1 of 14 Tandy Pong
My first taste of gaming! The Tandy Green Screen. For some reason this lived in the loft and I was always on at my mum and dad to retrieve it and let me play with the rifle or the motorcycle throttle attachment. The most fun was to be had playing all-comers at Pong ('tennis') though, and using the front-faced dip switches to shorten my opponent's bat just as the ball was getting to them...

For some reason people didn't like that.

My parents threw it in the bin when I was still young, claiming it was broken. I'm still not sure I believe them.

2 of 14 Vic-20
Along with the Green Screen, the Vic-20 belonged to my brothers - there's a large age gap inbetween me (youngest) and my middle brother, and then only a few years between him and my eldest. Piracy was obviously rampant in those days but as a six-year old it just meant more games for me and for that I was happy. I played them all - well, all of them I could get loading, even the fruit machine simulators.

We only had about eight or nine actual purchased games, and it felt like a real treat when I did play them - I have incredibly fond memories of hitting SHIFT+RUN/STOP and waiting for Crazy Cavey, Rock Man and Arcadia to load.

It was also my first, and last, foray into programming. I tried to code a version of Outrun for the VIC, having played it in the arcade on one holiday to the seafront. The program contained about six lines of BASIC, one of them being '30 A$=OUTRUN CAR'.

It didn't work.

3 of 14 Atari ST
We had a loft conversion at my parents' house. Until he moved in with his now wife, my brother lived in said loft conversion - the roof was about 6ft off the ground and the room was HUGE. I used to invade whenever possible and one day noticed a grey lump that hadn't been there before, a catchy tune coming from the telly and a weird green dragon on screen. Being used to the VIC it was unlike anything I had seen before in the home, and somehow managed to persuade my brother to let me use it while he was out.

It was good to see that loading times hadn't decreased at all. My love affair with Rainbow Islands began here though, until we discovered that we were missing a disk 2; and again, much like the VIC-20, I spent countless hours going through badly-labeled disks after exhausting the stacks of retail stuff just to see what was on them.

I've got an ST in the loft these days. I just haven't got the time for it now; I've tried via emulation too but I just don't think anything really compares to being sat in the very top corner of your parents' house in the height of summer, curtains drawn, just wondering what comes next.

4 of 14 Sonic the Hedgehog
I think after a while my brother got fed up of me camping out in his room, and with the reluctant blessing of my mother one birthday, took me down to Toys R Us and purchased a Sega Megadrive. For me! It was a dream come true - my very own console, which came with Sonic the Hedgehog as a pack-in.

We very nearly took it back, too. When playing through Green Hill Zone my mum noticed a hissing sound coming from the telly - we had no idea what it was, other than it started and stopped randomly. It took us a good amount of time until we noticed that it was actually the sound of the waterfalls in the background.

I was in love.

5 of 14 Scott and Bungle
Scott lived just around the corner from me, and had an Amiga and a miniature snooker table. We used to play basketball together at my house before I got a bit too overzealous with slamdunks when I was tall enough to reach the hoop, and ripped it off the wall. I was always terrible at snooker and not much better at what we used to play on his Amiga - although in one epic week off we completed an entire season of Jaguar XJ220, finishing second and third in the driver's championship and winning the manufacturer's championship. He was gutted; I was pleased.

He also introduced me to CCGs in the form of Magic: The Gathering, but not long after he moved away to Christchurch and I've only seen him once since.

Bungle lived about 20 minutes walk away - we'd been best mates for ages, he called for me every morning on the way to primary school before we eventually went to different secondary schools. His constant trying to convince me that Playstation Wrestling Games were a Good Thing never did quite work. Prior to this he had a Megadrive, and I once told him a load of lies about how you could fall off the edge of the rock in The Immortal.

We played a lot of videogames together alongside the usual kid things like going to the shops on your bike and stuff. I once managed to embarrass his family by loudly proclaiming that the person they were talking to had a dog with a stupid name.

