He did have some things going for him, as all kids on toy-starved council estates do. You’ve got your Scalextric kid, your Space Hopper kid, your Subbuteo kid; even the fateful skateboard was its owner’s major selling point. And Thomas, well, his USP was a Commodore with a cartridge slot, in those days as futuristic to us as, I dunno, Johnny Five or something. Problem was, he didn’t have many games, and those he did have were just retarded versions of things we’d already played. Somehow, though, with all the furtive resourcefulness of a teenager seeking out porn, Thomas had snapped up and stashed away a copy of Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top o’ Fun – a grotesque and mildly diverting circus minigame compilation which took on whole new dimensions of significance when hidden in the bottom drawer of a Formica computer desk.

But it was too much for us. Sneaking into his house was like a video game all in itself – the shrill mum, the antsy shushing, the screeching sirens at the slightest unsettling of the sterile atmosphere – and even on arriving in his bedroom the negotiation bonus level was a trial beyond any reward, Thomas with his fear-wide eyes locked on the door beyond your shoulder as you pleaded with him for a wee shot, just a wee shot! In all our fruitless friendship I never got further than the first level, which circumstances lent a tension equivalent to operating a launch control station at NASA; and as he fumblingly prised the cartridge out of the slot I noticed how damaged he was by the sheer bright cleanliness all around him, much more so than ever any of the rest of us had been by the dirty disrepair of our own houses. The blinding lightbulbs all one hundred watt, the walls were blank and white, the surfaces stark, symmetrical and bare. Even the very table edges were sharp where ours were round and worn. And I would be glad when we were caught, shuttled off down the narrow stairs, the door slammed tight behind us.

Poor bastard. He never stood a chance.

The reason I mention this is because I was reminded recently of an old sports management sim for the Spectrum called Grid Iron II which, as far as I can remember, was a £2.99 screensaver consisting of a repeating image of zombie spiders parading around an otherwise static stadium, interspersed with flashing, subliminal messages exhorting the viewer to “DEFEND THAT PLAY”. And I was too scared to turn it off because it was so wretchedly, self-sustainingly dull that it seemed to me more like a human being than a computer game, as if I had just inadvertantly loaded my Spectrum 128k up with the personality of a sad fucking bastard and if I so much as looked at the reset button the tape deck would hiss and chase me, snapping, down the stairs.

I am guilty of trying to end everything -conversations, anecdotes, reviews, routine toiletry purchases- with some sort of South Park-esque “YOU, the reader, have learned something today!” coda. I doubt anyone ever believes it. Instead I should probably just let everything tail off as it always does, with the bland, unsatisfying hum of “Umm…” fading off into silence, like some absurdist, beret-wearing play. No hugging. No learning. Umm.

The ball came skidding out to me on the right wing, heralded by an aural avalanche of “Man on!” Opening out my body to caress the ball to a halt on the inside of my right heel, I hesitated for just for a second as the full back, a 19 or 20 year old kid, crept in on me, before suddenly I burst past him, moulding my body fluidly around his desperate attempt at obstruction and leaving him struggling in my wake, only my slipstream keeping him within touching distance. On the touchline to my left as I pelted past came a cry from the coach.

“Done him for pace, Thomas!”

I could almost have stopped dead and wept, because it is years since anyone has said that to me and, chances are, I will never hear it said to me again. For I was quick, once. I remember -what do I remember?- demanding justification as to the stange tactical usages of me by my basketball team, and being completely mollified, deeply proud actually, of the shrugged explanation “It’s because you’re faster than us.” But year by year I get slower and slower, my pace retreating deeper and deeper like an aging prizefighter’s punch, my memories of Road Runner-like vapour trails now so dusty that wiping them off for inspection is an episode in snorting and choking. And the only reason I am able to write this is that I don’t really believe it, not really, I can’t imagine ever being 52 and dynamically power-shuffling from one penalty box to the other, I can’t even imagine being 27, to be honest.

