Something about videogames seems to foster a severe all-or-nothing mentality in gamers. A competitive streak is no bad thing, but to hear most videogame fanatics tell it, anyone who doesn't come in first place might as well not even have tried. It's a pretty cutthroat perspective. Maybe it's just human nature; sports nuts tend to be the same way, and they're all huge, noisy alcoholics (or so the stereotype goes), which makes them even scarier.So it's hardly a surprise that so many gamers love to fixate on who's winning or losing the console race. These days, Nintendo is the favorite whipping boy of the hardcore set: the company is losing, some sneer, because the GameCube fizzled out and lost its lead against Microsoft's Xbox. Any day now, they agree, the company is going to give up and bow out of the console race altogether. Every new corporate strategy is painted as a desperate last attempt; every new system is predicted to be their last.