie-in would appear on every system under the sun, with various wildly differing levels of quality between versions. Spider-Man 2 appeared on – *deep breath* – PS2, GameCube, Xbox, PC, Mac, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP as well as N-Gage, so it comes as little surprise that some versions weren't up to scratch. This one's a stinker. A far cry from the console versions with their sprawling cityscapes, the N-Gage version switches between half-hearted 3D web-swinging stages with bewildering controls (“press up then down then 7 to make Spider-Man reverse direction”) and sterile 2D platforming stages with no personality and a lack of definite direction.

The Verdict?

So, is it worth picking up an N-Gage for those three games that actually deliver some fun? No… not even close. But it is a little interesting that even a bad console filled with bad games can still have a few gems buried deep within its game library. So all the time I spent going through the N-Gage’s game library wasn’t wasted – right guys?

...Right? :(

Matt Suckley's words have appeared in Pocket Gamer, VICE UK, Paste Magazine, and more. He's currently writing a book about the Nokia N-Gage.