It was when I was 18 and had already forgotten everything I’d ever been taught about Maths that I realised Life was not the linear structure of XP Points and levelling up that I had hitherto taken it to be. No, no such steady progress from “Mostly Harmless” to “Elite” for me; instead I was like a polar bear on a disintegrating ice floe, every piece of which floated away, irretrievably lost, as soon as I moved my foot from it. Including my capacity for apt ursine metaphors. And I keep casting around to find out what new abilities have replaced my old lost ones, flicking through status screens and inventories for some scant sign of meaningful improvement, but finding all across the board only red numbers and dropping line graphs and decline, decline, decline.

This is what I didn’t like about Might and Magic, frankly. Zelda and things like that, you could just flash about in the sheer joy of exploration, slinking about the ghost-infested graveyards at night and jumping off waterfalls, and nobody said anything. With Might and Magic, though, there was always the implication, the nagging recollection that any time spent simply navigating its beautifully rendered and imagined world was merely money in the bank for Atrophy, the delight of discovery forever marred by the approaching half-coconuts of the apocalyptic Horsemen. Clip clop, clip clop.

Fuck sake! I am getting old enough fast enough as it is, without the help of some withering on-screen avatar, my own personal JPEG of Dorian Gray. Too much realism, that’s what it is, people coming home from the unrewarded grind of work to the unrewarded grind of World of Warcraft. I remember when I first got The Sims 2 and didn’t eat or sleep or go to the bathroom for about two weeks. I can laugh about it now. In thirty years, I’ll probably weep.

I think that I am one of the cleverest and most well-read people around. You’ve probably noticed that I think this. It’s not difficult to think you are, or even to be, the smartest show in town when to be high-brow, as this world goes, is merely to know the names of the books you ought to have read. (Meooow! -Ed) It is not hard to spread and smear even a little learning, like jam, over the bready whiteness of one’s reputation. And people believe it because they are not interested enough to disbelieve it. So, there is my character in this piece; smug and smart and ever-so-pretty, accomplished like an Austen heroine. Enter stage left! A villainous, moustachioed, aristocratic foreigner; as per usual.

This one in question was an English teacher down doing a couple of months of supply work inbetween terms at his public school. Having immediately alienated himself from the sympathies of the school staff by being too clever by half, he flatteringly fixated on me as the only worthy recipient for his two months of erudite conversation and private tuition, two months during which I had my ass handed to me on a semi-daily basis.

I once played Jonathon Power, then the world number one, at squash. He did not try very hard, let me keep up a rally or two, even gave me a point, but still made me acutely aware of being stretched to the very limits of my abilities and found wanting. It was not like that with this teacher. I would still be reaching for the rabbit in my magic hat when he would blindside me with an author I’d never read, deflect my feeble ripostes with the Last Word on Orwell or G.M. Hopkins, and then, oh my, then the gloves were off! What followed was like a bugged and broken version of Mortal Kombat, an unbreakable, neverending combo of multi-hit Fatalities during which my only avenue for intercession was in deciding whether to come down face-first or arse-first on being sent spinning up into the air again. I remember the exact moment when my mind’s referee stepped in to call it off, the unanswerable observation that the best storyteller in any language was Isaac Bashevis Singer causing me to sink to my knees like a vanquished video game character with a despairing croak of “Oh no.” Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Lessons learned. Humility, acceptance, healthy handling of self-doubt, and one other. In all the time that we were talking, no-one ever seemed to realise, looking on, that I was being beaten like a bad dog, BAD dog! with a rolled-up newspaper. All suggestion was to the sincere effect that that sure was some high-falutin’ dialoguin’ going on there; and over time I realised that to the bystander, the eavesdropper, the pay-per-view crowd eagerly tuning in, there was no meaningful distinction to be made between what I was saying and what was being said to me; it was all like some supremely complicated finishing move from the WWE which is so intricate that you can’t tell who exactly is doing what to whom, only that it looks impressive and Jim Ross just shouted “Ooh, that’s GOTTA hurt!” So there it was. Not only had I been comprehensively pasted in my preferred field of human endeavour, but I had also discovered that most people were so monumentally uninterested in said field that they didn’t even realise I had taken said pasting. Much soul-searching.

