Damn, that thing is gorgeous. We’ve been expecting updates to the iPod shuffle and mini for a while now but Apple seem to have cross-bred them and created something that has the best parts of both of them. They’ve made it absolutely tiny, and given you the choice of cool white and sexy black. In making it flash-based they’ve also given a real benefit to picking it over the standard iPod – it might have a relatively small amount of storage but it’s significantly smaller (unlike the mini), is entirely skip-proof (unlike the mini), and has a screen and enough storage for a decent amount of music (unlike the shuffle).

Despite the fact that I’m an Apple fan I’ve actually never owned an iPod and at one point was downright hostile towards them. I have an iRiver iHP-120 which I still think is a far better player for the same price – driverless operation, Ogg Vorbis support (far better than both MP3 and AAC), longer battery life, FM radio, line-in recording, voice recording, better sound quality, etc – but I’ve recently gone off the idea of a complete music library in a slightly bulky player and have been looking at a possible flash player. The 4GB nano looks ideal for that and I think it also works as a pretty huge USB flash drive. Much bigger than my current 256MB drive, at least.

I’ve been planning on paying a visit to the Shinjuku Apple store in Tokyo which is supposed to be one of the, if not the, biggest Apple stores in the world (on a related note, check out this video of the queue for the opening of the Ginza Apple store). According to the Japanese online Apple store the 4GB model costs the equivalent of £135 compared to £179 that it costs here, so something tells me I might be buying it there.

A week from now I’ll be twelve hours from catching a bus to Heathrow airport to catch a plane to Paris where I’ll catch another plane to Tokyo and spend ridiculous amounts of money. Sitting on my desk right now I have ¥193,000 (£955 in real money) and a clean credit card just waiting to be blown on inordinate amounts of PSPs, games, DVDs, CDs, and alcohol. I’m getting really excited about it now.

We already know that we’re going to be hitting Akihabara almost as soon as we get there early next Thursday, then the next few days are going to be split between TGS, Sony’s PS3 event, and general Tokyo stuff. The Studio Ghibli Museum is booked for the Monday and we’ll probably spend a day in Kyoto (via the bullet train). After seeing the piece on Japan on a budget on BBC Departure Lounge we’re now thinking of visiting Edo Wonderland, which is a kind of a feudal Japan village populated by actors playing the parts like the “living museums” that you find across America. The best part is that if you book in advance you can hire costumes including ninja ones, complete with katana.

If you ever feel the need to complain about the possibility of next generation games costing $55-60 or more, just take a look at this. The prices are Canadian but even so it works out as $80 US for a SNES game and $420 for a Saturn, and even more if you take ten years of inflation into account. It only goes to show that my constant assertions that they’re doing their best to give a decent deal with the current generations and that we pay a lot less to play the latest games are true.

I’m going to be picking up my Xbox 360 launch games (which apparently and sadly might not include PGR3) for £50 each, safe in the knowledge that I’m not having to pay the £60-a-time that I willingly handed over for a new N64 game.

While not quite up there with ClearPlay (seriously, is Ong-Bak even a movie with the violent parts taken out?) in the idiotic-and-secretly-evil stakes, I’ve just seen via Edge Online that there’s another new secure system to do the difficult and tedious things like raising your children for you and stop the kids playing those evil games for more than they should. Game Guardian houses a PStwo console and, through a PIN system, lets you set how long it can run before the system gets powered down, probably without warning.

It’s convenient because even though the kids are still playing GTA, it’s OK when they can only play it for an hour. Edge point out the obvious frustration of being shut off mid-mission, but imagine the fun if it decided to shut down during a save and completely corrupted the memory card, losing all progress from all games. That would make Little Johnny much easier to live with, wouldn’t it?

I really like both the PSP and the DS, but I have to admit that I’d probably choose this over either of them if the price came down a bit.

I remember reading about this guy in EGM (I think) and being impressed by his VCSp and PSp, but playing Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, and Skies of Arcadia away from a TV would rock unbelievably. That and having a portable SNES, of course. Nonetheless, the “portabilizers” (not my term, thankfully) remain an interesting little gaming subculture that’s always worth checking out as they’re getting ever more ambitious and continuing to come out with some seriously ambitious projects. The PSP might be comparable in some ways to the PS2, but these guys actually have portable PS2s! I can’t wait to see how the portable GameCube works out.

Back on the subject of the DC and portability, I know it would be nice to have some good new titles but the PSP seems like the ideal chance for Sega to give some of their underappreciated Dreamcast games a new audience. The power of the DC and PSP seems pretty comparable and when the PSP is crying out for AAA titles Sega have a nice pool ready to go. When it needs a good RPG can you go any better than Skies?