The common thread between all these leaps forward? Improving games. Where Sony's motives for exhaustively popularising the PlayStation were transparently capitalist, you get the impression that even though it's ultimately about making money, Nintendo's in it for the games. The N64 was legendarily delayed specifically because Shigeru Miyamoto felt Mario 64 needed a tad more work.

Through a combination of misjudged marketing (the ads were frankly rubbish) and, frustratingly, people counting only the number of games available rather than appreciating the quality of the fab ones that did come out, (bit of an insurmountable problem, really, considering how long they take to make), the N64 missed its chance to be a major success, but it's pound-for-pound absolutely the best games machine you can buy.

It's invisibly sophisticated in a way that only something can be that's working incredibly hard at fun (you'll notice that every multiplayer game supports all four joypads). There are crap games (that "Seal of Quality," eh?) but they're spectacularly outweighed by the magnificent.

Nintendo's own games and those of closely associated, slightly sinister hug-gents Rare are practically unbroken in excellence, and this seems to spur third-party publishers into being that bit lovelier than usual for fear of being ritually crushed by seething crowds. Zelda 64 is officially recognised as the finest game in the world. The previous finest game in the world was GoldenEye, and the one before the one before that, Mario 64 - a line broken only by some idiots voting for Quake instead of Starfox. You get the idea.

Next time I'll be investigating (phwsshh) the secret underground laboratory (cough) of Hiroshi Yamauchi (cough) where I expect to (cough)... (dies).

Don't worry, readers - J Nash isn't really dead. It's merely a literary conceit. See him alive and well at his new thing, called The Weekly.