There's probably a saying somewhere that talks about how everyone is the master of at least some task, no matter how trivial. They are the best, the god of, say, flicking people with tea-towels. Or perhaps tearing a Minties wrapped to get the longest possible chain.

Some of us of course are lucky enough to be masters at something profitable. Building boats. Singing. Playing games that people pay people to play for some reason, like Quake 3. There are lots of games where being an ubermensch is handy. Dozens of game that allow you to dominate the local LAN, be a tiny god of a likewise tiny dingy basement. And why not.

Me, I was good at a game called Star Control 2. It's a 2D spaceship duelling game and you can still play it today - just click the link at the top of this blog.

Interestingly enough, the original Star Control - or Starcon as we always called it - was the first legitmate legal game I had ever seen for the PC, that came in a real box and all that sort of thing. Everything I'd played up until that point (1990) had been either shareware or, uh, borrowed.

It was a great game. It had a sense of humour, a cool one-on-one campaign mode, everything. But when I was in Year 10 I was talking to some guys at school about how much I loved it, and one of them told me I should try Starcon 2. So I was duly presented with a couple of floppy disks, and I was lost.

This was the ultimate game. Douglas Adams style intergalactic japery, silly alien names, an adventure game, upgrade your ships, discover zany new races and even sleep with some of them (mmmn, Syreen), it was awesome.

But it had a mode called Super Melee, where you could assemble a fleet of ships and take it to the computer or a human opponent. And I played Super Melee over and over and over and over again.

Years passed. High school finished, off I went to uni. And then the same weekend I visited Wollongong to play Quake on the LAN some guys had set up, a friend of mine got wind of my Starcon 2 prowess and told me I should challenge some other kid to a Super Melee. This kid, I was told, was some kind of Starcon 2 wizard. He might not have been deaf, dumb or blind, but he sure could play that Starcon 2.

So off I hied to his slightly musty room and we played Starcon 2. And of course I crushed him, quite easily. Yay for me. My victory wasn't exactly sung to the rafters. There was no ticker-tape parade. But it felt good.

But what felt even better was the kid in my dorm back at MY university who had been riding me hard the whole semester (figuratively, you fools). He was a geek, but apparently I was geekier and that warranted ridicule. He wore his pyjamas to those ridiculously early 0900h lectures, the full bit.

And he lazily challenged me to Starcon 2 and to my surprise he was really good. Really amazingly good at the game. The sweat did bead on my brow. It eventually came down to who had chosen the best fleet for the Super Melee and I was able to squeeze a victory out with a single ship left in hand. I turned to him to say jeez how did you get so good at this game.

"Jeez," he said to me before I could speak, "how did you get so good at this game?"

I shrugged it off. "Oh," I said, "I played it a lot back in Year 10."

The kid stroked his beard. "Let's see now, what was I doing in Year 10?" he pondered. "Oh yes, experimenting with drugs and sleeping with girls."

And with that he turned on his heel and left. There was never a rematch. He was a closet gamer if ever I'd seen one. The way he used the mouse when he played Doom was a classic giveaway.

Oddly enough since that showdown in 1996 I've never had the opportunity to show off my leet Starcon 2 skills. And I just know if I tried to relive those glory days using the Ur-Quan Masters (link, top, click now), some idiot-savant obsessive from Wyoming would kick my arse using nothing but a Shofixti and a Zoq-Fot-Pik.