So what is this pelvic neutral thing, exactly, and why are we interested in looking for it? Well, it's more of a where. I've had back trouble for far too long and was looking to do something about it when my dear mum, bless her, put me onto Pilates. If you've never heard of it, it's an exercise system, so called because it was developed by a man of that name.

The focus is on your abdominal muscles, and most of the exercises are done lying flat on your back. To perform them correctly, your pelvis has to be in the neutral position, i.e. neither tilted forwards nor backwards, and it has to stay in that position as you make the movements. This is co-ordinated with breathing exercises in which you think of trying to put your navel on your spine and keep it there as you breath in and out.

I've found that if done properly these exercises are very hard work and really deliver the results. After a month or so of doing about 20-30 minutes a day, my back is much less sore than it was, and my stomach muscles are much stronger. It's all the more impressive because the movements are done slowly and gently; there's no jerking, no force, and you don't do a lot of repetitions - maybe ten in a set, maximum.

Plus, it also works well with aikido. You are focussing, in effect, on what martial arts and meditation call the 'centre', and constantly concentrating on that point helps you do the same thing when you're on the mat. Before, I was just treating my centre as a matter of focussing on where my weight was, but now if I try to keep my stomach muscles tightened in the same way as I do when I perform the Pilates exercises, I feel much more stable in techniques and I can maintain my centre the whole way through, at least some of the time. And that's a real breakthrough.

This rather begs the question of why no-one in aikido ever explicitly told me to do this, because I'm now convinced that anyone who is any good must be doing it that way in order to generate the power that they do. Or maybe someone did tell me and it just went in one ear and out the other because I didn't understand what they were saying. Either way, now I've found it out for myself I won't forget it in a hurry.

But even if you're not interested in anything sporty (and I'm sure this would help with all sport; dancers love Pilates, apparently), Pilates is well worth a go for its own sake. It's great because you don't even have to be fit, and you don't need any equipment, other than maybe a rug or blanket (if you don't have a proper stretching mat). All you have to do is lie there, and even if you can only make tiny movements at first, you'll still be working hard. Highly recommended.

I know I'm not the only one to have commented on this:

Members of the Russian Communist party have called for the new Indiana Jones film to be banned in the country because they say it distorts history. St Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told the Reuters news agency it was "rubbish". "Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?" He said many Russian cinemagoers were teenagers who would be "completely unaware of what happened in 1957", when the film is set. "They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war. "It's rubbish... In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the US."
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7418727.stm]

But I still couldn't resist some fun at their expense. I'm just going to pass right over the irony of the Russian Communist party complaining about distortions of history as too huge to treat properly here, and deal with the issue at hand. First, I should point out here that my wife is Russian and I saw this film at the movies with her. She did actually express some unease that the movie caricatured Russians, but I pointed out to her that (i) the movie caricatures everyone, because it is a cartoon after all, not realism and (ii) in the earlier films it is the Germans who are singled out as the cartoon baddies, but since WWII was long over they had to pick on someone else, and given that this was the period of the cold war, the Russians were the obvious choice.

I also remarked that as an Englishman, I could have taken offence at the fact that the only English character in the film was a fat, treacherous, double-dealing, dishonourable rat (take a bow, Ray, for a great supporting turn); but since I in no way assumed the film was intended to be a true depiction of our national character, I couldn't really find any grounds to. These observations were sufficient to mollify my spouse, but I'm not sure they would do much to calm the head of the St. Petersburg branch of the CP, whose sense of historical reason appears to have completely abandoned him.

How anyone could assume that a film [warning: spoiler ahead] that culminates with a flying saucer lifting off from the South American jungle could be in any way historically representational beats the pants off me. Indy IV was only so-so (Iron Man was much better, well done Robert, you have hit the franchise jackpot there), but it was decent entertainment so long as you didn't treat it as anything more or other than that. Some people, however, clearly got their genres mangled. Earthquakes and cyclones cause inestimable tragedies for humanity, but it's this sort of petty rubbish that could really make me despair of the human spirt - if it weren't so funny.

Time for a another product review. I bought myself a Sony Playstation Portable Slim'n Light , to give the thing its full name (intended to distinguish it from the older larger heavier model that is no longer being sold at retail), for Christmas and I have to say I've been thoroughly enjoying it ever since. It's become a constant companion on the journey to work.

