Dear Future Gamer,

Great magazine, sitting on your behind and receiving a read every week, this is nice! I'd like to contribute to the fuzz around the 'Next Generation PlayStation'. I think that all this arguing about winners and losers is some kind of leftover from the older SNES vs Mega Drive days, and that it is something that should be left behind.

Many seem to forget that any console manufacturer is a company, and not the hype actually surrounding it. If we argue any system to be the best, we might also want to question some other things. I think that PS2 will be a huge success. And I think this is not necessarily because it will have the best games, no, it will be surrounded by the biggest advertising stunt ever performed in the game industry. After all Sony's 32bit machine has grown popular largely thanks to advertising. And now that they have established a large world-wide user base, advertising for their new monster will hook the world. And many of these newer users don't read Future Gamer or game magazines and are lured into the game-world by commercials and hype. No matter how bad the games, the upcoming ads will make Sony's console sell like hell.

I am also convinced that a cult underground game society could spring up, formed by people who claim that Sony's commercial approach alienates us from true games. N2000 and Dreamcast users might argue that their new machine will have more original games and Sony users are merely victims of commercial hype.

Sega, Sony and Nintendo are all commercial hardware companies at the end of the day. If you can afford to, I say buy as many game systems as you can, and enjoy them all instead of continuing these endless debates over and over again.

I myself worked in a game shop for a while and after a while this arguing over which system is better tends to become a bit foolish. Just sample games from as many systems as you can and learn that no system is the best, but game developers who make great games are the best!

Casper Planken

FG: There's no denying that Sony will put their advertising weight behind their new machine and this will, indeed, open up the world of videogames to whole new section of the consumer public. Advertising alone will not make or break a machine though. Word of mouth is a powerful tool and it's the games that will be talked about and therefore it's the games that will make or break a machine in the long run. The PlayStation 2 might sell well to start with but if the games are crap then people will abandon the machine quickly and will tell their friends not to buy one.