ELECTRONICS giant Sony kicks off a massive advertising campaign for the PlayStation 2 tomorrow. The message: if you haven't bought one already, you're probably too late.

A worldwide shortage of machines has seen the European allocation of PS2 machines reduced. Anyone who hopes to walk into a store this side of Christmas and buy a console is likely to be disappointed.

The Furby shortage of two years ago, which saw parents fighting over the right to buy a battery-powered toy and people camping out overnight to be first in the queue when fresh supplies arrived, will be nothing compared with the clamour for more PlayStation 2s.

Instead of urging customers to go out and spend £299 on a PS2 this Christmas, Sony will be advertising the fact that its wonder machine has sold out. Desperate customers will be directed to a new telephone helpline that will keep them up-to-date with the latest situation.

UK shops had hoped to receive 200,000 machines before Christmas. This has now been trimmed to just 165,000. Even the original figure wouldn't have been nearly enough to satisfy demand.

Even at a not inconsiderable cost of nearly £300, Sony reckons it will have an installed user base across territories using the PAL TV system (ie. most of Europe) of three million by Easter. That's why Sony introduced a pre-ordering system two months ago. Customers who wanted a machine had to fill out an official form to be sure of getting one. Electronics Boutique, the biggest games retail chain in the country, sold out within days.

So why the massive demand for a games console? Because the PS2 is unlike anything that has gone before.

It is massively powerful (ten times the processing punch of its illustrious predecessor), has backwards compatibility with old software (so there's no need to bin your old PlayStation favourites when you make the move), and, perhaps the ace in its hand, the PS2 also doubles up as a DVD player.

Digital Versatile Disk, or DVD, has been slow to take off in this country. But elsewhere, it has already shouldered aside video tape as the favourite medium for watching movies at home.

The benefits of DVD are many: better picture (twice the resolution of even the best video), better sound (digital surround as standard), no degradation (have you watched those films you taped ten years ago recently?), and ease of storage. And because of DVD's massive storage capacity, many movies also come with added extras such as bonus featurettes (the modern day equivalent of a second feature at the pictures), commentaries and subtitles.

Home entertainment users would love to have a DVD player and, with the PS2, they get one for free.

In Japan, where the PS2 launched earlier this year, shops were surprised not to be selling masses of games but a huge number of DVD movies instead. That pattern is likely to be repeated over here. The PS2 could sound the death knell for home video recorders - and if it doesn't, the recordable DVD that's coming next year almost certainly will.

The only clouds on Sony's horizon at the moment are lack of stock, which could prove useful for the Sega Dreamcast, and the soon-to-be-launched Microsoft console: X-Box.

Sega's machine can't play DVDs. Mindful of this, it has put together a tempting bundle; for the same price as a PS2 you can buy a DC and a separate DVD player. And the first PS2 games titles have failed to live up to the hype. Games like Tekken Tag Tournament look no different to their DC rivals and, in some cases, worse. This may be due to developers struggling to get to grips with Sony's hardware.

Much has been written about the difficulty of implementing anti-aliasing on the PS2 - a technique that blurs the edges of objects and prevents them looking jagged against a background. The PS2 can utilise anti-aliasing but perhaps not quite as easily as the DC, so the first generation software titles haven't been the huge step forward we had been led to believe. Nevertheless, as programmers get to grips with the machine, expect the PS2 to open up a gap.

This is all very well, but what can be done if you desperately want a new games console and aren't one of the lucky ones?

As the shortage is worldwide, there's no real point in looking for a PS2 abroad; in any case, software over here won't play on foreign imports without internal tinkering.

You could buy a Dreamcast. Sega's machine certainly has a wide catalogue of impressive titles, many available for considerably less than the PS2 equivalent. It won't play DVDs, but with the money saved you could buy a dedicated player with change left over for a copy of The Sound of Music on Christmas Day.

Or perhaps you'll be tempted to buy an N64. Nintendo's ageing machine is available at pocket money prices now but with only a handful of new titles due to be released and a new Nintendo machine looming, it must be considered a dead format now.

The alternative is to do what the rest of us have already acknowledged: simply wait until new stock arrives sometime next year.

And for a lucky few, the wait is almost over.