The only thing I have ever been good enough at to be really good at -I mean, world championship good, if people had cared enough about it- was Sensible World of Soccer. What vast swathes of my adolescence were spent slicing open opposition defences with shuriken-sharp little passing triangles whilst listening to Sportsound on the radio! Elton John and The Who should’ve sung a song about me, I was that good. But no-one cared. The sad fact is that other peoples’ superiority tends not to be a source of inspiration but rather of helplessness and resignation. I do not understand at all how all those guys are better than me at the guitar, or painting, or Halo 3, so I don’t want to do any of those things anymore. And so, day by day, fewer and fewer people wanted to play Sensible World of Soccer until there was me, only me, champion in a world devoid of challengers.

Devoid of challengers. My heart is heavy that the only way I can think of empathising with people who are good at something is by recollecting my prowess at an old computer game. But at least, in the end, I can, y’know, I see what it must be like to travel eternally in search of someone who has sense enough just to recognise the incarnation, let alone to be a worthy adversary for it. No-one was ever worth my playing them at SWOS; yet I was always scared that someone would be. The twin horns, in short, of Life’s central and most vexing dilemma:

1) What if I never meet anyone good enough for me?
2) What if I do?

To begin with one pound was enough. For that I could have ten goes of just about any game in the arcade, and I’d have to have been a pretty pathetic sort of character not to have made that last for the Saturday afternoon hour or so that my mum was in the bingo hall around the corner, even without factoring in all the other time-dwindling pleasures of just being there; the cashier’s conversion of that chunky little brass pellet into a handful of the silvery fish which, every now and again, came cascading down from the one-armed bandits in the front parlour; the proprietary, preliminary stroll between the glimmering rows, the satisfyingly sticky carpet holding your feet a moment in front of each individual cabinet; the occasional jostle for position when some Grand Master was in attendance, nibbling for a good view of even just the tidy piles of 10p’s which established his rights in perpetuity; the unspeakable joy of finding one last coin in the corner of one’s pocket! And we hadn’t even got round to playing anything yet, that last of most joystick-wrenching, button-pummelling delights! How to describe it? To me, relatives visiting from abroad meant getting to play the Bubble Bobble machine at Glasgow Airport. I wish it still did.

Still, nothing lasts forever, and it was Street Fighter II that ended it all, really. So overwhelmingly popular that the owners quickly realised they could easily charge 20p a game to play it and any other new games, suddenly prices had doubled all across the board whilst my meagre hourly stipend remained the same. The contemplative walks between games grew longer and longer still, the mournfully quiet jingle in my pockets lighter and lighter as I considered all the angles. To continue or not to continue became a serious moral dilemma; to admit to my pauperish position by continuing to play the now antique 10p games seemed inconceivable. Add to this the continual concern that even my occasional games of Street Fighter were likely to be curtailed by the jarring chord of “HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!” and my subsequent beating and elimination at the hands of someone who was better than me because he had more money to play more often, because games were becoming increasingly sophisticated, because it was no longer enough to be good at them generally but to need to be good at each one individually. Times were bleak, my friends; many was the day I thought about getting out whilst I still had money for a Beano and a Refresher Bar. So what changed things? Well, what pretty much always changes things.

There really were no girls in the place, never ever ever, because girls did not tend to play games and boys who played games did not tend to have girlfriends and the arcade itself was fairly dark and dismal and not really a cool place to hang out in any case. So when, one day, whilst playing Street Fighter II, a girl came up to drop her challenger’s money into the metal slot, I was as surprised by the gender of the opponent as I was gratified by the prospect of extending my playing time by a couple of minutes at someone ELSE’S expense, for a change.

