The Sony PocketStation, formerly known as the P.D.A. (Personal Data Assistant) is one of the latest peripherals to be released for the PlayStation. The basic idea is that it is meant to allow PlayStation owners to continue playing their favourite games while out and about. Being not much bigger than a memory card it obviously isn't going to mean you can continue running down the Harry Krishas in Grand Theft Auto or hunt down those zomies in Resident Evil 2. But what it should provide is the possibility of tweaking the setup of your Nissan Skyline by buying parts off a fellow PocketStation owner via the infra red link. Another aspect would be to download your Tekken 3 character and battle it out with a mate with the onboard CPU deciding who wins via a simple punch-kick-block interface.

But console history is a deep and convoluted one and add-ons for these machines have been notoriously unsuccessful in a last effort to save a failing platform. The classic example has to be the 32X for the mega drive. This was a CD-ROM unit which sat

under or next to the console (depending which version you owned) and allowed Sega's new CD format games to be played without buying an entirely new unit. Other examples were the GameBoy adaptor for the SNES and even personal computers were not spared when Commadore released a similar CD-ROM for their dying Amiga format.

Having said that Sony have so far been able to introduce us to the idea of add-ons. When Nintendo revealed the N64 the controller was a crucial part of the idea of a totally 3D format. The built in analogue stick allowed natural input to be sent to the console making games far more intuitive to control. While analogue was not a new idea, Nintendo was the first to incorporate this as standard thus pushing the barrier forward. So as not to be left behind Sony released the Analog controller to a willing audience. And now this, the PocketStation, is this just in an effort to keep up with the Visual Memory System of the Dreamcast or will it really revolutionise the way we play games?