1 of 15 Binatone Pong
Following Atari's success of copying table tennis, everyone else decided to copy Atari. It was left to veritable British stalwarts Binatone to provide me with my first taste of gaming. Can't say for sure when, 1978 or 1979 probably. What I can be sure of is that looking back, the colour scheme was hideous (brown?!), the paddle controllers no bigger than a bean and the lightgun about as effective as a chocolate teapot. But it was my console and I loved it. Sadly Mr Binatone went the way of many things back then, a victim of leaking batteries into the unit rendering it null and void. However there was another machine just around the corner...

Recently I actually spotted the exact model at a boot fair. It was complete and in good condition though unboxed, but the guy wanted £15 for it. I urmed and ahhed about it (seemed a bit pricy), and said I'd come back in a bit and haggle for it if I hadn't bought anything else. Returning twenty minutes later, someone else had bought it. Ah well, maybe next time.

2 of 15 Atari 2600
Feel the woodgrain on that. After the death of the Binatone Pong console, this suddenly appeared out of nowhere shortly afterwards to delight and amuse. It is also the only time my parents actively joined in playing games, as the hours spent at each other’s throats with Warlords will attest to. Given the price of cartridges back then, then thank heavens for the local video shop. Not only did they rent Betamax tapes (yes, my father went with that choice), they also did 2600 games for the princely sum of £1 per week. I think I used up a load of pounds in renting games over the time of owning the console.

3 of 15 Sky Diver (2600)
Playing this game at the time always reminded me of the classic "He jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute" ditty. The result was quite the same if you didn't open your chute in time. There was something undeniably evil about letting the little men exit the plane, waving their arms about in panic and then hitting the ground with a suitably satisfying crunch. Sod burning ants with a magnifying glass, I was committing wilful acts of atrocity indoors instead! The two-player option was also easy enough for my little brother to play the game as well. Speaking of which now...

4 of 15 Maze Craze (2600)
A simple yet cunning game, get your robber (a coloured thingy) through the maze to the other side avoiding all the police (other coloured blobs). As the mazes were seemingly generated randomly, it meant almost unlimited variety. It also ended up in almost unlimited frustration as well, demonstrated by my brother one day when he got so pissed off at the game, he ripped it out of the console (with the power still on) and threw it across the room. Cue one dead cartridge. Our mother had to go back into Woolworths and pretend it has just stopped working and get an exchange.

5 of 15 Star Wars (arcade)
When I was ten years old, I wanted to be a Jedi. Whilst I may have grown out of that aspiration in the intervening years (though many people still cosplay that role), I haven't lost my love for Atari's coin-op. Despite being one of the last vector games of the classic era, it still maintains its hold over people today. The sleek look, the frantic blasting action, the speech used, it is one of the best films made into a game ever. Possibly the greatest. You can't play it properly either without the yoke controller, which means I am going to need some serious cash to buy one for myself in the future.

6 of 15 Commodore 64
It's time to introduce the beige breadbin of doom. After selling on the 2600 because of the sudden lack of games for it (aka the "crash"), this appeared one Saturday morning in the downstairs room. It has gone on to define, mould and essentially be part of me for the last twenty years or more. There are so many memories wrapped up in 64k of goodness that there is nary enough space to begin starting to recall them all. The only one that needs to be mentioned concerns fast loaders, those little bits of code that made waiting for a game slightly less painful.

Anyone who had a C64 will probably know of the Novaload. It isn't the quietest of things now, and for a short while (approximately two minutes) whilst loading Daley Thompson's Decathlon for the first time, we were wondering what the hell had gone on with the computer after the FOUND message came up. Took a little while longer to figure it out. Probably about the same time I started getting pissed off with all the American music playing whilst US Gold games looped the spools.

The original C64 I had lasted until the mid 90s until it finally died (cue raiding the board for spare parts), but considering it had survived numerous fuses blowing, scores in the circuit board, at least reroute hack job with wire on the circuitry and a vase of water poured over it accidentally, it did quite well. The original cheese wedge power supply only burned out a year or so ago, and is sorely missed for warming your feet in winter.