What's so great about it? Well, of course there are the games; you can find pretty much every kind of title you'll find on the bigger consoles or the PC, plus some unique games that are only available on the PSP. Daxter (platform action) and Jeanne D'Arc (turn based strategy) are two good examples of PSP-only titles that are great fun for anyone who loves gaming. I finished Jeanne D'Arc and I'm about half-way through Daxter, and I haven't regretted the cash I laid out on either title.

But if you're not keen on computer games, that doesn't mean you wouldn't be interested in this particular gadget, because it's also an excellent portable media player. In particular, it's great for video. Admittedly there's the hassle of format conversion which requires a PC (it only supports .mp4 at the moment though that may be about to change; there have been rumours of native divx/avi support for a while), but if you can live with that, then once you've plugged in a decent sized memory card (8 gigs is perfect), you can store films, TV, music videos, or whatever else you want to watch.

Transferring files is just a matter of dragging and dropping (in Windows; I have to say I'm not sure about Mac or Linux support, although there's a pretty thriving hacker scene around the PSP so even if it's not officially catered for you'd probably be able to get it going with little difficulty). Once the files are on your PSP, it will do scene search, pause, fast forward, etc.; basically a full featured video player, and the widescreen format is capable of an excellent picture that draws you in so you forget about the small size of the device you're watching on. And of course it supports mp3 as well, so it's also good for audio. The external speakers are poor, but through headphones the sound quality is more than acceptable. Sony have also added support for a number of internet radio stations in a recent update, so you can go online if you have a wi-fi connection available and listen that way instead. It's a shame the wi-fi is only 802.11b - if it were the 54 mb g standard it would be even better, but it's fast enough for streaming audio most of the time.

The other good thing is the continued support from Sony, who are regularly updating the system software to add new features. Support for internet telephony via Skype (although you need to buy a headset with a mike separately) was one major recent addition; hopefully there will be some more major changes as the firmware reaches version 4.0, which is due to happen pretty shortly.

This isn't a fanboy rant, so I have to say the device isn't perfect. It lacks a built-in camera, and the only available plug-in one is a poor-quality toy rather than a serious camera of the sort that top-end mobile phones are increasingly carrying. I haven't bothered with it. Plus, it lacks a touchscreen or a numeric keypad, so there is no easy way of giving text input, though there again there are rumours that a plug-in mini-keyboard is in the works.

Nevertheless, I have to say that as an all-round portable entertainment device, it can't be beaten; there are gadgets on the market that can perform better than the PSP at any given function (apart from games, at any rate), but there's nothing else that I know that can do it all like this one.

Liar, liar, pants on fire. As the political economist Joseph Schumpeter once remarked, ‘the first thing man will do for his ideal or his interest is to lie’. Hilary has nicely illustrated the truth of this observation. I had been saying privately to friends that her desire to get herself into the Oval office was so great that she'd do or say anything that she thought would help her get there; her pork pie about running across the airfield tarmac under fire in Bosnia is the proof.

The 'I misspoke' thing is ludicrous, embarassing, and, well, shameless. You didn't 'misspeak'; you bloody well made it up, you deceitful woman. One thing that I am quite sure I would never, ever forget would be being shot at; the time and place would be indelibly imprinted on my mind. You can't get "confused" about someone trying to kill you by firing bullets into your flesh. It either happened or it didn't, and you can't get it muddled up with some other time you went to Bosnia (unless perhaps you actually happen to be in the armed forces and therefore do get shot at all the time).

Anyhow, this little episode shows the positive side of our ubiquitous media society; it can act as proof of the historical record in a way that exposes dishonest politicians in a very public fashion, and therefore (hopefully) creates an incentive on the part of others not to try the same trick, if only on pragmatic grounds. As for Hilary personally, I hope her candidacy has been seriously damaged by this. Of course you have to be very ambitious to want to be President, but in order to actually do the job properly you have to be other things as well, and I think that in her case she's mostly just very ambitious.

'Fanboy' is one of those new words for an overly zealous supporter that makes me grin. Being a fanboy makes you nerdy, and shows you have no sense of perspective. I am a Spider-man fanboy. Spider-man is ace, the best comic character ever created. There, see what I mean? Anyhow, I've loved the character since I was a kid, an increasingly long time ago.

You all know the story, if only from Sam Raimi's excellent movie adaptations (oops, there I go again); geeky Peter Parker, science spod, is bitten by a radioactive spider that gives him superhuman strength, and a sixth sense for danger (as well as, in Raimi's version, spinerettes in his wrists; in the original comic he used his whizz-kid skills to make mechanical web-shooters).

