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Whenever I look out of the window to find that snow has covered the country like a carpet of white dung, my first thoughts are not of some bucolic childhood memory of sledges and snowmen. Nor does it bring to mind whimsical scenes from some classic Christmas movie, where snow is always brilliant white and accompanied by the sound of bells. No, for me, the sight of snow automatically takes me back to the hours I spent in 1989, hunched over my Amiga, carefully traversing a frozen island in Mike Singleton's brilliant Midwinter.

Here are some of the thoughts I've had while playing third-person platformer action Ratchet & Clank, organised into categories:

When I was a bit younger, I had to be told that ToeJam & Earl is something of a Roguelike, because - superficially, at least - it doesn't always feel that much like Rogue. Certainly, it has procedural level generation and random loot placement, but it delivers these elements with bright primary colours and wrapped-and-ribboned gift boxes.

There's a law of writing about games that is never broken. If you ever say any game is the first to do anything, somebody in the comments will sniffily point out that you're wrong, citing something that came out on the Amstrad or similar in eighties, and questioning whether you should be allowed to review games.

Let me get straight to the point: Nintendo World Cup is a football game that allows you to kill other players. You do this by performing a Super Shot at very close range, and it's effective roughly eight times out of 10. Push the magic buttons, watch while the ball performs some loopy multi-coloured firework display, and then wince gratefully as it thuds into your rival's stomach with a sound effect that invokes the Incredible Hulk slipping on a stray rollerskate at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Just because I'm a bit posh doesn't mean I haven't known hardship. I might have gone to a school that had burrowed right up itself for the best part of 500 years, but that doesn't mean I haven't got scars. Technological mistakes know no class boundary. They haunt every family.

I decided it was time to settle the debate, once and for all. It's been the subject of human conflict for generations, with more blood spilled over this matter than the world's religions combined. Unrest in the Middle East, uprisings in South America, and territory disputes within the second Mars colony have all been inflamed by one topic. Which is better, Ratchet & Clank or Jak & Daxter?

Those sex cards, eh? I was determined to collect as many of them as I could. If that meant going out of my way to safely escort a barmaid home late at night, so be it. Convincing a dryad that sex is not just for procreation, that it's fun and can relieve stress? No problem. I couldn't help myself. It was like sexy Pokémon.

There's a comic artist you've probably never heard of, despite his being one of the most talented single-panel creators of all time. A man without whom we'd never have had The Far Side, and all that followed in its wake. B. Kliban's cartoons appeared in Playboy in the States from 1962 until his early death in 1993, and the books collecting his work are worth whatever the second-hand book shop is charging. (He's far more than just some cat drawings, for those who've encountered that side of him.) And amongst them is a recurring theme which Kliban called "Sheer Poetry".

Sequels made over 15 years later are notoriously awkward. The Phantom Menace, Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Plastic-Wrap Aliens, and more recently Tron: Legacy have tainted that which we held dear all those years ago.

As I recall, the demos for Stranglehold and BioShock came out fairly close to one another. I certainly played them both on the same day. It was weird. It was like videogames' past had decided to pick a fight with its possible future.

I can't remember where I was when I was told that my first - or even my last - grandparent had died. I can't remember where I was when Challenger exploded. I can only remember where I was when I found out my mum and dad were getting divorced because dad chose the same moment to park his Citroen Dyane on my foot. (He was probably nervous.)

I'm really struggling to play Marble Madness. And not because it's incredibly difficult. It's just too much. Too much sensory overload, too many childhood memories evoked by a single sprite or sound effect.

It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. I am a very big man. One of my greatest laments about the state of the adventure game is the reduction in interactivity.

Until five or six years ago, I had never heard of Parkour. My sister, a professional in the field of athletic strength and conditioning, first described it to me as something of a balletic aerobic sport with all the complexity and conditioning of a martial art -one used for clambering up the side of a building in seconds, or clearing two-story jumps without any messy bone breaking.

You know that time has marched on when something that everybody did without really thinking finds itself categorised and pinned down by a catchy title. Take "emergent gameplay", for example.

The Longest Journey is my favourite game. It's not the best game ever made. It's not the best-written, although it's up there. It certainly isn't the best example of an adventure game. But it's the game that most touched me - a game that literally changed my life. It changed how I think, an aspect of how my imagination works, and my philosophy. I'm not sure what higher praise could be offered.

