We had a report this morning that Nintendo's UK Web site had been hacked. Sure enough, taping in www.nintendo.co.uk brings up nothing but a blank page.

So we contacted Nintendo to find out what the damage was. We got a call back to say the site hadn't been hacked as it doesn't exist. Nintendo certainly owns its .co.uk namesake, but for some reason has decided that there is no point in having a UK Web site.

We know that Nintendo has past its glory days, that it is trying desperately to reinvent the GameBoy and that the N64 is going (gone?) down the pan, but surely it has some use for a Web site? In fact, Nintendo seems particularly uninterested in the UK and Europe, seeing as the GameCube is only expected to reach us next year, when Japan will get it this summer and the US in the autumn.

Why no UK site? we asked a Nintendo spokeswoman. "Well, we only took over the site recently from an agency," she said. Apparently an agency has run it before, but, er, hadn't actually put up a Web site to run. What is going on here? And it would seem that there aren't any plans at present to build one either.

Has the Internet passed Nintendo by? Come to think of it, we can't think of any Nintendo Internet-based news at all. Is this not just a wee bit short-sighted? ®