The comics emerged in the 1960s, what now seems a time of naive optimism in mainstream culture, and they reflected their era. Someone has probably written a good study of how they changed over the decades, but certainly by the 1990s (partly to compete with the growing independent comics sector that was increasingly winning a more adult audience away from the titles published by Marvel and DC, the two firms that had dominated the traditional super-hero comics market) they had taken on an altogether more mature and adult tone.

All that has just been scotched. In what is perhaps the most disastrous use of a deus ex-machina I've seen in the entire series, in order to save his dying aunt who had been hit by an assassin's bullet meant for him, Peter makes a deal with the devil to undo his marriage and make it as if it had never been. He agrees, and wakes up in a reality where he is unmarried and lots of other old characters have been resurrected.

This is simply a way of getting rid of years of story development, and even in the world of comics is just going too far. All sorts of stuff I could accept - Peter having a clone and thinking for a while that he was the clone, Peter finding out that in fact there was a long mystical tradition of spider-powers that he was heir to, etc. But none of these things disrupted the continuity of the stories, although they took the character off in new directions. In contrast, this pact with the devil just seems to do away with a vast chunk of Spider-man's life.

The response from my fellow fanboys is overwhelmingly negative, so I hope Marvel do the sensible thing and work out a way out of this plot, because they'll lose a lot of readers if they don't, I prophesy. The nice thing is that in comics there is always a way out, unlike real life; which no doubt is one of the reasons they're such a popular form of escapism. Anyway, give Peter his life back!

I attended a speech by Tony Blair a couple of weeks ago, the first time I've ever seen such a senior political figure in the flesh - even though he'd left office. I went even though I regard his period in government as a great disappointment, crowned by the mess he made in Iraq. At no point did I stand for or applaud the man; but I couldn't help finding him an impressive performer simply as a rhetorician.

This is hardly surprising; you don't get to that level of public office unless you're very good at working the crowd, and he had some great anecdotes. There was the one about the Irish negotiator at the peace process who asked him, apparently in all innocence, what they were going to call the baby when the news escaped that Cherie was pregnant; next time TB saw him, he was sporting a tan from the holiday he'd had on the proceeds of his winnings from the bookings based on some very good inside information. Or the one about how TB never used a mobile phone while in office, and the day after he left power decided to get one. So he texted a friend to say 'hi', and got a reply saying 'sorry but who are you?' to which he thought in response 'it's only been 24 hours'.

But beyond the style and the jokes (and the sycophancy; he flattered the audience shamelessly and mercilessly, although I suppose they were paying him a lot of money for the privilege), what about the substance? There was *some*; it wasn't all complete flannel. But it wasn't very weighty either; TB, though a very talented speaker and political operator, is not one of the great minds of our time. With typical nerve, he spoke on 'The Crisis in Global Governance'.

Tony, you *are* the crisis in global governance, I thought to myself. Anyway, his theme was that the world is changing faster and is more interdependent than ever before; indisputable, but not beyond the wit of a clever senior school student to have worked out. As one would expect he skirted very lightly over Iraq and terrorism, treating the latter as a form of inexplicable fanaticism that had come out of nowhere. He was arguing the case for globalisation (of trade), arguing that it brings more opportunities than harm; but not once did he mention corruption.

I thought this was a pretty glaring omission, as it neglects the simple equation "bigger pie = more graft". At the end there was a chance to ask questions, so I thought I'd step up to the mike and ask how we were supposed to create or maintain institutions that can at least mitigate the issue. His reply was simply, yes, we need less corruption. Er, of course. But *how* exactly are we going to achieve this? No answer.

To be fair, I'm not sure anyone else has a very good answer, or at least not one that goes beyond generalities about the need to maintain the rule of law and the importance of due process and the observation of procedure. I certainly don't; that was why I was asking. But then I wasn't British Prime Minister for ten years either. They don't call him Teflon Tony for nothing.

Not being a great fan of Chelski, I wasn't too saddened by Mourinho's departure, but I was astonished at the manner of it. Here is a manager who is clearly one of the best in the world, who has not only won the European cup but brought Chelsea two league titles and two cups in just three seasons, and what does Roman do? Spits the dummy as soon as things get a bit rocky. He may be a great businessman but he clearly doesn't understand that in sport you can't just buy success as if it were stocks and shares.