7 of 15 Impossible Mission (C64)
Denis Caswell is a genius, although he denies it. Impossible Mission is one of those games that can suddenly grab you from nowhere and terrifyingly refuse to let go. I was introduced to the world of Agent 4125 and Elvin Atombender via one of the covermount tapes ACE magazine used to do, and I was hooked from the off. If you need an example to illustrate just how to do a platform game properly, this is it. Everything about it is meticulous and deliberate, and if you make a mistake, it is always your fault. Sure it isn't actually impossible, but you'll have one hell of a time getting to that point, and most importantly, still have fun and want to keep on playing it after beating it to do better, faster, smoother. This is for sure one game where learning the skills, finding the nuances in the platform layouts and droids, and just where to jump will make you a better player. And I still fire it up every so often to have another battle of wits against a digital foe whose opening speech has become common knowledge amongst any retrogamer, let alone those with C64s.

8 of 15 Dropzone (C64)
Longer-term readers of Rodent may know of my penchant for this Archer Maclean Stargate-inspired shooter. Defender and Stargate are the daddies for bi-scrolling shooty goodness, but shock horror, in one or two ways Dropzone is actually better (oh my god, the sacrilege!). The control method is as good as that laid out over several buttons, you need only the joystick to perfectly control the jetman about to shooty the bad guys and save the girl, I mean scientists. Having to deliver them back to base is a great addition twist to the gameplay as well. It's one of those games I could play for hours on end and never get bored because it is always challenging, always requires full concentration and can and will kick you when it gets the chance. Now I wonder if Archer will ever get back to producing that limited run of Dropzone arcade machines he's been mentioning for years now...?

9 of 15 Smash TV (arcade)
I never saw a Robotron arcade machine back in the day, hence I missed out whilst others were experiencing something special. Thankfully that little blot on the gaming CV has been rectified in the intervening years, but not before I was introduced to double joystick wielding goodness in the form of the seminal sequel Smash TV. Which is essentially why it gets the nod here ahead of its compatriot. It certainly gave me an indication of what was to come when it is nigh on unforgiving and relentless in its pursuit of killing you in any way possible.

Long before MAME came along, at a computer show probably in 1990, some company had the bright idea (possibly Ocean as they got the license to convert) of sticking one of these machines at their booth. On free play. Not one to turn down a free opportunity to complete the game, my brother and I probably spent the next hour and more destroying all the levels, reaching the pleasure dome and entering the obligatory rude letters on the high score table at the end. Needless to say after that, I went back to the game to try playing it "properly"!

10 of 15 Flying Shark (arcade)
Playing games at times can be a fine line between enjoyment and sadism. No prizes for guessing where this machine happens to lie. I much prefer shooters where the essence is on destroying everything in front of you and just surviving as opposed to worrying about chaining, dodging thousands of bullets and weapon management that many shooters today require. Eat lead or die pretty much. Why my life became tangled with Flying Shark I not entirely certain, though passing the time whilst on a ferry for a school trip to France certainly registers as one of the earliest memories of battling giant tanks and aircraft. It certainly has a way of kicking you repeatedly, especially when down, but for some bizarre reason I just want fight back and kick its arse in return.

11 of 15 Super Nintendo
I stayed with the C64 through the 16-bit computer era and didn't upgrade, though I did get to play games on the ST and Amiga quite frequently at mates' houses. Call it loyalty, call it flying in the face of progress, or call it from the fact that 20-25 pounds for a game (and no one I knew was pirating them round my way) was just a bit too much to afford on pocket money. So when my brother's birthday in 1992 came around then we decided to make the leap and pester our parents into buying him (aka us) a SNES for his present. It wasn't quite Bart-type nagging but it did the trick.

And we were happy for a while. But the lure of importing games had been with me before then (via getting stuff for the C64), and we did the same early on. Until Super Mario Kart was released and none of the currently available converters worked because of the DSP chip, it made the connectors wider. Stuck with an unplayable game we were desperate to play, the decision was made to make the leap and buy some imported hardware. Spotting a semi-dodgy advert in the local paper for a shop in Wimbledon that sold import gear, full speed was made for their location and after a bit of a haggle and root around (a story in itself), we left the shop with a US SNES, pads and power supply.

