Dear Future Gamer,

I'd like to give my opinion on import games in this country. Firstly, top rated games have (and always will) suffer from low sales in this country. What am I talking about? Well take Tekken 3 for example - the sales in this country were not even as good as predicted. Why? Well I think it has something to do with the fact that it took over half a year to arrive from Japan/US and when it did we had to put up with ugly borders and game speeds which were akin to the replays in the aforementioned versions.

Why should we have to wait so long for a game which is not even optimised for this country? Tekken 3 was the first game that I had bought on import - and now I try and buy all the major releases on import.

With imported games people can play the latest games in full-screen and at full speed, as they were originally designed. They can even play all the classics that may not even be released in this country (eg. Xenogears).

Taking these things into consideration, it is not surprising that a lot of people now choose to import (or even pirate) their games. These are probably the main reasons why sales of big titles in UK are so low - and they will always remain this way until the gamesplayers get a better deal.

Habibul Choudhury

FG: It is galling that we have to wait ages for some of the latest games to arrive on these shores and you're right, we're all impatient. With the PlayStation so well established now it's a whole lot easier to buy imported games these days but I don't think they're having quite the impact on the sales of legitimately released titles that you suggest. Sony and the rest ignore the import market at their peril though.