Dear Future Gamer,

The PlayStation 2 is a joke, it will never be a success. For a start there's the cost of it, Sony say that it will cost around £250, why would anyone pay that when you will be able to get a Dreamcast at around £150?

And then there's the price of games, if development will cost as much as people are saying then the games will come out at around £60 and Dreamcast games will be around £30.

Square have said that no more than five developers will be able to take full advantage of the PlayStation 2's capabilities and when you look at the Dreamcast, companies like Homestead, who have never been heard of before, can get the most out of it easily with their first game. I don't see Sony saying how easy it will be to develop for PlayStation 2. And a British company have said that the development costs will be phenomenal. What are Sony trying to do, kill off small developers? And if it really is that expensive to develop for then all the small developers will just move onto the Dreamcast and that can only be good news for Sega.

Then there are the specs: Sony say their new console can do 70 million polygons per second untextured, whereas I've read that with textures that figure’s reduced to a mere 16 million polygons per second - now that's quite a drop

On top of that PlayStation 2's constant frame rate is 50fps. The Dreamcast may not be able to match 16 million polygons per second but it can maintain a constant rate of 1.5 million polygons per second and with a bit more time Sega will be able to push it up to the maximum three million polygons per second. And plus the Dreamcast's constant frame rate is 60 fps. I also read that the PlayStation 2 demos could have easily been produced on a Dreamcast, so it's obviously not the big jump up that Sony would have us believe.

With Sega working on a backwards-compatible add-on and a DVD add-on it looks like Sega are going to have everything that Sony will and more. (By this I mean decent games, ShenMue anyone?!).

Sega will have had a year extra in Japan before the PlayStation 2 is launched there and they will have a year in America and Europe too. I think that this is enough time for them to pick up a large enough installed user base.

Craig Bailey

FG: Craig’s obviously a Dreamcast fan. The PlayStation 2 sounds like a phenomenal piece of kit, whether you like Sony or not. Whether it succeeds, at the expense of Dreamcast or not, is down to many, many contributory factors though. None of which I have the space to go into here.