So here's the deal, Moe pulled out a certain ancient and horrible console in the Hyper den. In case you haven't seen a 3DO, it has all of the sex-appeal of a betamax recorder and none of the manners.

We fed games into its maw. Terrible games. In the year we saw games like Doom II, System Shock, X-Com and Marathon there was also this ... thing. The best one, and by that I mean the worst one, was Space Ace. It reminded us of all of the horribles things you can do in game design.

While it looked fantastic, thanks to cute animation from the Dragon's Lair guy, it spent so long looking at them in the mirror that it forgot there was company and it was meant to be entertaining.

The camera angle changed like an MTV videoclip and cutscenes blended with gameplay so you didn't actually know when you were meant to stop watching and start dodging. Beyond that, it would just throw you into situations, give you a second to do something and no hints on what that thing should be. Needless to say that you didn't play the game so much as memorise a sequence of d-pad moves, if you wanted to get anywhere. The horror. It might have been cool in '83 but by '93 it just showed the peril of looking back.

He's my point: for every great game that you remember, there were about 10 absolute shockers. What I love is when people will compare a dog of a game today to an absolute classic and give big budgets and technology lip about it. To quote JT (which, I think, is a first) cry me a river. If you want to see clone games look back to the 80s and 90s. We talk about the lack of innovation now, but how many generic side scrollers did we see? How many text adventures with wishy-washy writing and a love affair with leading you in circles and then telling you “command unkown”?

Last year alone, tossed up Oblivion, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Company of Heroes, Battlefield 2142 and Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (to quote our reader's choice top five). While each of these games have their faults they also offer gameplay experiences that just weren't possible in years gone by, from connected gaming on a massive scale, to intelligent units that actually soldier, to huge worlds dwarfed by stunning sunsets, to companions brought to life not only with writing and voice but expressions and actual affect on the game world.

Before you come to me with misty eyes about the good old days, just spare a moment to delve those repressed memories and dark, 3DO, corners of your childhood. As lame as the lame games of today are, the lame games of yesterday really know how to suck. You know how I know? Because every “games were better in the time that's not now,” gamer has been so traumatised they've repressed them right the hell out of their lives.