Properly, I should lose. It should be like one of those movies where the big, boorish brute is reduced to tears by the heroine’s astutely applied armlock, only with her reaching into his pocket and chucking his last 20p down the drain whilst so doing. It is what people expect, and I am loath to disappoint. In the event, however, I beat her with such consumate ease that I was almost sorry I hadn’t made it last longer, tried to eke another half-minute or so out of the rare occasion of my ascendency over another. Much to my surprise, given the demonstrably massive disparity between our abilities, the girl drew out another 20p. And lost. And again. And lost. And once more! And lost. And so it went on for the remainder of the hour: and, as it happened, every Saturday afternoon thereafter for the rest of the summer.

She never got any better. Despite my precautions always to have another 20p in reserve, and my constant fear that she would grow good enough to beat me, she never did. But nor did she ever get fed up with it, no matter what, whether enduring the oppressive humiliation of death by a thousand kicks at the feet of Chun Li or the borderline cheating of being pinioned by E. Honda’s hundred-hand slap: every time the next twenty pence was as inevitable as the next defeat, every time my own twenty pence spun out over thirty, forty minutes of successive beatings. And you know, in all that time we never even spoke to each other, nay, scarcely even looked at one another. I remember looking once to find that she was pretty enough for me not to be able to bring myself to look again. It was like that.

I was never guilty about the money – she seemed to have plenty of it – nor really about winning all the time, but in my more lucid and introspective moments I felt something like sorry for her, every Saturday giving up hours of her time and pounds of her money and possibly even whole measuring-sticks of self-esteem (not that I’d have understood that then) without a word or even a look of acknowledgement both of us were too bashful to give. And for what? Love, or whatever you call it when a face leaves such an imprint on your soul that it feels like an unfillable hole that’s just been there for ever and you know that there’s a tremble in their loveliness that you’re the one to fix.

And Street Fighter II? It was good. But you already knew that.

Chaos is a great game. A lot of the time, when I tell you about this game or that, it is not in the sincere belief that there is any genuine mileage left to be dredged from playing it. I may as well recommend to you a cup of mead or a crossbow: all very good in their day, no doubt, but much superceded in ours. Chaos, though? Chaos is still playable. Chaos is still played. And not in a spirit of irony either.

Briefly then: Chaos was a game of turn-based strategy in which eight wizards were dropped into a 12 by 9 square arena with a handful of randomly selected spells. With a few exceptions (such as Gooey Blob or Magic Fire, which were immediately and cheerfully launched into the centre of the arena), most of the spells summoned up one or another from a standard bestiary of fantasy creatures, orcs and dragons and hydras and the like. If you successfully used these to kill all the other wizards before the time-limit ran out, you won the game. If not, you didn’t.

Is that it? I think so. You didn’t even need eight or, indeed, any friends to be able to play: part of the fun was naming all the computer-controlled wizards after your acquaintances and watching as that girl you fancied blew up your worst enemy with a lightning bolt before herself getting eaten by an bear, the stuck-up cow. Perhaps most intriguing of all, and certainly most indicative of the game’s peerless strategic structure, was the natural devolution of each match into the three classically distinct game stages. The peripheral skirmishes of the opening, with everyone desperately scrambling to avoid being killed by a magic bolt before the game had even started; the brief bloodbath of the the middlegame; and finally the fatigued, arm-heavy, rope-clinching endgame, with the Mexican stand-off of three eventually giving way to the methodical plodding-after of the weaker wizard by the stronger, the uncertain prospect of the Damoclean draw hanging dimly over the heads of all concerned.

The only real problem with Chaos was one induced by the relatively unsophisticated nature of Spectrum games. The extremely tiny technical capabilities of computers at that time contributed massively to the immediacy of the gaming experience by making it virtually impossible for the CPU and RAM to keep up with anything more than what was happening, to whom, on that screen, right now. Planning for long-term gain was therefore virtually unknown to us. The idea of being retroactively punished for previous bungling boggled! But remember that Gooey Blob/Magic Fire you unleashed at the beginning? Oh yeah. Right.

