Recently in Hard Wired, we’ve been talking about the prospects of both the Xbox and the Gamecube.

For most of you, though, these have both been pretty academic issues, since neither console has been available without some risky importing and a lot of wading through Japanese text. As of this week, though, gamers in the Western Hemisphere are able to experience both consoles a lot more easily, with the American release of English-language versions of both machines.

Of course, for most of Gamer’s readers, that’s still a slightly abstract prospect, since the vast majority of you wait for new games machines to be released in your own native lands before taking the plunge.  Which, apart from anything else, means a long wait. We’re at least four months away from seeing the Xbox on the shores of Europe (assuming Microsoft stick to their schedules, and when was the last time a console did that?), and Nintendo haven’t even deigned to suggest a possible release date for the PAL version of the GC, with some persistently grim rumours suggesting we could all be kept waiting until next September.

But you know what? Personally, I’d much rather neither company bothered with a European release at all. Because in this era of globalisation, firstly it’s a bizarre anathema that the situation with a new consumer leisure device should be so dramatically different from corner to corner of the world, and secondly it’s an excuse to treat European gamers like third-class global village idiots. Which isn’t only a pain in the butt for us - it also means that the games companies actually have to go to a load of trouble and expense in order to make their European games slower, uglier, later and generally inferior, plus it stores up a bunch of customer ill-will as those same customers get grouchier and grouchier about this situation never changing despite the fact that we’ve all been moaning about it for the last decade.

So what’s to be done? The answer, like most answers, is simple.

If Nintendo and Microsoft simply didn’t bother to release the GC and Xbox in Europe, demand would still be high. Therefore, retailers would still want to make the machines available, and hence they’d simply get in loads of US imports. Of course, Nintendo and Microsoft would happily supply those imports at normal prices, because it wouldn’t be undermining their European market, because their European market wouldn’t exist. And equally obviously, since European consoles are traditionally far more expensive than their NTSC equivalents, retailers selling import versions would undoubtedly be able to sell them cheaper than the official price of a European version would otherwise be.

The technical issues that make most people nervous about import machines are basically non-existent. Almost all modern TVs are perfectly happy to display an NTSC signal, and a step-down power-supply transformer is as easy to use as a normal plug. (And let’s face it, if you’re still using an old black-and-white 14-inch portable, you’re not the kind of person who’s going to be wanting a next-generation console in the first place.)

Everybody having the same machines would be a dream for the games companies, who would save a fortune on making crappy PAL conversions of their hardware and software, and a dream for gamers, who would finally get to play games at the speed they were supposed to be played, looking the way they were supposed to look, and at the time they were supposed to be played. (And without all the rigmarole of having to buy all your games by mail order and wait a fortnight for them to be delivered that you get if you buy import consoles at the moment.) It’d be a dream for shopkeepers too, who’d be able to sell consoles and games at a lower price, but making a bigger profit.

And yet, for the sake of about seven people in the Western world who have a creaky old 1976 TV but still want to play the latest games, a billion European gamers with money burning a hole in their pockets will have to wait another six months to get their hands on the next generation of consoles, and will have to put up with a third-rate product when they finally do. Is there a single person out there who can explain to me why this isn’t the single stupidest thing done by even this most notably stupid of industries? Because it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.