Mourinho had more or less instantly transformed Chelsea from a good premier league side that performed well in the cups but never really mounted a consistent title challenge to a title-winning team in his first season, and carried on from there. It wasn't his fault if the owner and the board imposed players like Ballack and Shevchenko on him, nor was it his fault that key team members who he clearly did want, like Lampard and Drogba, were injured for the start of this season.

I watched the game against Rosenborg that proved the final straw, and Chelsea, while perhaps not at their best, were hardly terrible. They could claim with some justification to be unlucky not get a win after going 1-0 down; they hit the post twice and although even Mourinho admitted they were wasteful with their chances, they did create plenty of them, and no-one can win all the time. They have now appointed a B-list candidate - manager of Israel doesn't really cut it at the highest level - and are in danger of completely derailing everything Jose built by provoking a mass exodus of senior players. Great man-management there, Roman.

So far as I can see, Mourinho was quite right to insist that as manager, he be allowed to manage. Chelsea are in danger of becoming the new Real Madrid, a soap opera that's great to watch but incapable of winning anything (don't get me started on Real's second sacking of Capello after he won them a second title). Of course it's great when you play beautiful football and win, but the main thing, above all, is to win. If you have to win ugly, as the saying goes, well, that's what you do. Jose knew that; Roman has yet to learn it. It's rare to see someone shoot themselves in the foot with such lethal accuracy but I'm grateful to be able to witness the spectacle.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Well, credit where it's due. Avram Grant managed to forestall the threatened exodus of players, and has taken Chelsea to the European Cup final and the verge of the Premier League title. I still hope they lose out on both to Manchester United but it hasn't been the implosion that I was expecting. You have to be big enough to admit when you got it wrong ;-)

As with Gears of War, there's been a lot of hype about this game, which is now out for the PC and the xbox360. And my first impressions are that, unlike Gears which was great but flawed, Bioshock fully justifies it. It does so because the world it creates gives the appearance of having been fully worked out, and so it rises above cliche.

This is rare in computer game story telling, but at the same time it is not, to be fair, by any means unknown; there've been some really strong narratives in games I've played. A couple that stick out for me are Max Payne and Mafia, which showed you really could do gangster noir with in depth characterisation on the PC; sci-fi fans could also name the Half Life series, and others will have their own favourites again. But the point is, it can be done; it has been done. And when it succeeds, its a story-telling medium that's second to none. Perhaps only the novel can give you the same feeling of having been somewhere.

Rapture is the underwater city done in an art deco style that the makers of Bioshock have set their game in. It's a place where things have gone terribly wrong, and they create an atmosphere of horror with some very traditional horror movie tricks (lights flickering on and off, strange noises, overheard voices, and so on) used to full effect. At the same time, the colours are such that there is real beauty in the faded grandeur of this doomed city where all the inhabitants now seem to be not only mad but psychotically violent.

So far I've only explored a fraction of it but the detail is a delight. It's been a long time since I was in a virtual environment where I wanted to explore every detail; playing Oblivion was perhaps the closest I've come to it in recent times. But Bioshock actively rewards you for peering into every nook and cranny, hiding stuff for you to collect in a way that plays with the computer game convention of the power-up item that adds extra health or energy to your on-screen character by having them in plausible locations. You can find money in abandoned cash registers, and use it to buy stuff from vending machines, for example.

And the enemies are just as believable. They are people who have suffered adverse reactions to the DIY genetic modifications that became the basis of the city's economy; it was conceived as a kind of giant social and medical experiment in private enterprise, a very topical theme despite the faux period setting. It is, indeed, 'post-humanist', as my Dad said when he watched me playing some of Stalker in the cheerful mutant-infested alternative post-Chernobyl environment that game conjures up so well.

So far, I'm riveted. I really haven't seen a setting for a shooter like this one before. We shall see...

Gears of War (Gow as we'll call it) is an xbox360 game that's been getting a lot of attention since its release. If I told you the story you might ask why; you're a space marine saving the world from the alien threat, and it's not like that hasn't been done before. But as they say, it's not the tale, it's the teller, and in any case, this game is definitely all about action. Find a wall to hide your sorry backside behind or get it shot off.