I broke my thumb when I was about 14, and was pretty miserable about how awkward it made gaming. So, out of his cupboard he produced a random piece of board that he had handily labeled 'BORD'. This ingenious innovation enabled me once again to indulge in our hobby, and we then spent many a happy hour tearing through Streets of Rage 2 together...

As we grew up, we went our seperate ways. I blame this on my stealing his spare life on Toejam and Earl once.

6 of 14 Sega Saturn
I was a teenager once, you know. I did a free paper round once and would get paid between £8 and £12 a week, which at the time seemed like a really big deal. It was five or six times the amount of money I would usually find myself with, and after spunking the first few paycheques on Megadrive games from Gamestation (when it was good, and I spilt Irn Bru on their carpet) or Iron Maiden CDs, I set my sights on the Next Generation.

By this time the Playstation was already establishing itself as the playground best but deep down I knew there was only one console for me - and so, one snowy morning I set off on my usual round delivering 300-odd papers and mentally totted up how much I would need for one Saturn, a copy of Virtua Fighter and the bus fare into town and back. The total worked out as £45. I got more than enough that week, although when I eventually came back from town clutching my prize my mum was pretty annoyed that I'd bought something 'obsolete' as she hadn't read about it in Readers Digest in the last six months.

I didn't really get on with Virtua Fighter that much - it was too clinical and precise for me and still remains that way, but booting up my Saturn for the first time, popping the disc in (which was a revelation in itself), hearing the loading sounds, seeing things in smooth 3D... the single most magical gaming moment ever.

7 of 14 Sega Rally
The second game I bought for my Saturn, and perhaps the best example of the Sega of Old - you had four tracks and three cars to choose from, which by today's standards is nothing, but what you were given was just so well-designed and polished that you really didn't care. I used to spend hours time-trialing the Desert course and I /still/ don't know how to do the last corner. I even used to take the CD out with me when I was doing my paper round - it made a change from listening to the radio or Iron Maiden. I was once mugged for some Werthers Original samples I had to deliver whilst listening to it too, by a load of older kids from my school. It was perhaps the most bizarre experience of my life.

8 of 14 Sega Dreamcast
For my eighteenth birthday I received a spangly Sega Dreamcast from my girlfriend - it was something I'd vaguely been hinting at for a while but never expected it to come through. Having been through a bit of a gaming 'break' for the year or two preceding my 18th I'd been keeping an eye on the Dreamcast's development and releases, but nothing prepared me for just how special everything felt once again.

The jump to my Saturn was huge, and the jump from Saturn to Dreamcast little smaller. I had a riot playing Skies of Arcadia (which was also a present), just marveling at everything. I picked up some classics for pocket change as I came into the Dreamcast's life late on, and put countless hours into both Sonic Adventures, Powerstone 2, Grandia 2, Crazy Taxi, Sega Extreme Sports, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Hydro Thunder, Rez... the list goes on.

Once again I was just in awe of the way these things could make you feel. Farewell, Dreamcast. We barely knew you.

9 of 14 Collecting
One Bank Holiday a few years back when I was finally working full-time, I had nothing better to do and so popped on down to the local May Day fair. The fair itself was utter bobbins, but the jumble sale tent held some appeal; so I queued up on the off-chance that there would be something interesting, a daft trinket or something similar to take home.

I spent £2 on an Acorn Archemeides with the blessing of my girlfriend, and a little bug went chomp. I was hooked from the moment I started - car boot sales most Sunday mornings, getting up at half six in the morning prompt when I had trouble getting up an hour later for work. I would spend ages browsing stalls, haggling, and bringing home oodles of tat with the odd gem nestling away somewhere... it quickly became a passion and subsequently an obsession before I eventually decided enough was enough - between the early mornings, the cleaning of stuff that looked like it had been in someone's shed for ten years, the research, cataloguing and eBaying of duplicates I'd take up every evening and every weekend, leaving myself no time at all to actually use any of the stuff I was buying.

I knocked it on the head two years ago, sold most of the bits off and I think I bought a car with the proceeds. I don't regret it one bit, but it was definitely an accomplishment to look at your shelves stuffed full of... well, stuff.

