I'm playing World of Warcraft again. I thought I had broken this rather nasty habit, until they released a ten day trial for the Burning Crusade, and I found that the two new starting areas are leagues ahead of the original ones. Also, with the high-level migration to the Outland my old server, Nordrassil, is near empty is some of the early zones, which makes it nice for soloing. So while my main awaits to see if Polly wants to quest once more, I'm levelling up a Blood Elf mage with floppy ears and bad taste in outfits.

This also means my Wii isn't getting used much at present. Which is nice in a way, as it tides me over until Resident Evil 4 and the Wii Mario games get a European release.

We also spend an unusual weekend recently without internet, after BT bollocksed up my voice on Friday, my DSL on Saturday and then refused to fix anything until Monday. This makes them only slightly better than T-Mobile, who are trying to charge me for phones that were never sent, but I digress. It did mean that at long last, some five years post-release, I finished Warcraft III. This leaves me with a year to sort out The Frozen Throne before Starcraft II.

All in all, not a profitable few weeks...

While I've been praising the Wii, it's not without its drawbacks, some of them somewhat odd.

Firstly, GameCube compatibility. This is rather a good feature, giving you use of the entire GameCube back catalogue. The downside - no one stocks GameCube gear anymore¹, and controllers are particularly hard to get hold of (I had to resort to e-Bay). Also, they didn't try and reuse the Wiimote and Nunchuk, which surely would have managed a number of games; nor does the GameCube compatibility use the internal memory: you need a memory card.

Integration is also a little rubbish - GameCube play time doesn't appear in the play time list (unlike Wii games and Virtual Console games). And the controller ports/memory slot are all on the top of the unit - a little inconvenient really.

The Wii UI also suffers from a lack of consistency - some screens have a 'home' button, but the icon changes along with the position. Further, networking is dodgy (Polly's PowerBook gets better reception) and it suffers from Apple syndrome: when it's fine, it's great, but as soon as things go wrong, there's no information to be had. And when the connection fails, the unit has a habit of either never returning to the user (connecting forever, apparently) or not giving the user the option to retry and just resetting the unit.

The Virtual Console also seems to be suffering from laziness - Mario Kart 64 is missing ghost recording, for instance, and many games suffer from a lack of fixing for PAL² (or the option to display in 480i60). Neat idea, but they need to put a bit more work in (and some of the Japanese RPGs?) to make it fly.

Most of these can hopefully be fixed with firmware updates, but it is a little worrying - now consoles are so easily patched will we see a situation like PC games, where early shipping with bugs to be fixed in later patches in the norm? One can only hope for a respite from such, but the cynic in me would not be surprised.

¹ This strikes me as a little odd - surely there's a market here, especially given the limited number of Wii titles in Europe? Game seem to have embraced it a little, re-branding their own third party hardware as 'GameCube for Wii', but even the Oxford St. store is bereft of official hardware and has only [rubbish] trade-in games.

² Interestingly, while Sonic always played slower than Sonic 2 over here I had always thought it was a design decision. It turns out no, it was purely a rubbish conversion from NTSC to PAL.

It's a good time to have a PSP, especially with Pirates! and Sonic coming up. Unfortunately, mine was on the way out. Second-hand to begin with, the analogue controller and one of the buttons were playing up, and so I headed back to CeX to ask for a repair.

I though I was to be disappointed - upon noticing it was running a hacked firmware they tried to avoid it - 'flashing a custom firmware voids your warranty'. I pointed out this was rubbish, as it was a hardware problem, and that I wanted a repair, not a replacement. At this point they sent a message to the repair department, who responded 'just give him another unit'.

And so I now have a mint PSP, in significantly better condition than my old one. The only cost to me: a couple of hours flashing it back to 3.03SE. So now I've an as-new device running Super Mario. Spiffing. And blessings on CeX.

I've had my Wii going on a couple of weeks now, and it's a fantastic success. Zelda is stunning - while the graphics are merely great, the game-play is superb, and the controllers are the icing on the cake. Wii Sports is superb fun, especially with friends, although it does seem a little light sometimes - more a technology demo than a full game. And Monkey Ball has quite a learning curve, given the new control mechanism, but is nonetheless great fun.

I have yet to try the Virtual Console - first I need to track down a GameCube controller, and I'm tempted to go the full hog and get wireless.

Unfortunately, I was so enthralled I went and spent more money. Thanks to the temptresses at Amazon I now have a 26“ widescreen LCD, for a smidgen over £400. It's smashing - the Wii looks great on it, and it's fantastic to be able to watch the BBC in widescreen. All we need now is HDTV broadcasts (and the inevitable PVR upgrade for such).

In the meantime, though, more Zelda...

Yes, victory is within my grasp. After narrowly missing out on one of Game's three Wiis (for the City of London) I've discovered a new stock at Amazon Germany.

Yes, our German friends have Wiis coming out the kazoo, and hence I've ordered one. While I'm somewhat unlikely to see it until next week, even including postage it cuts £10 off the UK retail price. Thanks to the EU there's no extra tax to pay, and it even gets me the chance to practice some Deutsch.

