Bear with me. Yes, I know I do this for a living, but it doesn't necessarily follow that I know what I'm doing. Sweet baby Jesus; if I knew what I was doing then I'd probably be publishing a string of top-selling magazines or producing some big-budget title for Electronic Arts. As it is I'm a semi-employed wordmonger, currently filling a chunk of a quiet Friday afternoon by doing this when I should be compiling an hilarious page of fictitious celebrity PS1 games. (If you can think of an hilarious fictitious celebrity PS1 game, by the way, do let me know. I'm almost comedied out for the day.)

But yeah. As I was saying. I'm not altogether sure where I'm going with this, but with a bit of luck it'll become apparent when I get there. There are quite a few people who think I have the best job in the world. I get to play games and get paid to do so. And I get to inflict my opinions on everyone else.

(Which has its moments. I was just interrupted by a PR lady who was passing through the office and came over to say thanks for a review I did a good few months back. One of those games that most mags didn't get excited about but that I, for whatever warped reasons, really liked. If you like racers and have an Xbox, do take a look at World Racing. Ta.)

Games and games journalism have always been pretty much inseparable for me. Blame Crash. I'd been playing games for a few years before it appeared, I'd bought the odd C&VG and had Popular Computing Weekly delivered, well, weekly. I liked computers. I liked games. But it took Crash to ignite something deeper - here was a magazine that positively dripped passion for gaming. A magazine created by true enthusiasts rather than some catchpenny unit-shifter put out to test the waters in this new 'video game' market. Crash - and later Zzap, which I bought before I even owned a C64 - became my bible. Those two magazines pretty much set me on course. "What? You can play games and write about them and get paid for it? That'll do me!" And like, I suppose, quite a few of us here, they resulted in me having a weird set of teenage role models. Some of whom are now my friends. Others at least know who I am. And I still have a quiet chuckle to myself on those mornings when I say hello to Bob Wade as he turns up to catch the same bus as me into work.

(And yet it surprises me on those rare occasions when I'm confronted with my own micro-celebrity status. RV3, and I was in Starbucks getting some sugar for my overly-large cup of coffee, and this kid came up to ask me if my name was Jim and if I worked for Gamesmaster. Which was nice but kind of strange. We don't do this to get recognised. We - or at least I - do it because it's what we're (hopefully) good at.)

It was the magazines that brought the games to life for me back then. Because, let's face it, the games themselves weren't always brilliant. The anticipation of them, though... That's what the mags delivered. Thinking about it right now, I can remember the layout of Crash's Jack the Nipper review better than I remember Jack the Nipper itself. So many games exist in my mind as page layouts, because I'd pore over the reviews only to find that the games themselves couldn't hope to live up to the heaped plaudits.

(So it was then, and it remains thus. But what can you do when, at the end of the day, your commission requires you to award a game a percentage point that has to fit in with all the previously-awarded percentage points? I say, just read the reviews and ignore the numbers.)

So it was reasonably inevitable that I'd get into this line of work. Well, you'd think so. What actually happened was that I drifted away from gaming altogether in the early days of the 16-bit era and didn't drift back into it until the early 1990s. And it still took me a year after slacking my way through five years of higher education (I managed to balls up the second year by spending far too much time working on student magazines) to finally get into this line of work.

(And I did it with such embarrassing ease. So much so that I'm not going to tell the story here. Not yet. Maybe I'll post it in the middle of a completely different thread one night when no-one's looking.)

Some people talk about the games that fired their love of gaming. And yeah, there were certainly a good few great games, and I'm not going to win any particular prizes for originality by naming my favourites. Because the names that sparked off my love of gaming were names like Penn, Rignall, Jarratt and Mangram (At which point I have to say: Newsfield, you complete CUNTS!). Not forgetting, when they picked up the pen to show us how they did it, the likes of Braybrook, Walker and, of course, Minter.

So. Yes. I appear to have sort of got the point across that I sort of figured I might want to convey. In some roundabout kind of way. Think of it as an introduction. And now I realise that I competely forgot to mention the bit about getting a letter published in Zzap; it's for the best, really. And I like I said, it's not as if I particularly know what I'm doing...

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