... Because I'm never going to get any work done now! It rocks!

Brought it on the Thursday night midnight opening thing. I could've waited but it was quite a novelty to do that, of course in Bognor Regis it wasn't like there was any lines anyway.

Got it home, out of the package, hmm.. bit bigger than I remembered started it up. Ooh Yeah!

I don't find the touchscreen at all gimmicky, it is a well worked in way to play games, on the Metroid Demo it played almost like a keyboard-mouse combo on a PC and is easily the best FPS I've played on any 'console' platform!

I also got SuperMario DS with it, absolutley amazing, due to the small screen and higher resoluton it remarkably resembles Mario Sunshine on the GameCube.

The nice people at the store, (who I'm doing my best to get chummy with) also gave me a free 'Touch me' t-shirt! I'm a fanboy! WHOOO!

Word. I wanted to hate that thing - I really did; not because I don't like Nintendo (I love them!) but because I didn't want Nintendo to go gimmicky (some traditionalism is really nice.) However, this thing is great. I can't deny it - I love the DS... the backwards combatibility, the gameplay, it's great. I don't have one, but I really really enjoy the 'DS.

You cannot imagine how much I am SEETHING with pure envy now.

'Go' gimmicky? Does no-one else remember the Virtual Boy? Gimmicky incarnate, that was.

The DS does look pretty nifty, but being a simple peasant boy, I'll have to make do with my GBA SP - shiny and red as it is.

I may be behind the technology curve, but my retro-styled Famicom-DS wins in the geek-chic fashion-stakes!

I think I'll just keep waiting for the PSP to come out...

For the moment I'm happy with emulating old platforms on my GP32. Currently I'm working through the SNES version of Bust-A-Move. Some games just don't get old. I'm really hoping that they make a GP64 someday so the power of the machine will jump up and more sophisticated emulation will be possible.

Hee hee, the old SNES version of Bust-a-move, I've got that on my laptop. I can't play through it though, I'm rubbish. I'm sticking to Bomberman two and three.

To be honest, I could've waited to get the DS, it wasn't really a huge deal to me as I had my old Advance and had just brought Metal Slug, it was just that it was released a week after my twenty first so I thought 'why not'

Even, as you've said, that it has few games you want to play and will most likely have poor build quality?

Maybe this is the non-conformist in me speaking, but I do genuinely like the sound of the gizmondo. I suspect it's going to have a community of dedicated hackers working on it, and that always creates fun things!

The Gizmondo and its spiritual predecessors do look interesting. I did look at a GP32 when I was thinking about updating from my gameboy pocket. (Aah the good old days of Pokemon.) but it hadn't really been taken up widely then and it was simply too hard to get hold of.

And you think that the DS isn't currently being hacked? Or even already has been? There's always a homebrew scene. It's like one of them eternal laws. You can call it Jonman's Law if someone else hasn't already lawified it.

I must admit that apart from a couple of naughty emulators on my laptop I am a tool of corporate oppression in that I don't really liked getting my things chipped or anyhting like that. I got taken in by the FACT adverts and ended up ratting out my maths teacher or something for operating an illegal copying den from his cellar.

To my mind, there's a world of difference between a homebrew scene (i.e. reverse engineering a piece of hardware in order to develop your own software for it), and piracy.

And despite the dubious legality, again, I see a whole world of difference between emulating obsolete hardware which software is not being released for anymore, and emulating contemporary hardware which you can still buy (hardware and software) in the shops.

I completely agree. I have a SNES emulator, a GBA and GB Colour emulators as well as a Sega Mega Drive emulator. I personally feel entitled to these as I still own the platforms themselves (Mostly up in the loft now but I traded in the GBA for the DS) and found it much to hard to have them all plugged into my Tv. Though I tend to buy games as new or second hand instead of getting copies.