("Hello viewers!")

But never mind about all that right now. The question on everyone's lips this month is this: "Is it time, Stu, for an update on the progress of the Dreamcast?"

And d'you know, chums, I think it is. 

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Doesn't time just fly by when you're having fun? Already, we're barely three months away from the official UK launch of the Dreamcast.

In a revolutionary departure from normal policy, Sega have managed NOT to completely mess up on the thorny modem question, including one in the machine after all, and at the undeniably bargainous price of £199.

Could the company be about to get something right for the first time in seven years?

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Yeah, right. The only surprising thing about the DC launch campaign so far is the number of new ways that Sega have found in which to make total baboons out of themselves.

First up is the obvious stuff. By this time in the Playstation's launch, Sony had already sent out thousands and thousands of consoles to the world's press and media, even those who'd previously had no connection with videogames. This created an enormous buzz, with everyone talking about the new machine months before it appeared.

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Read much about the Dreamcast in the non-games press? Thought not. Sega can't even manage to get consoles out to the specialist games media.

But worse than that, I had a call recently from an official third-party developer who couldn't even get Sega to send out the special development console which programmers test-play their games on. (Apparently, there's only one of these machines in the whole of the UK, and somebody at Sega had leant it to their nephew to play Virtua Fighter 3 on or something.)

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Of course, money is tight at Sega, with huge recent losses and thousands of people being laid off, so perhaps you could forgive them for what looks like unbelievably stupid, short-sighted penny-pinching in this respect.

Except that at the same time, they've signed the biggest football-team sponsorship deal in history, blowing about £12 million on sticking their logo on the front of Arsenal's shirt next season.

(Picking the winners as ever, eh Sega?)

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The only problem with this approach, obviously, is that the next football season doesn't start until about a fortnight before the DC launch, giving almost no time to build up that crucial pre-launch hype that any new machine needs to have any chance of an impact.

So Sega's entire marketing budget appears to have been spent (Doh!) advertising the game to football fans (Doh!) on the shirts of a team who were totally eclipsed by their big, rich rivals last season (Doh!), and won't play until the machine's out. Doh!

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And then, of course, there's the games.

To their credit, Sega are (they claim) at least going to have a pretty decent number of games out at the machine's launch. (Although since it'll have been out for a year in Japan by then, that's not too impressive a feat.)

The only problem is that absolutely none of them have or will capture the public's imagination. Sonic Adventure is quite pretty, but the rest of the release schedule is a parade of dull sequels and fighting games. (Sega appear to think it's still 1993.)

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But all these are just traditional Sega mess-ups. The real stunner, the peach of peaches, the absolute show-stopper of stupidness, is the Dreamcast 2.