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The phone rang with a shriek that would wake the dead before trying to sell them double glazing for hell. I answered. It was Tom Bramwell, his words entering my ears as if a lava flow of rage.

What's more cunning than Metal Gear Solid boss fights that broke the fourth wall, more intricate than the labyrinthine plot twists that bound the series to obscurity, and maybe more sincere altogether? Try Hideo Kojima's frantic Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner.

SSX 3 was ostensibly the first game in EA's legendary snowboarding series to feature online play. I say "ostensibly" because whenever I bothered to string an ethernet cable across the room and connect my PS2 to the EA mothership, my reward was an empty lobby. Nothing could have been more fitting. SSX 3 is not a game about community or friendly competition; rather, it shows us the bliss of achieving greatness in solitude. It was among the last games of its kind.

Here's my impression of David Cage brainstorming ideas before making a game:

Fantastic, isn't it? Doesn't get the credit it deserves. What a classic.

You've read articles in which men of a certain age get misty-eyed about Deus Ex before. Throw an unwanted packet of soya food into the internet, and the first thing it will no doubt strike is an article bent-double around just what makes Bob Page tick.

I'm trying to think of more hoary old subjects to discuss than comedy in games. Let me see. How about DRM? I could be trying to talk to you about digital restrictions management. Or whether girls play games? Come on, that's more overdone, right? What about whether the PS3 is better than the 360? Okay, so in this context, everyone's now happy that we're talking about comedy in games, right?

Football! Eh? Don't we all love football! The way they kick it with their feet, the lovely round shape of the ball, the haircuts. It's a game of at least two halves. And have you seen when they score a goal? Gosh, everyone gets so excited about that. What a time.

A chap called Daniel Garner accidentally drives into a truck on his wife's birthday and they both die. For a game that's heavy on spearing zombies to walls through the face and giggling, it's all a bit melodramatic. Trapped in purgatory, the only way to rejoin his wife in heaven is to become an agent of various angelic and demonic creatures - one of whom has her boobs half out. His mission? To kill wave after wave of the hell creatures marauding towards him, then to move forward a bit and trigger another spawn. It's the sort of stuff that Milton would have come up with if he'd had greater access to Nuts magazine and methylated spirits.

Guybrush Threepwood does not have an American accent. He just doesn't. He has a cool British accent. Case closed. The more LucasArts attempt to cut and paste the 'official' vocals of Dominic Armato over Threepwood's voicebox, the further they are straying from the vital template that exists inside my head. In the days before CD-ROM, I forged this character's voice in the more central parts of my brain, and ever since its creators have done their utmost to undermine it. The same goes for Stan the used ship/coffin salesman. Stan doesn't sound like that in my head either, and his voice should accentuate more whenever his hands point directly upwards.

DuckTales, oo-oo! Tales of derring-do, bad and good luck tales, oo-oo! D-d-d-danger, watch behind you! There's a stranger out to find you! What to do? Just grab onto some DuckTales, oo-oo!

Golf has never been my sport. I tried it once. You have to hit the ball really hard. It just felt wrong. I couldn't bring myself to hit anything that solid such a long way. Someone could get hurt! Clearly, crazy golf is more my sport. (I still believe I'm going to get rich with my idea for full-scale crazy golf. Actual windmills for the windmill. Convert a hillside into a clown's head. It's the best idea any human has ever had.)

Why Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation? Tomb Raider I is loved with nostalgia, Tomb Raider II is the best in the first run of the series, Tomb Raider VI (The Angel of Darkness) has the novelty value of being awful beyond explanation, and VII, VIII and IX have all been absolutely superb. So why IV?

I honestly didn't know it was going to be brilliant.

Soldner never, ever disappoints. There are many games that you can rely on for offering you a fun time. But there is none other (that I've encountered) that provides so much endless, improvised hilarity. It is, without question, the funniest game ever made.

My poor immortal soul. The erosion began in 1997, when I was only 19 years old. Which seems... weird actually. The GTA games are only 13 years old? Surely the original came out in about '93?

