Dear Future Gamer

Why are you worried that Sony are trying to dominate the games industry with the PS or PS2? You should be applauding them, not slagging them off for it. Look at the state of the industry today. Three new consoles are on their way or are already here, all from different manufacturers, all desperate for a piece of the gaming pie. The consoles they're replacing haven't even reached their sixth birthdays, but already they're preparing to join their friends, the SNES and Mega Drive, in the console junkyard. Everyone (Sony, Sega, Nintendo) wants their console to be the new standard. Sony almost win, then half a decade later it starts all over again, leaving us gullible children to either upgrade to the Next Best Thing or play Mario Kart until the SNES explodes.

What kind of mess would the music industry be in today if, during the mid-80s, Panasonic (for argument's sake) had announced a new, better-sounding, longer-playing alternative to the CD, the CDX, forcing the consumer who only wanted to play his new Smiths CD to decide whether to stick with the old but reliable CD player or shell out hard cash for the new system, which after another five years would be upgraded to the new CDZ?

At last one company is finally bringing the whole bloody industry together and you say, "Hmm, we don't want a single format - that will lead to market dominance, which is unhealthy for us as we won't be able to release so many different magazines again."

Total platform compatibility may never happen. Still, Sony are taking a step in the right direction by making the PS2 backwards compatible. Oh, and it seems Nintendo don't learn from their past mistakes. If the Dolphin isn't backwards compatible, this may well be the end of the Big N as we know it. I, for one, will make sure the N64 is the last Nintendo machine I buy.

Jinn

FG: I take your point about machines becoming redundant before their time but this is such a fast moving industry with technological advances happening all the time and a popular demand for bigger, better, more games means bigger, better, more machines to play them on. We aren't worried about Sony dominating the games market as such, but we do think that if any one company has too much control over what games we get to play then that's a Bad Thing.