Pink PSP and DS Lite put on a pedestal for Pink Friday

Blame Sony and Nintendo. Normally we like to walk our own path here at Pocket Gamer, but when one megacorp copied the other to choose 27th October as the launch date for pink versions of their handheld consoles, our tiny-corp thought it'd be fun to join the party.

After all, the older writers here can remember when you kept your gaming fetish as secret from the opposite sex as your under-the-mattress magazines. Nowadays you're as likely to find a woman in a bedroom promoting handheld entertainment of the electronic kind as anything seedier.

Alas, she'll generally be in an advertisement targeting men. There's been a lot of hot air spouted in rarefied industry circles about attracting women to games, but the fact is there are plenty of games for those who can get past the barriers. It's the advertising, the packaging and even the experience of shopping for a game that still seems designed at times to put women off.

In fact, probably no one has done more for the cause of female gaming than Amazon.com. It's almost as if it's women who have to hide their secret gaming vice these days, as we found when we tried to interview some for today's launch. On that score, making a fuss with a pretty coloured console doesn't seem a bad way to 'out' all those female gamers.

Krystyna's article also mentions a few female-friendly games sites out of the dozens in existence – a valuable resource in a world where one writer's witty aside is another's sexist stereotype (sorry for any we've perpetrated today). It takes all sorts, which is something most of the industry women we interviewed were keen to stress too. Just as one male gamer may like first-person shooters while another gets seasick playing them, so a one-colour-fits-all approach isn't going to push every girl's buttons.

Hearteningly, plenty of women have already bought this generation of handheld consoles – there's a near 50/50 split among the sexes for DS Lite in some territories. Our quick profiles of the pink PSP and the pink DS Lite then are really just meant as an introduction for women who've not indulged before.

Buy a black PSP and paint cult symbols on the back with correcting fluid or scar the case of your DS Lite with a Stanley Knife if it takes your fancy. We hope no women will feel pigeonholed to play pink-or-nothing by today's hardware launch, although some are bound to feel patronised. If you do, please stick around Pocket Gamer when normal service resumes, and let us know if we do anything that pisses you off.

Last but not least, much of our site is dedicated to mobile games coverage, so we've done a quick recap for women (and any men visiting for the first time) who want to get into games but aren't ready to buy a piece of hardware for the privilege. Mobile games are the ideal stealth introduction to the pastime: everyone thinks you're texting, but you're really playing your first driving game, or flirting and chatting up little computer people in a game like just-reviewed Miami Nights.

On Monday we'll take the pink decorations down and go back to our everyday world of black and white gaming. If you're a woman who stumbled upon us for the first time today, we hope you'll stick with us.