No longer dependant on the capricious fancy of Ole Saint Nick or my parents quick-to-break resolve, I have been a bit late in coming to the party of next generation console gaming, it beginning to seem like a promised land of far away fancy, something to be admired and watched with a misers eye whilst quietly seething at my lack of finacial clout and getting my account banned from Ebay for reasons unrelated.

I was one of the many who imported their Dreamcast when launch day trundelled into town to a fanfare of cutting edge graphics and the promise of more intense gameply, for the humble price of suffering an idesipherable language barrier and one half of a small Lebonese child. So having to stand back as the masses stamped their inflated smugness over todays gaming landscape has been akin to seeing a sackful of puppies being thrown up a wall; you may not be able to see what's happening inside the sack but the noises and dribbling sludge coming from it lend you a painfully sharp insight that hangs around long after the cries and whimpers have faded and the nightmares have eventually stopped.

Having also owned both a PS1 and PS2 to fulfill my ambition of squandering my life on moments of greatness that don't mean anything in the real world and will probably lament the waste of time I dedicated to doing so on my death bed, I naturally saw the PS3 as the next logical step in preventing the real world from crushing my delusions of messiah-like god-hood and glory, and continuing to reduce my brain into a glorious pastiche of lumps of gooey happiness, sprinkled with chunks of sparkly cutting edge graphics, heart stopping adventures and possibly a great big Flake.

I don't see myself as a Sony fanboy, having never owned an MSX or a decent pair of Walkman headphones, so the presumption by Sony that I would pay for their next ebony hued piece of silver lining by investing more money than I can find down the back of several friends sofas and scratchcards seemed too big a bite of the peach to swallow, as it would have been met halfway down my throat by the waves of bile readying themselves to sally forth at seeing such a glorious display of pricing corpulence.

With few exclusive titles and no genuine direction, the chance of being able to buy my enitire dvd collection for twice the price it originally cost doesn't do enough to justify the argument of seeing the built in Blu-Ray player as a 'good thing', nor the promise that at sometime in the future the machine will come good and cure our ills and sooth our wounds and unite the world under a big canopy of online interaction and hitherto undreamt of utopian desires enough of a balance for the sporadic releasing of must-have games or killer apps.

There is the free online gathering gateway 'Home' for the socially inept, but I never liked the Sims series of second by second second-life-like stimuli and lets be honest, if you wanted to socialise you would turn off the console and go outside.
Besides, I don't really understand the draw of online gaming, and fail to see at what point being called a 'noob' and having my gaming skills and parentage held in equal questionable status stops feeling like there's some sort of omnipotent God to online gaming creeping about in the ether and dark corners like a DMT induced trauma secretly underminding me through subliminal messages and cheap head shots and candidly plotting my inevitable downfall at the hands of a seven year old Lee Harvey Oswald on the screen before me through the medium of bastardized text speak, and starts to become fun.

Then there's the Xbox 360, which likewise offers online interactivity, albeit for a range of varying prices designed to enhance your own particular brand of online 'pwnage' and desire to invest in a range of d.v.t. socks, but there will be snowmen lining Satan's driveway before I lash out on something that has such a chronic problem with 'issues' as to be an emo band all by itself, and that someone saw fit to dedicate an entire section on Wikipedia to the problems associated with ownership to.

Leaving only the Nintendo Wii, I decided I didn't need another surface in my house gathering dust no matter how angular and contemporary it looked, and felt having to pay for the privalage of increasing the amount of cleaning I have to actually do around the house instead of leaving it to nature to reclaim as its own and return the lands to the wonderful rolling sprawl of trees and woodlice it once was a little bit presumptuious on Nintendos part.

I get the whole marketed idea of Nintendo doing its bit for the good of humanity and getting people up off the sofa and turning the world into a slew of front rooms awash with overweight families sweating as they flail ineffectivly with the Wiimote and nunchuck, and can even applaud their dedication to expanding the market into a whole new area of the gaming community, the casual gamer. After the N64 and then Gamecube failing to resist the smothering army that was the Sony warstation and, to some extent, the Microsoft Xbox birthing pool, it's not hard to understand why Nintendo saw an idea and ran with it like a man caught twixt his lover and her husband in the cold light of a shotgun barrel.

It comes across to me as a sort of 'Crazy Frog' of the gaming world; everybody claims to despise it and there's no doubting the amount of outward vitriol shown on the internet and gaming forums spawned in its wake, but somebody keeps buying the damn thing and for all the great unwasheds denials to the contrary, it IS a console, it IS selling more units than the PS3 or 360, therefore it IS winning the 'console war' of this generation.

But simply having the best selling console doesn't stop Nintendo from releasing a mighty tidal wave of dross and mini-game based uselessness month after month, each and every one offering new and innovative ways to waggle the controllers in a way that honestly doesn't look a bit like anyone elses game but see how it makes the stick go up and down and up and down and up and down just like it would in real life. I am not 5 years old, and this style of Fisher Price interactivity leaves me feeling like a penquin whose mate is suffering from erectile dysfunction - cold and unsatisfied.

There just isn't an amazing enough leap of benefit between the Wiimote or simply using a regular controller for the vast majority of Wii games, and even if it is the most well implemented motion controller ever released it still doesn't stop it feeling like I'm being made to go the long way around to where I want to get to, the almost rabid insistance I'm actually exercising when I'm playing these games making every game feel as if the novelty of spending half the game figuring out which arm waggle makes the magic monkey throw the elephant back into the tornado somehow makes up for lack of actual gameplay.

Nintendo first party titles are the usual re-imagining fare (read; same old game as before but now even shinier), and include such chart filling family friendly names as Mario, Zelda, Seamus and, in case you weren't completely convinced of his greatness in every role in every game ever, about a billion more with Mario in the title. There are some noteworthy third party games, like Resident Evil shooter Umbrella Chronicles, and the massively enhanced lady parts of the women-folk that is Soul Calibur Legends, but thanks to the Nintendo Wii being the most underpowered of the three consoles, even these games don't seem enticing enough a reason to send the best part of one hundred and fifty pounds into the till of some retailer who will probably smile to my face when I buy the machine and cheerfully advise me on what games to own but will still add me to some imaginary list of people he keeps in his head of potential organ donors once the bombs drop and society demands sacrifice.

So there you would effectively have it, if indeed it weren't so uncertain a step. But, thanks to the kind of price drop that was the equivalent of that one drink who turns an ok looking lady into the kind you'll spend the rest of your life trying to convince your friends you wouldn't go near with someone elses even though they've seen the video on YouTube, the XBOX 360 has become my white-mans burdern, entrusted to fulfill my dreams and desires of glory and valour, as long as neither of us actually speaks openly of the likleyhood of this happening, and I quietly get on with digging the hole in the garden for when 'that' day' arrives.

Even though I harbour the thought Bill Gates gets a tight little shiver of satisfying revenge somewhere deep inside every time another one of his little boxes of temporal uncertainty finds its way into the kind of hands that all geeks and science boffs everywhere have felt at sometime disguised as a fist, his one-man crusade to exact revenge on these mono-browed peoples has been nothing short of a success as far as sales and public brand awareness goes. You can't deny the unusually quick uptake of developers in recent times to bring their latest magnum opus to the people via Microsoft, and despite the lack of interest in HD DVD at the till and a list of complaints as long as a very long thing talking about long things that are long, the publics thirst for the kind of technology that can blow your mind but not your budget only goes to prove that not even I seem immune from the old addage of their being 'one born every minute'.