Do you keep vodka or instead do you keep ice cream in your freezer? Life comes down to mundane choices like that and I can't help feeling that the answers say more about us than we'd like. I had to shift the Absolute Kurrant (thanks comedy double entendre vodka makers of Sweden) out to make room for half a tub of Haagen Daz. Okay, so practical issues came into play; the ice cream can melt and would be ruined, the vodka just gets to room temperature. But that's the thing why do I still have half a tub of ice cream left? Its Cookies & Cream flavour for Christ's sake. Like a third nipple it shouldn't be. There is no 'leftovers' in the world of ice cream. It is sealed and full or unsealed and empty. That's it, binary cold snacks. I am 32, I think this has a lot to do with moving the vodka.

Because my Mum was poor, and my estranged Dad was out of touch, video gaming began as a social experience for me. We had a proper Atari but that lived at Dad's house, so we, my two brothers my Dad and me, played it together. Frazer Edmondson got a Vic-20, Tim Cox got a Spectrum and then Mark Rayson got a C64. If I wanted to play games I had to go round their houses. At the time Frazer was my best mate so I could go visit lots but he got to Scramble and then Matrix and just kinda gave up. He did write a terrific floor-tile matching programme for his mum though, I mean it wasn't a game and you didn't need a joystick but it was a window of hope that Frazer would go on to become that Darling chap and have a Ferrari before he could legally drive. Instead Frazer concentrated on converting a bicycle he'd found. It was pretty damn good that bike too: spray painted 'metallic orange tan' and finished with awesome sit-up-and-beg handlebars. The quick release wheel fixings turned out to be a bridge too far though. After the wheeless post-wheelie landing incident I think he went back to the classic tightened-with-a-spanner solution. The skin grew back on his forehead too. But the real damage was done; Frazer had discovered outdoors, later it would be girls too.

Tim was my rival in the school year. Rival in the sense that we competed to make people laugh. That meant Lunar Lander sessions were always embittered by a competitive taint that makes long-term social gaming impossible. That and the Spectrum was shit of course. His Dad was in the British Transport Police, I think that was why he liked Clive Sinclair. Royal patronage and teary-eyed patriotism, after all the Crown was on Dad's hat and Commodore was owned by those revolutionary deserters: the Americans. Tim also liked that bloke called Lloyd something who sang records. Lloyd Cole? I dunno but it was all a little too affected for me.

Then there was Mark. Now Mark had four things going for him: his C64, a CB radio rig with an illegal mast the size of Blackpool Tower, a bedroom that was more apartment than pre-teenage sleeping pit, and a Mum who was (and probably still is) the best host in the world ever. Frankly it was no contest. Even when my Dad choked out the readies for an Amstrad CPC 464 it was still Mark who had the edge, what with the Amstrad being game-barren. Damn you Alan Sugar and your 'bundled monitor won't tie-up the living room TV' irresistible-to-parents logic. Was it just me or was Alan Sugar a 'special uncle' to editors of Amstrad computer magazines 'oh please, mmm, yeah, like that Alan, mmm nice'? Now, to be honest, the CB thing passed very quickly for me. So quickly that I never even got the Harvard catalogues or went down Tandys to look at a rig of my own. So that ceased to be an issue quite fast. But that Commodore 64 machine just seemed to get better, and better, and better, didn't it? Here's what I remember: loading up stuff by Jeff Minter, or Andrew Crowther and losing two whole days of a summer holiday or weekend. Mark's mum would ensure that we were kept supplied with cheese or curried bean toasties, another mate Michael Tyrell might pop-in too and I'd wake-up after dark on the second day with some fuzzy memory of camels or llamas or a train or some other shit burned on my eyes. Then I'd regret having eaten so much and would cycle the three miles home. In the dark, games fantasies would continue to play me in the form of run-ins with stray pets or cars. Infinite lives? Never, it was three ships or you were fucked. Always was, always will be.

But some time later and then for ten years at least, I lost games. And now, thanks largely to the evil interweb, I found them again. And I realise today what happened. It was the social aspect of gaming. Forums like this one, events like Retrovision and, starting a couple of years ago, Penny Arcade reminded me that games are for sharing. For talking and arguing about, for discovery, for rediscovery. I don't give a monkey's arse about the detail but I do love losing time all over again with my mates on stuff like Super Mario Sunshine and on a million pieces of MAME and VICE crap. The toasties off Mark's Mum are gone but at least now we can drink something stronger than Sodastream and we get to eat those large bags of crisps they had on Different Strokes. This is the essence of Retrovision, coming back out of our solo hidy holes and just playing games with our mates and talking about rubbish. A bit like getting stoned but with games on cassette tape or on machines called cubes that ain't.

I've solved the vodka/ice cream debacle. I've drunk the fucking thing and that, my friends, is why this instalment just tails...

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