By the end of the game the fire/blob reliably occupied about 80% of the playing area, dividing the screen into two or three scarce slivers of free space in which each wizard paced around alone, watching as the scourge scarfed up his creatures like fucking Tic-Tacs, unable to do anything but wait to find out how many sole survivors would share the tie. And it was somebody’s fault! Whole new vistas of moral agency and responsibility unrolled like carpets before our eyes; metaphysical manifestos of cause and effect presented themselves; and all that we could do was sit there. And wish. That we’d been eaten. By a bear. Stuck-up cow.

Our other friend had not stopped to let us catch up, and was now a good six or seven yards ahead. We trailed behind, making up ground despite ourselves. It could not have been long, but it was long enough for us almost to have forgotten, when the pebble, presumably not far from terminal velocity, dropped with a bone-shattering PTOC! square into the centre of his bequiffed bonce. There was a long, pregnant pause as he stopped dead, anguish and astonishment battling for supremacy. He considered all his options: then, clasping his hands suddenly to his pulverized pate with a strangled squawk of incomprehension, ran off screaming.

There are three principal reasons why I am forever missing out on other peoples’ pop-cultural references. First is my habitual shunning of anything that other folks like enough to talk constantly about. “It’s becoming popular?” said Isaiah Berlin, “It must be in decline.” Second of all is my unwillingness to admit to lacking any kind of contextualising knowledge or, indeed, any knowledge of any variety which is clearly possessed by my interlocuter. Thirdly, my growing resignation to the fact that other people talk rubbish, and my complete lack of surprise or interest at being unable to decipher their seemingly random babblings. No, hold on, I’m not finished yet. Fourth: why should I have to know who Rob Schneider is when no-one I speak to knows who directed City Lights? And eleventh: even if I DO know who Rob Schneider is, do I want to be dragged into the macabre life-in-death of his admirers by admitting as much?

Pop-cultural references are the Masonic handshakes and red ribbons of the initiated. They are also what I fall back on instead of proper conversation when I am lazy or bored or see no advantage in expending fresh material on the current audience. They are the stock footage in an Ed Wood movie, convincing and contextless tanks and gazelles dragged down by the surrounding dreck. Somewhat less honourably, they are ways of amusing myself at the expense of oblivious others. Seinfeld, Frasier, Futurama, all are grist to the mill of my desire to derive enjoyment from even the most unpromising of circumstances; but old habits die hard, and of all my conversational crutches it is perhaps Monkey Island on which I fall back most often, a battered veteran bouncing back onto the trusted ringside ropes.

To return to Isiah Berlin and the inversely proportionate relationship between something’s popularity and its worthiness. Truer now than ever, now that anything which so much as breaks even at the box-office is automatically fast-tracked for three sequels and a spin-off show. Every last drop of affection, and every last penny it equates to, is shaken from us as from an upside-down piggy bank, and all in the guarantee that every Little Mermaid movie will be still worse than the last. But computer games are different. They have to go on trying to get better. It’s no good trying to sell us a Super Mario game that’s graphically (or anywise) inferior to the first one; it won’t take, fellows! And this, I think, is why the most iconic and long-lived fictional creations of the last two decades have been characters from video games.

Take the Monkey Island games, for instance. I was 10 when the first one was released, 20 when the fourth and so far final installment came to pass. These games signpost the intellectual stages of my growing up as surely as the diaries of Adrian Mole. None of which really tells anyone why they should play the games if they haven’t already, but I’m not sure that I can.

Remember the Mega-CD, when Full Motion Video in video games first became a plausible reality? There was a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers game at the time which was paradigmatic in its attempt to arbitrarily shoehorn FMV into video gaming. It was basically a murky, grainy episode of Power Rangers randomly interrupted by cues to hit A, or X, or Z NOW in order to continue: it was, to all intents and purposes, like watching a faulty DVD. And there’s an extent to which Monkey Island was like that. The reward for solving a puzzle was not a whole exciting new gaming experience but another piece of slightly interactive dialogue and a cut-scene or two. A new map and a piece of music. Which you had to cycle through about eleven floppy discs to get. But it was real. It was actual. You’d never been to these places before. And it was so good that I’m too embarrassed to tell you how good it all was.

