Hello again viewers! This week, I feel I should admit something to you all. I’ve been a little behind the times.

Even though I’m a professional videogames journalist and everything, I hadn’t actually laid my hands on a Nintendo Gamecube until last weekend, when a journo chum managed to secure a loan of a Japanese import machine and I popped round for a go. The delights of Super Monkey Ball can wait for another day, but Luigi’s Mansion and Wave Race: Blue Storm provided hours of the sort of classic gaming entertainment I’d been beginning to think were dead forever.

Y’see, the reason it took me so long to get to grips with the Gamecube was that I’ve been suffering from a kind of videogame apathy for the last few months. Brought on by the failure of the Dreamcast despite its (belated) hosting of some of the finest games ever, by the spectacularly uninspiring presence of the Playstation 2, and by the hysterical reaction afforded to a few old SNES and NES ports on the Game Boy Advance, I’d been starting to think that either videogames had just become terminally boring (good God, how many tedious Formula 1 games do we need, anyway?), or I’d become too old to appreciate them any more. But that idea went flying out of the window pretty much from the first moment the Gamecube’s little power light went on. (Well, to be honest, even before that, as we cooed like maiden aunties over the machine’s tiny proportions, diddy little game discs and impossibly well-designed joypad, but let’s stick to the relevant facts.)

And yet, looked at in the cold light of the critic’s eye, Wave Race: Blue Storm is pretty much the same game as the original N64 version, and Luigi’s Mansion is a stunningly pretty but simple and repetitive game that, for all its cornucopia of beautiful touches, is essentially about running around in circles with one joystick and spinning circles with the other one at the same time. So how did it come about that my chum and I had more sheer fun in one evening from two of what won’t even be the GC’s flagship titles, than either of us have managed from an entire year of the PS2? And as I pondered this tricky question, an answer came to me, in the shape of a theory.

And here’s the theory. Maybe there’s a universal law that every new games console that gets launched comes with a finite supply of excitement and wonder. Just as surely as you’ll only get one joypad and no memory card in the box, there’s only a set ration of brand-new-toy thrills included too, and it has to be shared out among all the games that you might be playing on your new baby.

There’s actually a logic behind this fanciful notion – it makes sense, after all, that having forked out all that money you’re immediately going to want to see everything your new console can do, and that means setting aside time and attention for every game it can play, even if you haven’t actually bought them yourself. And with only a set number of hours in the day, that means that the more games there are, the less time you can devote to each one, and the less involved with it you’re going to get, because even as you load it up, you’re wondering what the next one, or the one you didn’t buy, will do. 

Whereas, obviously, if there are only a couple of games in existence, you’re going to give them the sort of thorough examination that will reveal all the painstaking effort and love that their creators put into them. And just like relationships with real people, the more time you spend getting to know the inhabitants of a game’s world, the more rewarding the experience is likely to be.

There are other, less abstract factors at work in this equation as well, of course. Even if the PS2, say, had only had three games available at launch, the chances are they wouldn’t have shaped up too well against the impeccable design pedigree of Shigeru Miyamoto and the rest of the Nintendo team (never mind the Sega wizards behind Super Monkey Ball). But there can be little doubt that Ridge Racer V, Tekken Tag Tournament and Fantavision would have come off a lot better if the PS2 hadn’t also been swamped in a load of mediocre third-party rubbish from its first day of release. After all this time, have we still not learned that old quality-versus-quantity thing? It would appear not.