PlayStation2, the words still sound like honey in my ears. Like the culmination of some grand epic, the PlayStation 2 is now a reality and I'm still giddy with excitement. My zealous desire to own a PS2 reached a fevered pitch this week and had me compared to everything from an irrational fanatic to a crack whore looking for a fix.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that you might want to wait before you jump on the Sony bandwagon. Now, it looks like you're not going to have much of a choice. Sony announced this week that they would be shipping only 500 000 units of their Playstation 2 for release on October 26th”half of their intended. Sony claims that it is due to a component shortage, but one can't help but wonder if they are trying to build a Tickle-Me-Elmo Christmas frenzy.

My wife hates it whenever I make a significant electronics purchase; she doesn't mind the money spent as much as the buyer's anxiety I always experience after plunking down a few hundred dollars for something I know will be obsolete within a few months. The DVD player, the stereo, the camcorder are all sources of great anxiety to me whenever I think about them. Should I have waited for them to go down in price? Could I have gotten a better deal if I had looked around a little more? Did I get the right brand? Because of this tendency to second guess myself, I try to avoid making major purchases of things new to the market. I waited a year to see if DVD would really take hold, and it did. I had intended on breaking the waiting restriction with the Playstation 2. I didn't think that there could be a surer bet. At the beginning of the summer I started putting pennies away in anticipation of October 26th. I would be the first one on my block to own it, and it would be glorious. There was no doubt. After all, Newsweek even ran a cover story on it. Sure, there were rumors about an X-Box and a Dolphin, but what were they in the face of Sony?

I want to be a kung fu fighter. I want to dance like Jackie Chan
and flip like Jet Lee on wires. I want to have a wise old kung fu master that says things
like, "You fight well for one so young, but you must learn to let go of your anger
and become like the stream. When you can do this, you will be invincible.

It kills me to say this, but I've always believed that if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. So here I am.

I'm a writer and I love video games. Being a writer may make me hypersensitive, but I find myself wondering all the time: Where did they get this crap? It's not the plots of games, which are varied and diverse enough to satisfy any genre desire, but the way these plots are presented. Where did all the dialogue writers go? Why aren't any of them working for game companies? Why does this gross negligence never get attention?

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with my copy of Norm Koger's The Operational Art of War, and I have a lot of nice things to say about it. It's deep, it's fun, it's got a great interface”well, OK, it's just a great game. In any case, I was happily playing along in the spiffy 2D mode, feeling nice and comfortable with the familiar board wargame look of the game, when my son looked over my shoulder and suggested we try the 3D view of the game, "you know, the one where the tanks look like tanks instead of chits of cardboard." Figuring it wouldn't hurt to humor him, I switched over to 3D, and”Great Patton's Ghost!--we were confronted with a sight to freeze one's very soul”that of the ugliness that lies at the heart of wargaming. We witnessed wraith-like infantry, indistinct vehicles, Germans wearing green uniforms, Allies grey. It was like World War II on food poisoning.

Catch the Winter X Games? During the women's slopestyle competition, one of the riders pulled a double-grab 360. The announcer hollered, "ding ding ding," and called the trick. It struck me that he was making a Coolboarders reference. The video games are affecting the sport itself.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... arcade machines cost you a quarter. Now, the only games you can find at that stunning price are Ms. Pacman and Asteroids (at least here at the Seattle Gameworks). Needless to say, if you want to jump into the cockpit of an X-wing fighter or go one-on-one with Law in Tekken 3 it\'s going to cost you.

Summer is the perfect time to skateboard. I should know, I love to skateboard. School is no longer a factor and there is far less to worry about. The sun is high (as well as the temperature), and the amount of time available for pure skateboarding is great. For me summer is a good time for skateboarding, not for playing video games. And although I would prefer to roll around with my friends with the sun overhead instead of staring blankly at a television screen, there are just some video games that you have to play, no matter the time or the place. The game that I set my precious time aside for was ironically based on the same thing that I yearn for the most -- skateboarding.

Perhaps you missed last Sunday\'s episode of \"The Simpsons,\" which, as well as being one of the best episodes to date (enough to make a person forget about last season\'s crap-a-thon), also featured the show\'s first new generation video game spot. Of course you shouldn\'t worry; syndication will take care of that problem, but, for those of you who did manage to catch it, the time for discussion is at hand.

Yesterday, the arcade nearest to my house officially sold its soul”not to the devil, the government, or even a special interest group with some less diabolical agenda. No, it sold out to the thirteen year old mall crowd and their perceived need for franchise-like arcade huts and the seemingly infinite series of genre clones that go along with them. Don't get me wrong, one of the best things about arcades is the fact that they provide you with the opportunity to play games months before they make it to a console, and generally in better versions.

Obviously, the internet capabilities of the Dreamcast”combined with its superior processor apparatus”give it an edge far sharper than any system to break in the last forever many years. You thought, perhaps, that you had maximized the possibilities of your couch when you finally found the Dukes of Hazzard TV tray you had been looking for the last ten years, or installed the Molson-stocked mini-fridge next to your remote control caddy. But now, Sega has introduced the possibility of leisurely strolling through the internet from that selfsame couch, not to mention given you the option to play console games on-line with friends who are similarly devoted to their domestic sitting arrangements.

AIRPORT, Salt Lake City. Maybe some of you out there haven't been to E3. In fact, maybe almost none of you have. Well, this was my first year, and I just sort of lucked into it, so believe me, I understand the pain and frustration that you must feel knowing that another year has come and gone in which you didn't get to see any Namco girls. Yes, I am just patronizing you. Anyway, a conversation I accidentally got on tape at the airport might help. This kid ("some kid" as I prefer to call him) was on his way to visit his dad in Illinois. The plan was, he was going to go there, try and get free stuff and money, and mostly listen to his dad complain about "your mother the bitch." So I showed him forty-five minutes of footage of the Space Channel 5 Go-go dancers. And after he cried for joy, I hugged him, and we had a pretzel. We also had this conversation:

It\'s like that movie, Kill All Monsters, where the big guys from the Godzilla films get together and have a big old monster hoedown, except these are full grown companies. Of course, all that was at stake in Kill All Monsters was a fictional humanity, and here the reward is fiscal reality. With so many new consoles coming out, I find myself asked more and more often: Which one should I buy? Well, the answer, of course, is, \"All of them.\" That\'s unsatisfactory for most people, but it\'s about the best a simple Console Editor can do.

NORTHBOUND, Greyhound--just past Preston, UT (or ID or somewhere). Disclaimers have a tendency to strongly resemble either whining or lying. Having said that, the notes I just realized I needed for this piece are locked in the luggage bin of this bus (somewhere beneath the surly cowboy a few seats in front of me) traveling at the same breakneck 35 or so mph we are\"plus or minus the shifting and crashing around it\'s undoubtedly doing, as our driver seems to drive worse when he hasn\'t had a cigarette for a while, and Logan was sixty or so miles ago.