Punt of Evil. An infallibly reliable technique in any video game (esp. sports) which instantaneously converts a seemingly disadvantageous situation into an overwhelmingly favourable one.

Gay Header of Champions. An infallibly reliable technique in any video game (esp. sports) which invariably results in the scoring of points by one player without any avenue of intercession for the other.

Is that aw you kin DAE?! Cry, often peevish or ill-natured, traditionally favoured by recipients of the above.

The first full-priced video game I ever bought with my own money was FIFA ’95 for the Mega Drive. £34.99 it cost me from the now defunct Dixons across from the now rebranded John Menzies. £34.99! I could hardly afford that now, let alone then. Bloody hell! See, that was the thing about video gaming when you were a kid; you couldn’t afford not to like any game you bought. Thirty-five pounds was not a sum of money you were likely to see again any time soon. Just William-esque meditations about whether to spend it on the metaphorical equivalent of Coconut Kisses (taste nicer) or Gobstoppers (last longer) were purely academic, because whatever you bought was going to HAVE to last you, regardless of your inclinations on the matter.

Not that such metaphysical speculations were likely to be inspired by FIFA ’95, uncontroversially excellent as it was. Button-hammering, end-to-end mish-mash which was not much like real football as it was, but certainly like real football as it seemed to our youthful eyes, what probably separated the FIFA games from previous efforts was the presentation of the package: the pre-match head-to-head comparison, the smooth segue of goal-scorers’ names, the action replays! All of it, in other words, much more like watching footie on TV than actually playing it, and we played football ourselves often enough as it was, so that was just fine. So it was ironic that watching football on television was not only FIFA ’95′s inspiration but also its downfall.

1995, you see, was the year in which millions of us had watched, slack-jawed, as an amazing 50 yard lob in the last seconds of extra time had won the European Cup Winner’s Cup for Real Zaragoza. Suddenly playground pitches everywhere were buzzing with the cries of “NAYIIIIIIIM!” as shots from the halfway line, the penalty box, the car park lofted high and hopelessly wide; to score from anywhere within 20 yards of the goalmouth was suddenly ignoble and ignominous, whereas to score from anywhere beyond was carte blanche to tack on the emulatory yards up to the prerequisite fifty. Oh to be a goalkeeper in those happy days, when life was spent in perpetual pursuit of bouncing, wayward swipes, and you invariably returned with the ball under your arm only to find another one nestled snugly in the net and your next-door-neighbour-but-one prancing and screaming “Fucking NAAAAAAYIIIIIIIIM!!!!” thirty yards away.

But what happens on the field doesn’t stay on the field, and copycat serendipities were not limited to doon the pitches and up the park. No, from Kick Off 3 to Sensible Soccer, ISS to Dino Dini’s, any video game which had a “lob” button was apt to the same use and misuse as the centre-circles of our everyday. But it was a craze which would have died out of its own accord. In most games, because of the simplistic programming of goalkeeping functions, scoring a fifty yard lob was literally impossible. In FIFA ’95, however, not only was it possible but, in fact, foolproof.

The spot was just in from halfway, tucked in on the right touchline. (Which was, as it happened, precisely the position from which Nayim actually scored his goal; not that anyone would ever have disqualified a successful effort on these grounds, of course; never dare to drag the pursuit of goalscoring greatness down to a game of fucking Horse!) Once you got there, and lobbed to a smidge beyond the far post, and curled the ball back towards the goalmouth, nothing was left but the hilariously dispairing dive of the goalkeeper and contemplative selection of the celebratory mega-mix of sounds prompted by the hammering of buttons, honks and fireworks and screams of “GOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAALLLLL!” accompanying your opponent’s appreciative breath of congratulations: appreciation which would become even less vocal as time wore on. Because it was a friendship-destroying trump card to have, this, particularly when you only used it as needed, particularly when it was over hours and days and even weeks that the twos and twos and twos of last-minute lobbed winners finally accumulated in your opponent’s leaden brain to a heavy four.

