A few of the games listed on the official N-Gage site's showroom section now have release dates listed next to them: Mile High Pinball for the 9th of May, ONE for the 1st of June and Bounce Boing Voyage for the 2nd of June. Weirdly, four other games (Brothers In Arms, Dogz, Sims 2 and Midnight Pool) are all listed as the 4th of February, which never happened of course. Are these games coming soon(ish), or has Nokia neglected to keep its website up to date?

On a more general topic, the fairly slow rollout of N-Gage games is a little puzzling as the platform was meant to launch last Autumn, and had many of its games ready to play at last August's "Go Play" event. If the games are ready, why aren't they appearing on the platform?

One possible explanation is that there are still too many glitches and error messages on the platform, and they're having to test each game one by one to iron these out.

Another might be that the later games are taking longer than thought to develop, so they're having to spread the releases out as much as possible to ensure a steady flow without droughts.

Perhaps most likely though is that Nokia's waiting for N-Gage to start appearing on phones straight out of the box, which means people wouldn't have to bother installing the N-Gage app themselves. At the moment the only people using N-Gage are those who go to the trouble of downloading and manually installing the app, which severely limits the potential audience because most phone owners never install any apps manually.

(Incidentally, for those wondering if the dates are in an American Month/Day/Year format, they're not. Space Impact is given a release date of 21/04/08.)