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At last year’s AADL-GT Grand Championships, when the final battle got down to two players, one of them (Duck) intentionally drove into a fake item block, losing his last balloon, throwing the match, and guaranteeing that he would win not the Grand Prize, engraved iPod, but the then-only-weeks-old Nintendo DS. Given the iPod’s formidable cache (and higher dollar value), this was a surprise.

This season, instead of having set prizes, I decided to have the final place determing the order the winners would choose a prize from the prize pool, to avoid a situation where someone would throw the final match. Given that this year’s final surprise game was Pong, watching someone throw a match would have been utterly anticlimactic. Duck was victorious this year, taking first prize, and choosing the PSP (interestingly enough, Duck has since announced that he plans to trade in his PSP for more DS games).

The second prize winner was Jerry, a wildcard, and he barely stared at the table holding a brand-new 30gb iPod (with video) for half a second before snatching the Nintendo DS Kart bundle. Now, admittedly, these guys are gamers, but he could have sold the shrink-wrapped iPod on ebay and gotten a DS and 5 games for it. However, for the second year in a row, the appeal of the DS is apparently irresistable, even when it’s right next to Apple’s glistening cash cow.