When Square (as then was) announced that the next game in its headline Final Fantasy franchise was going to be an online game, it wasn't a popular decision. Bluntly, the kind of people who played Final Fantasy games had pretty strong ideas about the kind of people who played MMORPGs, and they weren't entirely charitable.

In the genre known colloquially as Diablo Clones, Titan Quest holds a special place for me, although oddly not so much for the game that was released, but more for what happened behind the scenes. Something that suggests we're trying to be God. So, since it's Sunday, why don't we see if we can find a berserk route to a teleological interpretation of videogames, via remembering a visit to Iron Lore during the game's development?

The God of War series has popularised a vision of Greek mythology that could be best described as totally freaking epic. In Kratos' classical world, no beast that stands less than 10 stories tall can be considered a true challenge. Every story point is a heaven-rending clash of the titans: The loser falls to the ground in a thundering collapse that makes all 5.1 channels of your fancy speaker system explodes with sound, and the victor gets to preen in heroic cut-scenes. The stakes are always as high as they can be, at least until they're higher.

The idea of taking an established classical story and reworking it with a darker mood will be familiar to anyone who's enjoyed books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The formula is simple: take a classic - one in the public domain for royalty-free convenience - and inject a modern twist at opposition to the tale, then wait for the cash to roll in.

Come with me now, as we attempt to picture the year 2010. Let your mind stretch out and attempt to perceive the thrill, the technological adventure. What manner of life will we be living? And most importantly, what sort of computers will we be working with?

Some people are deliberately iconoclastic. Those people tend to be annoying idiots. Other people just have weird taste. Those people are also likely to be annoying idiots.

These retrospectives are rapidly becoming confessionals for me. Here's this week's: I don't much care for Indiana Jones.

My theory that certain nationalities are historically, temperamentally, or technically suited to producing certain types of simulation holds up well enough in the tank and aircraft arenas (all the best WW2 armour games do come from Germany and the Ukraine, the finest jet recreations from USA, UK and Russia). In other areas, however, it starts to look shaky. For instance, if you want to visit the birthplace of the greatest Stalking-And-Slaying-Ungulates sim ever made, it's not Scotland or North America you must make for, it's Brazil.

ERIC! 200 LINES! GET TO WHERE YOU SHOULD BE!

There's a subset of thirty-something males who rarely get coverage on nostalgia TV, or even get a word in at pub table reminiscences that are routinely hijacked by the Sinclair Spectrum mafia. As such I think it's high time the nice, polite and extremely middle-class boys whose parents bought them a BBC Micro for unspecified educational purposes took a stand.

Lothar von Richthofen, the Red Baron's little brother, is a schweinhund. Half an hour ago he challenged me, the Black Stork's highest scoring and least dead ace, to a one-on-one duel over the Western Front. I thought twice about accepting, but eventually decided to go teach the young puppy a lesson. When I arrived at the rendezvous point, what did I see? Only Lothar's crimson and yellow Dr.I flanked by the bobbing planes of two of his cronies. The cunning Fokker had brought backup.

I absolutely blame Myst. I blame it for everything. Everything bad about gaming, every hateful puzzle, every stupid cut-scene, every dreadful piece of writing. I don't care if any of it is Myst's fault, I still blame Myst. I blame it for the recession, I blame it for X Factor, I blame it for the war in Iraq.

Let me tell you why my driving to Sawbridgeworth in the summer of 1994 was one of the best decisions of my gaming life. It's not without relevance, I assure you.

In the winter of 1991, my occasional friend and full-time next-door neighbour George hit the bacterial lottery, coming down with an astonishingly rare case of lyme borreliosis, also known as Lyme disease, also known as Bad News, George, This is Going to Hurt. You know you have Lyme disease when you start to get strange circular rashes, when they give way to soreness, fever, and malaise, and when these elements finally develop into shooting pains, memory loss, and, very occasionally, facial palsy.