You have to feel for Nokia. Having put considerable effort (and no little expense) into a dinner/party on Wednesday night for its Games Summit attendees, the company saw its plans derailed by a sudden Roman storm.

It's a testament to the bonhomie of attendees – and the quick thinking of Nokia's events team – that even the very real prospect of half the mobile games industry being blown off the top of a castle in a plastic tent didn't dampen the mood.

The wind and rain died down, the partygoers clambered to safety, and the evening proceeded swimmingly. The weather couldn't poop Nokia's party.

EA Mobile, on the other hand…

Woah there. It would be easy to pull out a few quotes from the publisher's Summit presentation, and portray it as a slapdown to N-Gage as brutal as Wednesday night's storm. Some secondhand news reports already have. But it wouldn't tell the whole story.

EA Mobile is backing N-Gage – the publisher announced several new titles at the Summit, and while Peter Parmenter and Chris Gibbs voiced a number of criticisms of Nokia's games platform, they also had (some) praise.

So the nagging sense of disappointment coming away from the Summit isn't just down to what EA Mobile said. It's as much about what Nokia didn't say.

Or, to put it another way, the bad news represented by EA's wake-up calls wouldn't have become the big story of the event if Nokia had had more good news of its own as balance.

N-Gage facts and figures
The Summit isn't a press jamboree – this was the first year journalists were invited along, but it was to join the conversation, rather than purely to be talked at by Nokia and its partners. We're fine with that, and perhaps we shouldn't have been anticipating a bunch of announcements.

There were some figures to chew over. There are more than 400,000 player profiles on N-Gage Arena, and the repeat purchase rate of N-Gage gamers is over 35% globally.

There are tens of millions of "N-Gage compatible devices" in the market, and while the 'people are making N-Gage transactions in 130 countries' stat is a bit woolly on its own, it does show Nokia's ambition to scale the platform (and its billing tech) globally.

More figures were apparently disclosed yesterday at the event, but journalists had all been flown home by then, so either they weren't intended to be public, or there was some confusion between the event-planning and PR arms.

New N-Gage games
The one new first-party game that was unveiled, Dance Fabulous, is exactly the sort of announcement we were hoping for, though. And not just because it features an up-and-coming singer with a set of lungs (not a euphemism) to give Leona, Mariah and Christina something to think about.

It's targeting an under-served demographic, it's got great production values, and if it really can tie in with Nokia's music activities, it could be hugely beneficial for N-Gage. Nokia has a mammoth marketing budget for its Music Store and Comes With Music handsets, and if games like Dance Fabulous ensure N-Gage is in more of those phones, it's worth celebrating.

But what else is coming up? Another fve or six platform-defining games like that would have been nice, for starters, partly to counter the hype around iPhone gaming, and partly to start filling that roadmap hole for the first half of 2009.

Perhaps they'll be announced later in the year. But if your own games conference full of journalists and partners isn't a good opportunity, when is?

Where next for N-Gage?
There was blue-sky thinking, of course: talk of GPS games, Web 2.0, augmented reality and suchlike. It's great that Nokia is pushing these ideas, encouraging (and funding) developers to explore them, and punting out its vision of how mobile can evolve as a gaming platform in its own right.

But it's the juxtaposition of this futuregazing with EA Mobile's more prosaic list of what needs to be fixed now that's a concern. Nothing that Parmenter or Gibbs said came as a particular surprise to their audience of developers and publishers, judging by the chatter afterwards.

Yes, it was a surprise to see those criticisms being made so publicly, second on the bill at Nokia's own shindig. You could spin this as Nokia being genuinely open to discussion and debate – can you imagine Steve Jobs allowing anyone to get up and outline the App Store's flaws at an Apple event?

If Nokia did know the full thrust and tone of EA's presentation beforehand, fair play to the company for taking it on the chin so publicly. If it didn't… well, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

As a list, Parmenter and Gibbs' criticisms are pretty stark. One build for multiple handsets isn't quite working as planned. The revenue share (or rather the revenues resulting from selling a game for the same price) is less favourable on N-Gage than on iPhone.

Nokia's UGC MOSH community is causing publishers concern (and that's an understatement). Certification processes are slower than EA would like. The N-Gage SDK needs to support more handset features, but also have simplified and streamlined standards. And N-Gage Arena isn't rich or deep enough.

The knee-jerk response to all this might be something along the lines of 'Screw augmented reality! Sort the platform out!".

Nokia's view, as put by Jaakko Kaidesoja in our interview, is that it's not an either/or decision: Nokia has one team in charge of the platform and SDK, and another looking to the future – both are important, and it's inaccurate to assume the blue-sky guys are in some way holding back the platform engineers and bug-fixers.

That'll be fair enough, as long as the issues do get fixed. A stable and profitable N-Gage platform would be the perfect base to explore innovative and new gaming ideas / technologies. But if the foundations are wobbly, the blue-sky stuff looks equally shaky.

Nokia vs Apple
Overall, then, the feedback at least gives Nokia a clear action plan. Developers and publishers want the platform issues to be fixed, while journalists want more game announcements, and a few more hard figures.

And everyone would like to see Nokia being a bit more aggressive in outlining why N-Gage is a viable gaming rival to iPhone. We all know it could be, but Apple is winning the PR war (and not just because of its infamous reality distortion field).

As a conference, the Nokia Games Summit is top-quality. It's up there with the Mobile Games Forum in terms of the calibre of attendees and the quality of the networking, and there'd clearly been a lot of thought put into not having the same-old panel sessions and speeches.

N-Gage has some of the smartest mobile developers making games for it, and now the N-Gage client is being preloaded on some of Nokia's most high-profile handsets, the platform is gathering momentum.

This stuff needs to be shouted about, though, at a time when Android and iPhone are seizing the headlines. Having kept its powder fairly dry during the Games Summit, hopefully Nokia will be doing a bit more shouting in the months ahead.