Thanks to a bewildering bug (and a much-appreciated heads-up by fellow Nseries blogger Cj) it turns out that Nokia’s N-Gage app does indeed run on my N96. And so, with great anticipation I logged into my N-Gage account and headed straight to the downloads section for a title I had just missed last summer…

Of course, given that this particular N96 has no 3G service for North America, I had no other choice but to download over a glacially slow EDGE connection.

A few minutes in I got this message. Why exactly would I want to save a corrupted file?

Fortunately Nokia has given users the option of “sideloading” N-Gage content — that is, downloading files to a desktop computer and then transferring them to a handset via a local connection. And unfortunately I’m still waiting for an email from Nokia so I can download the file, install it and start playing the stupid game already!

Given Nokia’s track record with other notification services (cough cough — Ovi Sync — cough) let’s just say I’m not holding my breath on this one…