Hello viewers! Y’know, you might think this writing-for-games-magazines job is all peaches and cream, what with the getting paid for playing games all day and that, but it’s not. For example, unlike me, you don’t have to sit here desperately trying to find something interesting that’s happening in the oddly anti-climactic world that is the PS2 so far. But the desperate struggle to find something more thrilling to write about than "Metal Gear Solid 2 still scheduled to arrive sometime!" has been eased a little this month by the fact that for the first time, there’s something for PS2 owners to get genuinely excited about. Yes, the release of pictures of the final design for Microsoft’s Xbox means that by Christmas (and hey, it’s only 300 or so shopping days away), PS2 fans WON’T be the owners of the world’s ugliest games console!

Yes, it seems amazing but it’s true – the much-hyped Microsoft wondermachine is even more visually grotesque than our favourite little black box. The PS2 might look like the heating system out of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva, but at least it isn’t the **size** of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva. And while we might have been slightly disappointed that the PS2 Dual Shock pad offered almost no improvements over the PSone version, at least it doesn’t look like someone’s scraped up a three-week old dead frog off a motorway and pumped a kilo of lemon jelly up its arse.