Plenty of games are amusing. Not many games are laugh out loud funny. Very rarely will a game go beyond a smirk or giggle and inspire a full on rip-roaring belly-jiggling snort like Grand Theft Auto IV has on many occasions. Within five minutes of ripping the cellophane off of my copy, it had me in stitches.

After a drunken night out with Nico’s cousin Roman, they stumble out of a club. The screen swims, and your previously solid control of Nico becomes a wrestling match with the analogue stick just to get him to stand up straight. Baulking at the thought of walking all the way back to Roman’s apartment (read save point) in this manner, Nico jumps into his cousin’s taxi. Unsurprisingly, controlling a car while under the influence is no easier than walking, and it’s not long before the local law enforcement take an interest. [...]

My first real experience of video gaming came early in my life when my dad treated us all to an Acorn Electron. My dad was always a sucker for a piece of new technology, and the beige beauty had caught his eye a few weeks before at a friend’s house.  His motivation to buy one for the Johnson household was steeled upon the realisation that said friend had a vast library of games which we could purloin through the ingenious invention known as the tape-to-tape cassette recorder.

Thus began my journey through the world of video games. My father had chosen the path and I would stick to it diligently from that day forth. The mainstream wasn’t for me; Johnny Popular could keep his Spectrum, his Commodore 64, the Elk was for me. Further down the road I would shun the Amiga in favour of the Atari ST, turn my back on the Playstation and fling my arms wide open for Nintendo’s 64-bit beauty. Playstation 2? Pah! I’ll have a Dreamcast please!

My friends would always be looking down on me, but I was impervious to their jibes and taunts. Aside the occasional lapse (there were a few exclusives I would secretly covet, but they will wait for a future post), I was more than happy with my lot.

What follows is a potted tour through my gaming past. Each post will be a chronological record of systems owned and the games I most enjoyed on that platform. First up: the Acorn Electron. [...]

Although I’m a big fan of their western equivalents, Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) have always seemed utterly impenetrable to me. My attempts to break into the genre are invariably met with poorly translated Japanese memes, repetitive battles, translucent character design, and many other irksome traits that die-hard fans seem to revel in.

There is a section on my games shelf that I have dubbed the ‘JRPG graveyard’. That’s where Final Fantasy III, Phantasy Stars I and IV, Earthbound and Eternal Sonata are interred, all unfinished, abandoned after ten or so hours of play each. [...]