It has been an awfully long time since there were four videogame consoles vying for consumers' cash at Christmas.
Your choice of hardware will always be partly determined by what you want to play on it - the best games are usually exclusive to a certain machine. But this is also a transitional time for the videogame industry, with older machines reaching the end of their natural lifespan and two major new consoles arriving next year.
So buyers must also consider how much juice is likely to be left in the box they choose. The Nintendo 64 (£74.99) is a case in point. Though technically superior to its rival PlayStation, it has always suffered from a lack of software support.
Even now, it can boast no top-flight beat-'em-ups or driving games. Yet if its back catalogue is small, it is also glorious: Goldeneye, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Wave Race.
Like its predecessor the SNES, the N64 has been bowing out in style this year, with the flawed but impressive Perfect Dark, the wonderful Mario Tennis, and now the latest masterpiece from Japanese legend Shigeru Miyamoto, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
Those who already own the machine will be more than happy, but only die-hard Pokémon nuts - Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Snap aren't available for any other console - will actually go out and buy one for the first time now.
What of Nintendo's old rival? Sony's PSone (£79.99) is a repackaged version of the original PlayStation, in a smaller, rounded white box, and with a snap-on LCD screen promised for next year. The PlayStation is now cheap enough to be a toy. But the technology inside it is still five years old, and showing its age with warped textures and coughing framerates.
There is of course a new Lara Croft vehicle out this Christmas (Tomb Raider Chronicles), but there will be no more ground-breaking games on this format. The back catalogue, even so, is wide and impressive, with such benchmarks as Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid, Tekken 3, Time Crisis et al available at reduced prices.
Since PSone's technology is now so well understood and relatively cheap to develop for, the console might yet enjoy an Indian summer as the medium for inexpensive, experimental videogames, such as this autumn's bizarrely fascinating Vib Ribbon, or the new Incredible Crisis.
Gamers looking for the cutting edge, however, will know it is time to move on. I only hope there are not too many tearful children on Christmas morning unwrapping one of these when they wanted a PlayStation 2. Beware of tragic parental confusion.
So should you go for a PlayStation 2 (£299)? It's kind of a moot point, since Sony managed to ship only 165,000 of the beasts to the UK. If you haven't already got one, you won't officially be able to buy one until well into the new year - but there are some enterprising companies out there offering to sell mysteriously acquired machines at a premium.
The PS2 is certainly a sleek and sexy beast: ribbed black, with understated highlights, it resembles a serious slab of hi-fi entertainment gear. It also plays back DVD movies, although the quality is not stunning.
Connectivity-wise, it's pretty future-proof: USB and i.Link ports, a promised broadband internet adapter, a promised slot-in hard drive. But it's criminal that Sony has provided only two controller ports, forcing you to spend an extra £30 on a multitap to play three-way or four-way games.
So what can you play on it? There's the rub. Of all the games available from now until the new year, the only "must-have" product is Timesplitters (Eidos). Programmed by Free Radical Design, who were part of the original Goldeneye design team, it's an uproarious first-person shooter with a beautifully fast and smooth four-player mode.
Because PS2 is backward-compatible with original PlayStation software, it has a ready-made library of old games, but it will take a while before developers exploit the full potential of its idiosyncratic computing architecture. That might not happen, in fact, before next autumn's Metal Gear Solid 2, a game already so desirable that a five-minute DVD trailer for it has been selling like hot saké in Japan.
But by that time, Sony will have to fend off the twin challenges of Microsoft's Xbox (currently selling itself on unproven polygon numbers) and Nintendo's Gamecube (wisely not claiming any numbers at all).
My guess is that it will do just fine, once the price is cut to something more sensible, but for now only gadget freaks really need one.
And so we come to Sega's Dreamcast (£149). It had some teething troubles when it launched a year ago: notably, the slipping of high-profile games and the failure of its internet service. But since then, things have started to go right.
It is still the only console to ship with a built-in modem, albeit a slow 33.3kbps model (a 56k unit is promised next year), and so out of the box it can function as a basic email and web-browsing unit. Owners of the excellent Dreamcast port of Quake III: Arena can participate in multiplayer fragging contests online as well.
Despite the PS2 hype, the Dreamcast has always been a very capable 128-bit machine itself, and its software catalogue is now superb. The evergreen Soul Calibur is still eye-searingly beautiful; there are perfect conversions of Sega arcade games such as House of the Dead 2 and Crazy Taxi; and recent major launches such as Metropolis Street Racer, Jet Set Radio and Shenmue, as well as the delicious maraca-shaking party game Samba de Amigo, have consolidated its position.
Dreamcast is by no means certain to be blown out of the water by the new boys next Christmas either. Consider also that current high-street bundles around the £149 mark offer the console with two or three free games, and that for £299 or less you can also get it with an excellent multi-region DVD player (the Encore DV-450S), and there is really no contest. Sega is the undisputed champion for videogamers this Christmas.
• Steve Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, £12)