There is a book called “The Goalkeeper’s Revenge”. I have not read it in quite some time: but its concluding words, if there is any justice, ought to be “Fucking NAAAAAAAAAAAYIIIIIIIIIIIM!!!!!”

As you can imagine, the crux of the game was the delivering of letters. (The villagers who you encountered would sometimes issue you with poorly punctuated requests for succour and sympathy which -unlike real life- you couldn’t simply ignore because -just like real life- no-one else would talk to you unless you did them.) Emerging from the post office with three letters and about 20 minutes in which to deliver them, your task was to direct Pat to his van and then proceed to potter leisurely up and down the cul-de-sacs and cobbled streets of Greendale, looking for the flashing doors through which to thrust the expedient epistles. It sounds simple, and it was- the time limit was so expansive as to admit of no real anxiety in the player, and much of the gaming time was spent in reflective equilibrium, rolling gently down along the gently rolling roads and occasionally indulging your childish need for excitement by performing some exhiliarating feat of unnecessary daredevilry, like ‘reversing’ or ‘turning a corner’. It was absolutely wonderful stuff, sedation just one shade away from euthanasia, eroding youthful enthusiasms and ambitions and replacing them with the soft, barely-pressing impulse for comfort and cardigans, warm beer on the pavilion and the stately shuffle of a quiet cricket game.

Tight tapestries such as these are only ever one loose thread away from total unravelment.

To deliver a letter, one drew up the van alongside the door of the intended recipient and pressed the ‘Fire’ button, sending the bulletin in question drifting in a straight line from the side window of your van. This could be a little awkward, as the van was a cumbersome beast which it was difficult to accurately position, and missing the door involved getting out of the van, going to retrieve the letter, and -for some reason- taking it BACK to the van with you, in order to try throwing it again. This was a little irksome, but once one had grown used to sidling right alongside the intended door, it ceased to be a problem. Squeezing up close to the gaping letter-box, -not difficult, given that most of the hedgerow-bound boulevards were scarely bigger than your vehicle- one pressed the fire button and watched with incredulous horror as the envelope ejected itself from the OTHER side of the van and straight into a puddle.

“No problem!” you’d smile gamely, “I’ll just get out of the van, retrieve the letter, go back to the van, turn the van around so that the door is on the CORRECT side of the van to receive the letter…..”

But you can’t turn the van around. The road’s too small.

“True. Alright, I’ll drive off and find an area that I can turn in, THEN I’ll come back here and….”

The nearest space that’s big enough to admit of your turning the van around is MILES away. And even THEN you’ll need to reverse ALL the way back.

“I KNOW THAT! DON’T YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a letter to retrieve.” Prod. Prodprod. Prodprodprodprodprod.

And THAT’S when you realised that you hadn’t left enough room on the driver’s side to get out of the van.

Seething with rage, you’d drive off down the road, reach the crossroads, perform the intricate and awkward set of manouvres required to turn the van around (All the more awkward for the fact that it wasn’t always apparent which end of the van was the front.), reverse ALL the way back to the site of the dropped letter only to find, true to form, that it was GONE, leaving you with no option but to return to the postmistress and have all your lengthy explanations rebuffed by the sinister expostulation “CUP OF TEA PAT” and a portentous reminder of the ever-ticking timer whose fearful presentiments of unemployment you were now powerless to avert. Driven mad by grief and rage, even the dignified exit of vehicular harikari was denied you by the game’s “Easy” setting; your last, bitter thoughts, as you wobbled down the main street at 15mph in a vain attempt to escape the Post Office’s jurisdictional radius while time was yet on your side, were that if, like Paperboy, all the houses had been on the same side of the road, all would have been well.