10 of 14 Super Monkey Ball
I first played this on import at a friend's house, and found it to be twitchy and uncontrollable, but it was monkeys in balls and so was obviously the best thing ever regardless. Eventually I managed to source a copy for under £20 and played it to death - slowly mastering the bastard monkey physics until I was adept at the Beginner and Advanced stages, often able to fly through both with just one life.

I would replay the first ten levels over and over - and even they were quite tricky in places. The genius touch was a practice mode though, that let you save replays - and so the old score notepad of old was dug out and new routes through each level worked out so that rather than the slightly mundane 'roll monkey along platforms' the game became 'make monkey fly via whatever means possible'. This was a lot more fun and whilst the ratio of squished monkey to happy monkey was probably pretty awful, well, at least I was having fun.

11 of 14 A New House (Donkey Konga, Paper Mario 2)
Three years ago I bought a house. For a 19-year-old, that's pretty scary... and having to borrow two grand to afford the deposit wasn't ideal either. Nor the fact that we borrowed it from some friends we knew from the internet - it all felt very weird, but when it all came off it was a great feeling.

The whole house needed redecorating when we eventually got the keys - and obviously as we were short of cash, there was no time off, no contractors, nothing - it was either DIY or Get one of our dads to do it.

After a few weeks of painting every bloody night after work, we finished the upstairs and got it carpeted. It was still quite a shell of a house, no furniture, paint pots everywhere, but as we were going there every night I decided to start moving a few bits in. Cue one Dreamcast, one Gamecube, and one lack of painting from a certain household member who was too busy playing Sonic Adventure 2.

Eventually we bought and built the bed so we could at least have a whole day's decorating without having to travel in both directions. It was hard work in the day and when the sun set I would only ever be found in one place - on the landing, playing Donkey Konga on a 14" portable telly with wires strewn everywhere.

I still think it's about the only thing that kept me sane through those times.

12 of 14 Tony Hawk's 2
The Tony Hawk series is surprisingly still going, and on it's eighth (or so) incarnation. However, there's only one that matters to me - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. This basically took the first game, which was simple, reasonably intuitive and added a few little tweaks to it - manuals, perfect/sloppy landings and so on, gave all of the featured skateboarders ridiculous abilities and just let you mess about.

It was sublime. They may as well have called it Tony Hawk's Fun. Let it be known that there is no greater feeling than a 720 Heelflip Benihana pipe transfer.

Completely ridiculous and yet so, so right. And they had Anthrax on the soundtrack.

13 of 14 XBox 360
I bought mine so that my girlfriend could play Uno. Then I discovered gamerpoints.

Good god it's addictive.

Add to that a healthy dose of streamlining XBox live, all the additional content and the way everything just hangs together so well. Achievements took me right back into playing games to finish them - finishing a game is one thing, finishing it with 1,000 points is even more satisfying. Online leaderboards are compulsive, beating your friends has never been so much fun or so easy.

Having been late to the party on virtually every console I've ever owned, the 360 has come as a real breath of fresh air. Demos are readily available, I know what's coming out each week, and you can see what people are playing at any given time. It's an absolute masterstroke, it feels social and there's nothing like shotgunning your friends in the face.

14 of 14 Sega Saturn (again)
To be honest, you could probably rename this feature 'My Saturn Life'.

I still get goosebumps when hearing the Saturn bootup sound, when clutching the 3D pad or when loading NiGHTS... I'm way overdue another playthrough of that, Shining Force 3, Shining the Holy Ark, another go at the time trials on Sega Rally, a go through all the Sonic Games on Sonic Jam (which is how a Sonic Compilation should be done - really puts the half-arsed ones you get these days to shame), having another go through Panzer Dragoon Saga, Virtua Cop, Guardian Heroes or Dark Savior.

Looking through my small-but-excellent collection of Saturn games just fills me with amazing memories. That's not to mention all the games I used to have, Rainbow Islands, Darius Gaiden, Wipeout (which would always creepily coincide with listening to Mark and Lard on the radio)...

I'd had great times with games before that and I've had them after. I'm still having them. Nothing matches the Saturn for me though.