Our first Christmas alone was quieter than normal but we still had a great time - speaking to both our families over Skype, opening gifts from each side and then going out to see the Tintin film, which I'll write about later. As a sign of our age, our main gift from Whitney's family was a very sleek coffee/tea/hot cocoa brewing... system (is the only word for it), and taking advantage of the way that we haven't had any neighbours for the last year and a half, I gave Whitney the karaoke game for the PS3.

The thing I was most looking forward to was something a little smaller, in the form of Iron Savior's new album - I'd been doing my utmost to stop myself just listening to the whole thing on Youtube before Christmas came, but when ordering it, Whitney found out that the import version came out on the 27th, two days too late - so she found the album cover and back online and mocked up a fake CD case for me to open, with a disc-shaped note inside saying that the real thing was on its way. My waiting has been prolonged for a few more days, but I'm hoping that that will make it all the more worth it!

She also got me the original Etrian Odyssey, which is a difficult thing to find now - after a lot of searching, she managed to find it listed as new at a sane price. The trouble is, well... she found it on a site based in Thailand, and it has to be said that of the two items I just mentioned, the fake Iron Savior album is the more convincing one by some margin. The cover of the Etrian Odyssey box looks like it was done on a home bubblejet, the cartridge label is on card with glue that despite its best efforts doesn't quite stick, and when you turn on the DS with it in (which it must be said I only did rather warily), it boots up into an alternative OS with a file selector.

The site - which I don't want to link to, but it's called Games Stock - isn't actually the comically unconvincing mess that I had expected, but they showcase 160-game cartridges that obviously can't be official (or legal). They also have the cheek to say that the reason they don't provide the manual is to give their customers the best price possible - which at $35 must be a pretty bleeding enormous profit margin, seeing as all they do is download a ROM on to a writable cartridge. This thing has about as much sense of disguise as Robo-Ky does when attempting to masquerade as Ky Kiske. Actually, it's got the sense of disguise of Michael Kiske trying to pass himself off as "Ernie" in Avantasia. Commodore Norrington said that Jack Sparrow was the worst pirate he'd ever heard of - he obviously hadn't laid eyes on this lot, otherwise he'd have had Jack in ninth or tenth place at least. And so on.

However, I was sort of delighted when I looked up the strange "R4DS" bootup screen online, and found some detail of what it was - peeling back the "Do not open" label stuck unconvincingly across the top to reveal that what I had was a writable DS cartridge with a miniature Flash drive inside. I've spoken to ravenworks about it, and he gave me a several page long description of its memory management and how it has seven or eight different buckets that you have to slide around to write in in a system that can only have been designed by Professor Layton. I can't see myself seriously writing a game for it myself because the audience is quite small, but it might be something that I take the chance to play around with, having been given the unexpected opportunity.

I get the feeling I should probably report the sale of laughably fake cartridges, but I'm not sure where to.