No doubt the more sadistic of you hope and expect this little story to be prologue to my getting home and finding out that my mum had spent my hard-earned pocket money on groceries or soft drugs. Not so. I tell you this in order to emphasise that the basis which underpins this entire review is my fanatical devotion to all things Ghostbusters. The extrication of this game from my adoration of Doctor Venkman and company is impossible- you must take both or neither. That understood, let us continue.

Based on the movie rather than the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters puts you in charge of the fledgling paranormal investigators just as they set up their own company (no Winston Zeddmore here, kids), handing over a sum of money for you to invest in the parapsychological paraphernalia of your choosing- ghost traps, PKE meters, containment units, and, of course, Ecto-1 itself must all be purchased before you are allowed to progress to the ‘map’ of New York which will be the nerve-centre of your gaming experience. In one corner of the screen, a readout of the city’s PKE level- in the other, an account of your financial status. It is on these two bases the game rests; in order to have a chance of saving New York City and, probably, the world, you must accumulate a certain amount of money (Quite why is never adequately explained) before the PKE activity in the city reaches a sufficient level for the gateway to the other dimension to be opened in Dana’s apartment building- conveniently located at the centre of the map. Raising the necessary cash allows you a shot at averting the disaster- otherwise, YOU LOSE!

Earning the money is a simple matter of busting ghosts. When a building flashes, it means that a ghost sighting has been reported- if a building turns pink as you pass it, it means that you’ve picked something up on the PKE meter. Either way, you go into the building, spot the ghost, lay down the trap, and arrange your two Ghostbusters (Only two Ghostbusters participate on any individual job) such that their proton beams force the ghost to within range of the trap. If the trap doesn’t get the ghost, then the ghost gets YOU. Simple stuff. Capture a ghost, get money, caputre a ghost, get more money, miss a ghost, get slimed, capture a ghost, get money, return to base to empty your traps, capture a ghost, ad infinitum- or, to some, ad nauseum.

I fully accept that Ghostbusters is a very limited game. You’re only ever doing one of three things- looking at the map, driving Ecto-1 to a ghost sighting, and capturing a ghost. Nothing else happens besides. The Stay Puft Man occasionally threatens to make an appearance, but is easily circumvented if one gets to the right place at the right time- otherwise, nothing can be done as he stomps through an apartment building, an action for which YOU are inscrutably held responsible and fined accordingly. The Keymaster and the Gatekeeper can be seen meandering around the map but can’t be interacted with, only serving to alert the player as to when he should go to Dana’s apartment for the final showdown (In case the scrolling “GO TO ZUUL” message isn’t explicit enough) by heading there themselves. The accumulation of outrageous sums of money is ridiculously easy, meaning that the player hits his fiscal objective about 5 minutes into the game and is forced to wander aimlessly until Zuul shows up- to make up for this, the final showdown is sickeningly unfair, the player attempting to sneak two of his three Ghostbusters under the bouncing Stay Puft Man and through the door via a pernickety system of ambiguous pixel-collision detection which seems to posit an alternative spacio-temporal reality bearing no relation whatsoever to the Spengler/Door/Marshmallow man triangle depicted on your screen. All the busts take place outside the same building, and involve the same ghost, and even crossing the streamers merely results in a dubious message claiming that your backpacks had conveniently shorted-out at the last moment. The complete and utter lack of variation in all elements of the game rendered it closer to unpaid work than fun to most people- to me, I freely admit, it is a disease by which I am overcome even to this very day.

If you never wanted to be a Ghostbuster, you will find this game repetitive and pointless. If you DID want to be a Ghostbuster, you will find this game repetitive and pointless. But if you wanted -and still want- to be a Ghostbuster, and spent most of your childhood playing this game in lieu of fulfilling that wish, then you will like Ghostbusters. A lot. More than it befits your reputation to admit.