Of late, Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the shining princes of my listless, shambling, over-sugared childhood, has started to remind me of the American Tea Party movement. This isn't because Sonic wants to cut federal spending, or because he thinks Barack Obama's an illegal alien sent to the US to kick-start the really exciting parts of the book of Revelations. It's because he's becoming a polarising idea: something that increasing numbers of people either love or hate.

Bit of a twist for this week's retrospective. Rather than focusing on a single title, we've allowed former Retro Gamer editor Martyn Carroll to get all misty-eyed as he recalls a particular era in gaming history. If phrases like Knight Tyme and Kikstart 2 mean anything at all to you, polish those rose-tinted glasses and read on.

At first glance, it's easy to think of Devil May Cry 4 as a soulless cash-in. Between its uninspired level design, confounding camera, and new protagonist who looks almost identical to series' hero Dante, it would seem as if Capcom had drawn too often from the same well. As Eurogamer pointed out in its 2008 review, DMC4 "feels like a high-def re-skin of a 2001 game design". It's no wonder Enslaved developer Ninja Theory has been hired to breathe some new life to Capcom's flagship demon hunter.

I'd never played the Kingdom Hearts games before. In fact, I only really noticed they exist very recently. I'm not sure how that happened, but I decided to put it right by delving into the original PS2 version of the first Kingdom Hearts. It's important to plug these gaps.

It's 1992 and America is in uproar over a fighting game which features acts of digital disembowelment so vivid and nasty that the US Senate holds a special investigation into video game violence. "Too violent for kids?" asks Time magazine. The game, of course, is Midway's gleefully adolescent Mortal Kombat, shocking decent upright citizens with its lumpy decapitations and spine ripping action.

I'm calling a moratorium on boss fights. I've even looked up the word to check what it means, to be sure about that. We need them to be stopped for a while so everyone can gather together and discuss what's going on. I'm not banning them - you can relax. I'm just calling for a hiatus during which some sensible consideration can take place.

I admit it. I used to type swear words into text adventure games.

Crystal Dynamics' first go at the Tomb Raider license must have been terrifying. Such an enormously famous series in the hands of Core, so spectacularly falling to pieces after Angel Of Darkness, Tomb Raider was at once one of the most famous franchises in the world and one of the most despised. Lara overkill combined with the unmitigated disaster of its sixth game meant that it was something of a poisoned chalice that was handed to the Californian developers, and the result is a fascinating combination of fervent loyalty to the series mixed in with some interesting new ideas.

So I ran this guy over. I guess I didn't like the look of him. He gets up twice, but I pop him back down again until he runs out of getting up juice. This causes the police to arrive, two of them. They screech to a halt nearby, get out of the car and then stand still. One stands in front of his police car, which proves a mistake when a van crashes into the back of it, causing the policeman to be run over by his own abandoned vehicle. The other cop reacts by sprinting off down the road, remembering himself, then turning around and running back, colliding with the bonnet of another van and running madly on the spot. The previously squished cop gets up, charges off down the road, and starts shooting his gun at a passing taxi.

Faster, little space-tank, faster.

I absolutely, categorically do not understand what everyone has against Escape From Monkey Island. While I admit I had been horribly wrong about The Curse Of Monkey Island, everyone else is entirely wrong about the fourth game in the series, and it's time for this mad prejudice to come to an end.

Several Christmases ago, I went to Guildford to interview Peter Molyneux. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked him what I thought was a pretty sneaky question in order to get him to spill the beans on his next, as yet unannounced project. "I know you can't tell me what you're working on at the moment," I said, laying a trap so elegant that even a canny panther might find himself caught within its snare, "but can you tell me about the problems with games that you're currently interested in solving?" I sat back and complimented myself on my underhand brilliance. Maybe after this interview, I should apply to the CIA.

Video game genres often end up having stock comments associated with them. You may have said some of these things yourself. "Of course, it isn't as good as Mario," works pretty well if you're talking about most platformers, for example. Then there's: "It's just a spread sheet, really," which is great for sports management sims and some of the weirder, more item-heavy RPGs. There's even: "My back is hurting. I can't feel my left leg," to bust out after a Kinect session. And for fighting games? For fighting games, the classic is: "I'd like to get into them, but they're too complicated. I'm not as clever as Simon Parkin."