Now, I'm not a big fan of sequels, GT2, FF VII and Quake 2 being a few of the lucky titles to make it into a very elite club but this is one title that the whole gaming fraternity has been speculating over since before Nintendo released their 64-bit machine.

Readers of Edge® will now be aware of the December 21st Japanese release date. Hmm, just in time for the last christmas of the century, coincidence? The price is expected to be in the region of £125 which would be a remarkable feat if proved correct as to start making a profit machines like these usually begin retailing for around £200-£300. Sony must be relying on their enormouse user base snaping up the new console like proverbial hotcakes. With most shops having sold out of PlayStations last christmas some may argue that this replacement is not needed or even welcome yet, especially when you consider that only recently with the release of Gran Turismo and it's planned sequel have programmers been able to harness the true potential of Sony's little box of fun.

Fortunately, we will still be able to play all our favourite games thanks to backwards compatibility. Infact they may be slightly improved, for example they could be run in a higher resolution with more detail. But the limiting factor of todays newest consoles surely has to be the monitor they are displaying on. This may change a few years down the line with increased support for digital television but until then perhaps another solution can be found. A

significant number of games fanatics not only own a console but also a PC. Sega have realised this fact with the release of their Dreamcast VGA adaptor which allows the console to be connected directly to the PC monitor allowing sharper images. Could we all be in for a lovely surprise? With many people forecasting the convergence of computers and television could we be about to witness the second step in the joining of the console and the computer. The first would have been the Windows CE operating system on the Dreamcast. Infact, with the proposed backwards compatilibilty Sony may be creating the first family of consoles much like the 80286 processor was to the 8086.

On the computing power side of things it is reported that the PlayStation 2, as it is currently known, will be around 20 times more powerful than it's predecessor. It will be able to shift 8 million polygons per second. A 500MHz processor is expected to be at the heart of the beast, so I guess we'll have to keep it in the fridge if we want to keep it switched for any longer than 5 minutes at a time! MPEG2 decoding and a DVD drive are also in the pipeline. However, it will still only use a polygon engine so no fancy new voxels or NURBS then.

Namco are supposed to be 'in on the act' which could mean a similar lauch line up to the original. Does this mean the PlayStation 2 will become 50% racing games aswell? Or will Sony take a tighter reign and demand more

innovative products from third party developers. The Net Yaroze project has shown the wealth of talent and ideas out there at the moment and Sony among others have actually hired people as a result of seeing their work on the Yaroze. Who knows, maybe there are a couple of Yaroze guys sat up in a big office with a top secret PS-X 2 working on the first title.

A major influence in the success of this new machine would have to be the release date. With a late 1999 date for the Japanese consumer there will obviously be huge demand for the christmas period. But what about the rest of the world? Here in Europe we can usually expect to see something around six months after Japan. There are always those few members of the community willing to pay upto £500 for imported machines and with such an awaited product as this those people taking this controversial route will no doubt hit record numbers. This could be potentially disastrous for SCEI as the Japanese would run out of units much sooner than expected. The best way of preventing this from happening would be to have a world wide release, something we here in Europe have been asking for since it first became apparent that this was not happening.

What other company would be able to pull of something so unique, anyway? Only the same that brought the public the two most unexpectidly popular peices of technology of our time, the Walkman and the PlayStation, Sony.