Well, viewers, I’m expecting the games industry to spring back into spectacular life and dazzle us with a string of stunning new games any minute now, so let’s wrap 2001 up and file it away, shall we?

Over the last two weeks we’ve celebrated the deserved flops of some of the year’s poorest/most cynical game releases, but now we really ought to take a bit of a broader view of 2001’s ups and downs.

2001 – THE HIGHS

- Grand Theft Auto 3. Obviously. Game of the year by a hundred miles.

– separately, Grand Theft Auto 3 actually being the smash hit it deserved to be. It’s frighteningly rare to see true genius actually scale the top of the charts, and for GTA3 to do it even with an 18 certificate attached is reason to be cheerful indeed.

- Visual Pinball and Visual PinMAME bringing arcade pinball to your PC.

- playing with the Gamecube for the first time. It's so cute!

- the MPU3/4 fruit machine emulator, filling in the last gap in the total home recreation of amusement arcades.

- playing Metal Slug 3 on PC, via the Kawaks Neo Geo emulator

- going for a walk on the monorail while the sun came up in Grand Theft Auto 3.

- Giga Wing 2 (Dreamcast). Import only for us poor Europeans, but well worth the effort to play this astoundingly over-the-top 2D shooter. This year’s Bangai-o.

- Kuru Kuru Kururin and Advance Wars, the stars of the Game Boy Advance. Played on emulator, naturally, where you could actually see the screen.

- the radio stations in Grand Theft Auto 3.

- a bit of an improvement in the standards and prospects of games journalism. Though mostly the non-professional kind. Websites and fanzines good, paper magazines bad.

- Police 24/7 and Sports Jam working up a sweat in arcades, the gyms of the 21st century for cool kids.

- Time Crisis 2 having ancient skeet-shooting coin-op "Shoot Away" as a bonus game.

- not even bothering to go to ECTS.

- setting stuff on fire in Grand Theft Auto 3, then stealing a fire engine and putting it out again.

- Shenmue 2. Another lovely holiday in the exotic Orient.

- knowing that Rez is only a few days away.

Optimists should stop reading here. For on the next page, we meet 2001’s hideous dark side.

2001 - THE LOWS

- knowing that Rez will sell eight copies.

- the first four hours of Halo on Xbox being so skillfully done, and so boring.

- totally skanked-up controls on Dreamcast Daytona USA rendering it unplayable.

– the rubbish version of Out Run in Shenmue 2.

– the suffering of the poor old Dreamcast generally. Never can such a good machine have been so completely crushed by so unsuperior an adversary.

- Tempest 3000 only coming out on a stupid format that nobody has (Nuon DVD, only available in America).

- the disappointment of the Game Boy Advance: crap screen, only two fire buttons, ugly GB compatibility, the worst Mario game ever and a shedful of lazy ports.

- wishing Ridge Racer 5 had Gran Turismo 3's graphics. And Ridge Racer 4's tracks.

- watching joyless cretins queue up to buy Championship Manager. Again.

– hardly anyone noticing that This Is Football 2001 was actually a much better game than the lazy and overhyped Pro Evolution Soccer.

- watching the gaming audience continue to regress to about 1989, ie 95% of games are marketed and sold to either 9-year-old kids or sad anoraks with dwarf obsessions. Pokemon, WWF wrestling, Harry Potter and grown men on skateboards. God save us all.

- the death of daily UK Teletext gaming magazine Digitiser, practically the last decent source of games writing available to anyone without an internet connection.

- not having played Super Monkey Ball yet.

– there still being practically no decent videogaming content anywhere on television, at least not before 3am. How many more millions of consoles have to be sold before just one terrible cookery/home decoration show gets canned for a decent games programme?

- Sony using their financial muscle to crush Playstation emulator Bleem! despite losing all the court cases they tried to bring against it.

- dreadful games magazines going "This game is great as long as you also spend another 50 quid on a steering wheel/mouse and keyboard/set of maracas/ massive LAN setup/extra arm transplant, all of which we get for free so we don't care."

- companies falling over themselves to pull totally unrelated games from the release schedules after the World Trade Centre disaster, in a disgusting attempt to score PR points for "sensitivity".

And that was that. Now will everyone please get back to work so we can have something new to talk about, please?