The controller is excellent. Tops competition twelve ways.

The size of the console is shocking. Even after all the descriptions I read that said the size of the console is shocking. It's not really a cube, unfortunately.

Luigi's Mansion is quite fun. They've taken a fairly simple gameplay idea and created many interesting puzzles out of it. The graphics were impressive, but still somewhat disappointing. The opening cinema is plagued with aliasing problems, and, apart from the flashlight, which is fantastic, the lighting often looks like it's coming from the wrong direction. And mirrors don't reflect your light beam, though they do reflect the illumination itself. Still, dynamic shadows are a good thing.

Oh, and there's no noticable loading time. Booyah.

Tossup as to whether it looks better than the current crop of PS2 games (update 11/28 -- it does). We probably won't be seeing PS2 graphics asymptote for a long time in any case. Cock-Box launch games look a little better. Of course, everyone hates the Cock-Box, so that doesn't really matter.

[Digression: Munch's Odyssey is Donkey Kong 64. To the extent that Giana Sisters is Super Mario Bros. Not that emulating a good game is a bad thing, it's just that you can probably get DK64 + an N64 for less than the cost of Munch, never mind the console it runs on.(update 11/28 -- the comparison to giana sisters is not quite fair in that donkey kong 64 was just another game in a well-established genre, whereas super mario bros practically invented scrolling platformers)]

And even if everyone was gushing over it, it still wouldn't matter. Because, and I probably don't need to reiterate this, but I will, the hardware is not what matters. People were sad when Sega went out of the hardware business, but they're still making games, and that's what matters.

What the demise of the Dreamcast meant to me was that I wouldn't have to buy one to play Crazy Taxi, Chu Chu Rocket, and Super Monkey Ball. 'course, I may anyways, because one Dreamcast and four controllers would be cheaper than three more Game Boys Advance.

It comes down to the fact that I've learned to trust Shigeru Miyamoto. If Nintendo were to get out of hardware, and announce that his next game was to come out for the NES, I'd be first in line to buy one of those ridiculously overpriced top-loading NES's on ebay.

N64 games are cheap now, too... seems like I'm going to be spending way too much money on games over the next few months.

And I probably ought to get a Gamecube memory card, oughtn't I?

On Twitter: @mogwai_poet