This month, The Man On The Street has been enjoying videogames again for the first time in several months, thanks to his new Gameboy Advance SP.

 Despite having been unimpressed by the seemingly endless stream of lazy SNES ports that passes for a release schedule, and having successfully resisted the original Advance on the highly reasonable grounds that you needed a set of football-ground floodlights to actually see the screen indoors, your out-of-touch-with-the-zeitgeist-on-the-streets correspondent was finally persuaded to join the new handheld generation by a combination of the facts that the SP is really cute, that it can be made (in conjunction with the sort of device that will soon be rendered illegal by the Government’s latest boneheadedly-misguided attempts to tackle the copyright problem) to run emulators of the Spectrum and NES, and that The Man On The Street had 140 quid’s worth of HMV vouchers to spend and couldn’t find any more DVDs he wanted.

Resultingly, your reporter has been spending the unseasonably warm weather in his local park, flicking between a selection of 200 old 8-bit games and the mighty Advance Wars, and having a damn fine time doing it. (Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s gone a bit cold and windy today, he wouldn’t be indoors writing this column at all.)

But of course, The Man On The Street wouldn’t be The Man On The Street if even being happy didn’t give him something to be angry about, and the GBA SP provides that in spades too. The most obvious grouse is Nintendo’s increasingly desperate penny-pinching cynicism, of course, but pricing the SP at almost twice the street price of the original model and leaving off basic features such as a headphone socket you can actually plug headphones into doesn’t seem to be dissuading the public from shovelling the new machine off the shelves, so you have to bow to the Big N’s business sense there.

Of course, the reason stock might be in short supply could also be due to large numbers of SPs being erroneously returned as “defective”. Despite Nintendo’s claims that the machine will run continuously for about 10 hours with the light on on one full charge of its batteries, The Man On The Street conducted repeated experiments involving fully charging the battery and then leaving the machine permanently switched on, and found that users will in fact be lucky to get SIX hours out of a charge, a fact which led him to actually exchange his first two SPs to the shop until realising that they were, in fact, all like this.

(The Man On The Street also gets very angry at this point about the fact that not a single gaming publication appears to have conducted this simple and obvious test for itself, just one more example in the long litany of failures to its customers that the dismal games-magazine business – or more accurately, the industry-press-release-disseminating business -  has descended into an abyss of.)

Nintendo’s already found itself in expensively hot water with the law in recent months (ref the £100 million price-fixing fine from the European Court), and such blatant advertising fibs might well cost it in the future again should any unhappy customers decide to take the matter up with the trading standards people. (Should you doubt the potential minefield here, The Man On The Street directs you to the US case where, found guilty of reckless joypad design, Nintendo was forced to send out millions of little “thumb gloves” to protect gamers from suffering hideous disfigurement to the digits on their left hands.

Or simply to remember Sega basing their entire Dreamcast ad campaign on the “six billion players” tagline, only to be forced to dump the whole thing by the Advertising Standards Authority when they discovered that even if the entire population of the world DID buy a DC, they wouldn’t actually be able to play each other due to the ever-present cretinousness that is region protection.)

The fact that the battery-life issue is so hard to circumvent doesn’t help either. (You have to be near a powerpoint to recharge, there’s no option to put ordinary batteries in. Much worse, you have to have the battery in the SP to charge it, unlike most similar electronic items, which means you can’t keep playing with a replacement battery while the other one recharges. And while second batteries slot straight in and are actually very cheap – about £7 – if you want to carry a spare around to extend playlife you also need to take a screwdriver with you to remove the tiny screw which Nintendo have inexplicably elected to lock the battery compartment down with.)

And what does any of this have to do with you, the games retailers of the nation? Well, firstly you might want to be braced for a heck of a lot of GBA SP returns. And secondly, as Nintendo’s profits plummet, chains are reduced to practically giving the Gamecube away for free to clear warehouse space, and the company pisses off its most loyal customers more with every passing day, you might want to start getting a lot friendlier with those enthusiastic Microsoft and Sony reps.