Apologies to everyone who missed me last week, when I was too ill with the flu to tie my own bootlaces, never mind write a fantastic column full of perceptive insight and wit.

What do you mean, nobody noticed? Well bloody sod you, then.

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This month, I’d like to talk about Sega again. But don’t panic. Y’see, I’ve been having a bit of a rethink about the Dreamcast.

At first, the DC launch seemed like a bit of a disappointment. Even now, nearly four months after the UK launch, the DC doesn’t have a single must-have game all of its own. There are plenty of decent titles out there, but unlike the launch of every other console in the last decade, there isn’t one game that’s so amazing you have to buy the machine purely in order to play it.

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(And if anyone tries to tell you that Soul Calibur is such a game, laugh openly in their face. A dead dog could finish it in five minutes flat in one-player mode, and in two-player mode it’s about a hundredth as much fun as Power Stone.)

And sure enough, after the predictable initial flurry of excitement, DC sales have slowed dramatically as the lack of truly unmissable games continues. The Christmas line-up was especially poor, and the DC and its games lagged badly behind all the competition.

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But hold on. As some of us have been saying for two years now, the DC never, in reality, stood the slightest chance of fighting a stand-up battle with the Playstation, never mind the PS2.

On the other hand, though, there’s a completely different area of gaming where the DC has the playing field almost to itself.

And no, I’m not talking about online gaming. (Jeez, when will you all learn? Nobody, except PC spods, cares.) I’m talking, obviously, about arcades.

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Imagine this: an arcade next door to your house. In that arcade is a whole bunch of the very latest glamorous and exciting coin-op video games.

Sega Rally 2, Power Stone, Virtua Fighter 3, Hydro Thunder, House Of The Dead 2, Soul Calibur, Virtua Striker 2, Dynamite Cop, Crazy Taxi...why, there’s just about something for everyone in there. The trouble, of course, is that the arcade’s not always open when you want it to be, and with the games at £1 a go it swallows money faster than you can get it out of your pockets.

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And, obviously, you can’t just buy the arcade for yourself – your floor would never take the weight of all those machines, and in any case they’d cost you something around the £100,000 mark.

Except, of course, not any more they don’t. Because if you buy a Dreamcast, you can now effectively own that whole arcade, in a version that’s all but indistinguishable from the real thing, for less than £500. THAT’S the strength of the DC, not another crappy Tomb Raider game that you can already play perfectly well on a £50 Playstation.

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So what are Sega doing to capitalise on this - unique - strength of the Dreamcast? Keen Sega watchers won’t be all that surprised to learn that the answer is "Next to nothing".

Despite having an army of arcade properties that would go down a storm on DC (Star Wars Trilogy, Daytona USA, Scud Race and Ferrari F355 to name just four), Sega are twiddling around cagily and refusing to even say whether they MIGHT be bringing any of these games to the DC in the forseeable future. Meanwhile, PS2 is six weeks away...

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The "big three" console makers already have well-defined and very different images. Sony basically owns the mainstream market, selling play-it-safe clones, licenses and sequels to the hordes of casual gamers.

Hardcore gaming purists, meanwhile, stick with Nintendo’s unchallenged superiority in original and innovative games. And Sega has its arcade games.

It would be a stupid and futile waste of time and money to attempt to change those perceptions now. Right, Sega?

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Sadly, however, they show no sign of learning any lessons from their years of mess-ups in the console business.