Now, of course, I just need to track down games and an extra controller...

The most annoying part of this whole exercise is that while stock trickles in profiteerers are still buying to sell on eBay. Indeed, if you're at home with extortion it's by the far the easiest way to get one.

Over the Christmas break we stumbled down to the Science Museum and had a go on the Nintendo Wii. And since that point I've been quite keen on getting one - a games console that grabs Polly's attention is well worth having. Unfortunately, the entirety of Europe is denuded of stock.

This is gutting due to my passing up the chance to buy one when Amazon opened pre-orders. Foolishly I thought that surely stock would flow freely post-Christmas. Instead, no one even has any idea as to when their next shipment will be, and scalpers are making huge profits - third-parties on Amazon are selling for mark-ups of 100% and greater.

A number of sites have sprung up to allow monitoring of which shops have stock. Unfortunately, updates are few (three last week) and all have sold out within 20-30 minutes. So it appears I may be waiting a little longer for the change to dance around the living room playing Wii Tennis.

The Science Museum has an exhibition on computer games at present, “Game On”. Given the subject matter timing was a problem - when could one go and avoid the inevitable horde of children? Any holiday or weekend is fraught with the problem of parents dumping their children upon poor museum staff, and given the point of the exhibition is its interactivity, well, this is less than ideal for the rest of us.

And so I thought: Christmas Eve - everyone will be out shopping, or at least out of London. And indeed they were. Unfortunately, the Science Museum shuts for three days a year: 24-26 December. And so we ended up booking for the 27th, and turned up at 10:00 on the dot, intent on beating the crowd.

This proved to be a wise decision. The exhibition ranges from Space Wars, Space Invaders and Ms. PacMan at the start, through to the Wii and PS3 at the end. For the Wii/PS3 you are given 5 minutes on one or the other, but the rest are fair game. And so we found ourselves with our pick for the first half hour or so, after which it became increasingly busy and harder to play your choice of sample.

In general it is very well planned out. Most items are played on the original machines, and most controllers and the like are in good condition. There was also a good range, although the focus was mostly on arcade rather than PC games. The EyeToy powered Super Monkey Ball proved to be quite good, and Polly found herself rather keen on Ms. Pacman.

The major disappointment turned out to be the newer generation games. They inevitable had so many menus than just getting into the game proved a chore, and bar graphical differences there was little to pick between the PS2, XBox 360 or PS3.

But we did get a chance to play 4 player tennis on the Wii. This, despite the rather basic graphics, turned out to be a lot more fun, waving the controller madly in the air in wild attempts to hit the ball. However, it remains to be seen if more games develop the controller concept further (or, indeed, if anyone ever has some stock in the UK).

In short, if you are in London and fancy some fun it's well worth the entry price. Just get in early to avoid the kids.

I am completely enthralled at present with Lego Star Wars II. Despite the number, this one deals with the original trilogy (i.e. no annoying whiney Anakin) and is an absolute blast. While one is tempted to discard it out of hand given the title (Lego? In Star Wars?) it does in fact turn out to be magic - a mix of action/platform, with 3D shoot-em-up segments, which really doesn't take itself too seriously. The only downside - the UK hasn't got the PSP version as yet, and no Mac release has been announced. Grr.

Even better, the PSP version is visually close to that of the PC version. Animation is (almost always) smooth and attractive. The game-play has enough variation to keep you interested, and with variations on the levels (play through in story mode, play through timed, play through with characters of your choice) there's quite a bit of replay value. The downsides - load times are not the best (par for the course on the PSP) and the fixed camera does mean that sometimes you can't quite see what you're doing - or where you're going, which can be painful if there's a hidden drop.

Otherwise - surprisingly fantastic, and very time consuming.

My main investment of the week has been a PSP. I've been tempted for some time, and when DevHook came out for firmware 2.71 I was finally convinced. Now you can have a 2.71 PSP (the latest is 2.81) and still run 1.5 firmware via flash. Hence homebrew is quite achievable, an advantage which the PSP clearly won over the DS Lite.

Of course, the requirement for 2.71 did mean buying second hand, so there are a few scratches on the screen. On the other hand it did mean the giga-pack was cheaper than the new base pack, so one can't really complain. The downside is that now I've installed a MegaDrive emulator Polly keeps swiping it to play Sonic the Hedgehog.

So I'm very happy with it, bar Sony's continual attempts to wipe out homebrew. If it had a touchscreen it would be perfect. I've also picked up a few games - Lemmings, which is still superb, Lumines and the ever classic Ridge Racer. Lumines is fantastic, although a little buggy - suspend the device while playing and upon the end of the game it will prompt you to load the profile, overwriting your new high-score and unlocked items. Whoops.

I've also tried the whole one demo available - LocoRoco. Decidedly weird, set to j-pop and lots of fun, although not really what you'd expect on the PSP. Well worth a try though.

My other investment for the week was a Flickr Pro account, and as such I'm uploading all 3.5Gb of my photo collection. Once completed there should be some more of interest there, especially for friends. Stay tuned.