Having heard that the US SNES could play Japanese games if you removed the tabs inside the slot, that was the first hack job performed on it. And then we played the hell out of Super Mario Kart for the next few months. I've still the SNES sitting proudly about in the room, though the ravages of time have turned the plastic fairly yellow, a known problem with the material Nintendo used. Hopefully once I get everything moved out and set up, it'll get used more than it currently does. And no need to go paying more money to Nintendo for Virtual Console games.

12 of 15 Zelda: Link to the Past (SNES)
The greatest game ever made? Perhaps. To me, it was sitting on top the big heap of classicness the last time I voted on a "best ever" list. Zelda is perhaps Nintendo's most important franchise today, mores than Mario, and this game is what laid the foundation for much of the design and format used since. There is just something intangibly beautiful in everything it does that is it hard to know where to start to describe its power over people. It really is the perfect game in my eyes. I almost didn't consider buying it either, until I borrowed it from a friend and immediately fell in love with its perfectness. I eventually bought my own copy at the GamesMaster NEC show, but more about that in a moment.

13 of 15 Street Fighter 2 (SNES)
The arcade machine was like a ten-foot wide pollen laden tart of a flower attracting all and sundry to it. Whilst in the guise of someone at school doing their A-levels, we were allowed out of the grounds during lunchtime. So there was myself and my best mate Dibs scurrying along to the local arcade to play this just about every day. So when we heard that Capcom were converting the game for the SNES, we both got excited, even though at the time neither of us actually owned the console (because, if I recall correctly, it hadn't come out in the UK yet!).

Come May 1992, and there was a SNES in our household. Couple of months later, after we'd done our exams and were waiting for the results, I get a phone call. Apparently the Super Famicom version had just come out the day before, and Dibs was shouting down the phone he'd managed to grab a copy and knew I had the console. Out of the door at Mach 10 and across the few miles to his house, where we spent the next twelve or so hours playing the game non-stop. My thumb has probably never taken as much damage before or since. The game literally was the summer for me.

I lost touch with Dibs after the first year of university. I did Google his name once years back to see where he had ended up; I knew he was doing medicine, so it didn't surprise me to find he had qualified as a doctor. Though the only references I could find were in Sweden of all places. I have him to thank for a lot of SF2 battles and honing my skills.

14 of 15 Sonic 2 (Mega Drive)
Some of you may know that I managed to wangle my way on the GamesMaster TV show back in 1993 and won my challenge to earn the adulation of the crowd and a gold painted stick in a box. No, the challenge wasn't on Sonic 2 before you get ahead of yourselves here. The series in question, number three, was the one hosted by Dexter Fletcher, so you may think I didn't get to meet Dominic Diamond. Or get verbally abused by him either.

What many people maybe don't know is that there was a GamesMaster show at the NEC just before Xmas the previous year. Needless to say there were plenty of gaming challenges held under the auspices of the double-entendre master, and one of them happened to be on Sonic 2. DD called for volunteers and I was lucky enough to get picked, to play against someone who knew the game like the back of his hand. I hadn't actually played the game up until this point so it may have appeared to be an uneven contest. Except the challenge was on the ring collecting 3D bonus round and god knows how but I waltzed all over him. My prize was a copy of Castlevania IV for the SNES, which I still own today. So in Sonic 2 goes for helping me win something!

15 of 15 Cardfighter Clash (Neo Geo Pocket Color)
Pure digital crack is one way of describing this game. One of the greatest handheld phenomenons to come out of SNK is another. For those who do not like CCGs (Customisable Card Games), this may just persuade you that they are worthy of your time. The number of hours lost playing this game and its sequel are too many to count, and all I am missing is really sufficient play against another human; I've hardly managed that in the six years since its release and that is sad. Maybe if SNK can get wi-fi working on the upcoming DS version there will be a chance to address the balance. Playing against other people is really where CCGs shine, no AI can ever replace that feeling of hope or sadness when one move can decide the game.