The PS2 is graphically less capable than a GameCube. Any developer who is lazy enough to only dress up a PS2 game (considering the Xbox360 and the Wii both use DVDs - alleviating any storage space considerations) is not using the console to anywhere near it's full potential.

You're almost certainly right - but I put it to you that developers don't always exploit consoles' full potential. Take some multi-platform franchise, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, maybe the Wall-E game or something like that, and you'll see a divide between the PS3 and 360 versions and those for the Wii and PS2. Perhaps we should forget this, after all any mediocre developer can make an ugly game, but it does contribute to the general impression. Gamecube ports don't help either, I enjoyed Zelda: Twilight Princess but it didn't wow me graphically.

Look, I love my Wii, but I watch Playr on Sunday mornings and the best Wii games don't look as good as the beautiful next-gen and PC games that are coming out. Wii graphics at the moment look a lot like the graphics of the later, and best-looking PS2 games. I'm talking about a console that has been around for donkeys' years, with software houses releasing their third or fourth title for the machine - all the tricks are known.

Now, the PS2 has a DVD drive as well. The issue isn't so much storage, so much as technical limitations to the numbers of textures and polygons that can be drawn on the screen, the amount of computation available to be devoted to nice lighting algorithms, physics simulation and so forth. Power will show in the end - I dare say the Wii games coming out in two years' time will look great and make my assertions about comparability with the PS2 look ridiculous.

Still, to get back on-topic, the PS2 is 'good enough', and has some games that really deserve to be played. I'm not surprised people are still using them.

I'm not really surprised - the PS2 has a huge software library, plus most owners have several peripherals that still prove useful. This weekend I played some Singstar and Guitar Hero III with friends, and I'd be more likely to buy more PS2 games that use the guitar and mikes, than to buy new peripherals (extra functionality and downloadable content notwithstanding).

In fact the Singstar game we played was a brand-new copy of the recently-released Singstar ABBA, and everyone loved it.

You can pick up used PS2 games for a pittance. I remember chatting to a store assistant in a games store, saying he was still always seeing parents come in and picking up PS2s with a bunch of games for the holidays. Console and a load of games well under 100 UK pounds, for which you can't really get another console (perhaps a DS or PSP with one game).

They're still releasing new games for the PS2, a pretty clear indication that it's still alive. No-one sane would advocate playing a cut-down and graphically poor PS2 Force Unleashed, but it's clearly still economically viable to release it. Though some would say the same for the Wii version. And, I don't want to arouse any fanboy ire, but I have a sneaking suspicion that similarities in graphical capabilities between the Wii and PS2 might help the economics of releasing a PS2 port... Anyway, there are a ton of PS2 games that are well worth playing - a brilliant last-generation game beats a mediocre current-gen one.

Everyone commenting on gaming stories should disclose their console preferences to discourage fanboy-ism. My TV is currently hooked up to a Wii, a PS2 and a Sega Master System.

If there was a trade, then by definition the stock was worth precisely the value at which it was traded.

While that is in many cases a vital truth, it becomes a pointless truism when one party is poorly-informed.

A handful of beans aren't worth as much as a cow just because you manage to persuade one hick that they're 'magic' beans. And an instantaneous stock-market price would only really mark the consensus agreement on the worth of a stock if markets were perfectly efficient.