At one level, the game really is as good as they say it is, and to cut a long story short, if you're at all into gaming, I recommend it. I played it right through to the end, which says a lot. I suspect that like most people I start way more computer games than I ever finish because the good ones tend to mean such a time commitment, and if something isn't holding my attention it's easy to move on to something new or go back to one I liked more that I've been meaning to complete.

A large part of what kept me playing GoW it was the way it looked; the quality of the graphics was really outstanding on an HDTV. This was one of the nearest things to cinematic that I've seen; the lighting was fantastic, the characters looked solid and well-detailed, the world was intricately realised and fun to look around. Never underestimate the joy of just wandering round in a computer game and checking out the environment for the hell of it; this is partly why something like Second Life has become so popular, I reckon, on top of its social aspect. It has the 'Hey come and look at this' factor, and so does Gow.

Plus I have to admit there was some pretty intense gameplay in there as well; third person shooting has probably never been done this well before. If you don't play games you're probably oblivious to the geek cult of the shooter, so a little exposition may be necessary. Since the dawn of time (in the minds of the cultists, anyway) the way to play shooting games has been from a first person perspective on a PC mouse and keyboard.

Really nerding hard now, there are various reasons for this. One is that the PC keyboard offers more input options than a gamepad or joystick. Another is the superior quality of PC hardware; the PC will shortly be pulling ahead of the graphical power and quality of the latest consoles yet again, if indeed it hasn't already. But the most important is the sensitivity of the mouse; what you're basically doing, at the mechanical level when you play, is to use the mouse pointer to click on a target, and a mouse is much more sensitive than a joypad.

Also, the first-person perspective can help with the illusion of a depth of field so calculating the distance to the target is easier, not to mention the movement of the camera. Because of a combination of these issues, aiming in third-person games is usually either notoriously tricky, or so computer-assisted that you no longer feel you have to try very hard. So GoW was going against the odds technically at several levels, and won out gloriously; it proved beyond all doubt that you can make a decent shooter i) for a console and ii) in the third person.

But I did have some quibbles. For one thing, it goes for a kind of pseudo-realism in the combat; the amount of damage you can take is very unrealistic but in most of the scenarios you're allegedly part of a team, and sometimes at crucial moments the software lets you down. You're meant to be trying to get some grenades into burrows that the aliens are bursting out of, but your team-mates do a lamentable job of laying down suppressing fire. So you die. Repeatedly.

And throw your game controller to the floor, screaming 'Goddammit, give me some fucking covering fire, you bastards'. Now in a sense this is a win for the developers, because that's some serious in-game intensity. But too much frustration like that can mean you stop playing a game, precisely because it's too intense. Too intensely annoying. This isn't a fight you can avoid, like in an open-ended scenario; there's no scope for just slipping by these opponents. You have to beat them before you continue.

And that was the other big issue I had with it, the structure of the gameplay. Here GoW is very traditional indeed. The story wasn't remotely open-ended; you were being funnelled through something. Now there's nothing to say that free roaming environments like in the GTA series are mandatory when you're making an action game; if you've got a story to tell and you want to guide the player through it in a fairly controlled way, then alright.

But GoW didn't really have much of a story; you didn't find out much about your character, who in any case was a complete cliche; grizzled gruff warrior with no discernible personality, and you're just on a mission to plant a bomb to that can foil the alien threat. So it's all a pretty formulaic affair that's always on the verge of narrative incoherence, held together by regular great action sequences (which are fairly scripted, the monsters will always be there at the same points) and wonderful visual style.

It has to be said the all the very best shooters I've played in recent years have been so great precisely because they give you more freedom than this. Far Cry, Oblivion, Bioshock, and Stalker, are all examples of first-person games with a structure that's loose enough to make you feel genuinely like an explorer in a different world; GoW gives you a package tour that you're whisked through. In fact it's more like Disneyland, with replicas of famous attractions rather than the real thing, because so much of the environment is inert. It looks great, but you can't interact with it, so once again the illusion is broken.

Of course fully interactive environments where you can open everything, use everything, and so on, are a tremendous amount of effort to create. They also take a tremendous amount of processing power to run on a computer, and in fact, you could say it still hasn't been done. But games like the ones above are already better at keeping the illusion of it than GoW. Mind you, lots of fans will think this is too picky; if you want an edge-of-your-seat ride through some great firefights and you're not too bothered by plot holes, look no further. If you accept its limitations, nothing delivers like GoW.

