And one final story before we put the blessed Wii-monster to bed for the weekend...

You may have read elsewhere that Nintendo was planning to make the Wii a region-free machine. In much the same way as the DS and dear old GameBoy are. We raised an eyebrow at this news, even though the story seemed to spring from credible sources. After all it’d be a bit of a first for a non-portable, full-sized console.

Anyway, just before our computers were turned off for a well-earned rest an email landed on our desktop from a bona-fide source ensconced well within Nintendo’s crazy universe. It stated that we could reliably quote Nintendo of Europe as having confirmed that Wii will be region-encoded after all. In simple terms this means that import machines won’t play UK games and, presumably, vice-versa. Ah well, there go our dreams of circumventing those rip-off Britain concerns we were expressing earlier.