Dear Future Gamer

I think it's very unusual to see a console priced at £65 and the games priced at £50. Nintendo and THE Games say the high price of games is due to manufacturing costs. Hmm. A small, printed circuit board with a 128Mbit ROM, 0.5Mbit memory chip and a battery is apparently £15 cheaper to make and sell than a 64bit games console with a 90Mhz processor, graphics chip, 4Mb of RAM and all the other technical stuff? The N64 has dropped in price from £250 to £65 - that's more than two-thirds off the original price. So, games should be £20, rather than the original £60. The profit Nintendo make on games must be sky high - no wonder they can afford to delay things like they do.

Like every other N64 owner out there - and contrary to the stupid "UK consumers expect to pay more" conclusions - I would buy a lot more games if they were cheaper. Maybe Electronic Arts wouldn't blame "poor N64 software sales" if N64 software was affordable in the first place. This Christmas I got just one N64 game - Smash Brothers - when I really would have liked three or four.

Neil Clowrey

FG: It's a marketing model that console manufacturers often adopt - lose money on the hardware and recoup the losses on the software. N64 games are generally expensive but the defence that manufacturing costs are high for cartridges does have some truth to it.