Well yes, in the sense that so many of them have been overheating that Microsoft has been forced to admit to a design flaw that may cause any unit to malfunction. But mine hasn't, so far, although it's in a well-ventilated position in a non-smoking environment. The new elite edition (and probably any subsequent regular units they release) should be free of the hardware issues that have bugged the console so far, and that's really the only bar to me advising you, if you have any liking for games and/or digital media, to go out and get one.

For £250 or so it's superb value. The quality of the HD output is a joy to behold; I finally bought a new telly when I plugged it in to my old one that I'd had for nearly ten years and a game wouldn't run because it required a screen with a refresh rate of 60Hz and this relic wouldn't go one wavelength over 50Hz. On my new 26" Polaroid TV (a bit of a bargain itself at only £300 from Curry's) it looks fabulous. There is a growing library of decent games to suit most tastes, and a lot of old xbox games are supported too, so if you are willing to buy second hand (and you should be) you have dozens if not hundreds of titles to choose from.

Personally, I'm enjoying Gears of War, which actually deserved the hype it received when it came out. I'm a self-confessed video game player, but in case you missed it, earth has been invaded by aliens, you're the one man who can lead the counter-assault, blah blah blah. It's not the tale, it's the teller; the plot is standard sci-fi fodder but the delivery is awesome; it's the closest game to deserving the title "cinematic" that I've ever seen on a console, and looks better than all but the latest generation of PC titles. It's hectic, challenging, and addictive; after an initial learning curve if you've only ever played shooters with a mouse and keyboard (or have never played one at all) so need to get used to the two thumbsticks etc., it's also very playable and great fun.

Nor is this the only title I've been impressed by. Top Spin 2 tennis looks like it will keep sucking me back in, as does Fight Night Round 3. The latter in particular is visually impressive; the punches make you want to wince when they land. But both games look like they've got a lot of replay value because of their tactical depth; neither is the kind of game you really 'finish'. You can get literally years of fun out of a good sports sim, particularly ones that allow two players like these do. Of course if you want to use xbox live you can play online too; I don't bother because of all the idiot 13 year olds. Of course they'll beat me, but they'll call me names while they're doing it and I can't be arsed, frankly; I'd rather play with family or friends than get the abuse.

But even if you don't play games at all the thing has it's uses, assuming you already own a PC with XP or Vista. Through the xbox interface, which is very well designed (possibly the best Microsoft interface I've ever used, in fact), you can get to all your mp3s (and have a full-screen visualisation running on the TV, which is impressive), and all your photos, also in fullscreen. I looked at some of the photos taken on our recent honeymoon in Paris which were still on the laptop and they stood up very well; my wife looked almost as radiant as she does in real life (was that okay, honey?) while I was viewing from the across the room on the sofa. It will even stream video, although not in divx format; there's no technical reason for this, it's just Micro$oft protecting their .wmv format which no-one wants to use. And if you want to buy an extra external drive it will even play HD video discs. You can even use it as an instant messenger as well though text input via the remote would be clunky, like texting from a mobile phone; better to get an add-on wireless keyboard if available.

The one frustration was that I couldn't get the media sharing going from my desktop (even though the Zune software package on the PC could see the Xbox and I opened the right incoming and outgoing TCP and UDP ports in the firewall), and I couldn't work out why. But it would work from the laptop, which runs XP Media Centre Edition, not XP Pro like the desktop; perhaps that was a factor. I haven't been able to test with a Vista machine yet but as that has the Media Centre app built in (on Home Premium and Ultimate, anyway), I suspect it would be pretty trouble free. Also word in praise of the controllers themselves; they are very ergonomic, and I can use them for quite long periods without my hands getting sore, which isn't something I've always been able to say about gamepads in the past. Plus the wireless link from the controllers to the xbox is very stable so long as the batteries are full, very important in an intense gaming session.

So, overall, this new version really is a big step forward from the original xbox which I also owned a second-hand version of but never played much even though it seemed fairly sturdy. I partly neglected the original console because my PC kicked it's backside thoroughly when it came to gaming; but on a good widescreen HD-TV with today's games, that really isn't the case any more. The PC is pulling ahead visually again already with the new DirectX 10 standard from Microsoft, but the xbox 360 is still going to be competitive with it for several years to come, and anyway it now clearly comes into the category of 'good enough' so far as the graphics are concerned; the screenshots for GTA IV look fabulous. Overall, the thing is great fun. Buy one. Remember, every time you do, Microsoft loses money :-)