After barely making a dent on the charts in launch week (top seller Tekken Tag shifted marginally over 15,000 copies, and total sales of all PS2 software put together reached barely one game for each of the 80,000 consoles delivered so far), PS2 games have now, as I write, disappeared from the listings altogether, which is a little hard to fathom. Indeed, the only plausible explanation for so many people having apparently bought a £300 console and nothing to play on it is that most PS2s have been bought as Christmas presents for little kiddies, and so won’t generate any game sales until (at least) the New Year. And the worrying thing about that is that it appears to continue the developing trend for Playstation to be primarily a kids’ toy brand rather than the entertainment choice of the discerning and dedicated gamer. The enormous recent success of under-10s titles like WWF Smackdown is just one indicator of a polarising of the games market, away from the all-encompassing PS1-driven trendiness of the mid-to-late 90s and back towards the old-fashioned two-camps model of geeks (previously PC and Amiga owners) on one side and kids (usually playing Nintendo titles) on the other. Except that where you might expect PS2 to be bought by the tech-savvy early adopters, it seems that it’s the youngsters who are piling on board. (After all, the PS2’s DVD facilities are so messed-up it’s difficult to believe that people aren’t buying games because they’ve bought it to play movies on...) And that has some alarming implications for the future of PS2 software. So if you want to play anything other than hundreds of identical wrestling and skateboarding games over the next few years, you’d probably better get out there and start buying up copies of Timesplitters right now. A lot of copies of Timesplitters.

"Reverend Stuart Campbell's religion is videogames - he owns more than 35,000 of them. He's a freelance journalist, ex-game developer with Sensible Software and industry analyst who's written for every games magazine worth a damn and a few more besides. Sinners beware."