School is in session

Ah, you young pups never had it so good. Neophytes, the lot of you. You really don't appreciate this golden age of gaming. Why, when I started playing games you were just a twinkle in the milkman's eye. While I cut my teeth on Treasure Island on the C64, you were being squeezed out on the back of a Ford Orion because Dad got excited a little too early by the possibility that maybe in the next three hours he might glimpse the faintest suggestion of a solitary nipple.

Don't panic, young grasshoppers. I am not here to chide you for your lack of knowledge. Just imagine me as a kindly uncle, one who would let you stay up an hour later when your parents were having a night out. Picture your hair being ruffled while you got to watch the second episode of Corrie, safe in the knowledge you were being treated. Hell, you can even take a sip of my can. Don't tell your parents, though, because we are still on rough ground after the incident with the bowling ball and the box of hamsters.

So, you may be asking yourself as you sit there at your computer screen with more bread crumbs adorning your pre-pubescent chin than hairs, tousling your hair with your eyes closed and humming, why the hell have we gone down this horrible, NSPCC-inspired segue? Because I am here to educate you. You are young, you have not yet learnt what to hate and love. You blindly buy things because they are shiny and pretty, only then to discover they are shit. So you put them away, and somehow feel that you exerted some sort of critical control. But you still bought the bloody thing. Some executive somewhere is using your money, your specific spondoolics, your wonderous wonga, to caress a Persian beauty's loins while he eats battery hens he breeds himself and kicks a hispanic gay puppy with three legs. Picture his jowly face and red braces, and big fat cigar that proves he is better endowed than you (and his man boobs cover all the gender-related endowment angles). Hear his laughter as he openly mocks your diseased, pathetic kind and soft unthinking mind sponge. And then watch, horrified, as he sticks kittens in shredders and drinks non fair-trade coffee. Yes, you have not funded terrorism or pornography, but instead you have fuelled the behaviour of a bastard. Shame on you.

Don't get me wrong, I am not here to tell you a game is rubbish. That is your opinion and your opinion alone, even if that means you put Fifa Street 3 at the top of the charts and not buy Ratchet and Clank. (Stifles sobs, goes into therapy, comes out poorer but spiritually realigned). I am here to educate you on the things in games that should make you pick up the pitchfork, light the torches and hound the executives Franken-style to a windmill, where you will char their corpulent bodies for ever offending your sensory prodders.

What you have to ask yourself before we start on this journey: who would you rather trust. Kitten shredder or hair tousler? Racist puppy kicker or the person who let you watch Have I Got News for You before bedtime? Be prepared to have your mind sponge turn into a rock hard lump of thought iron.

Oh, and Take Two are whores. Just putting it out there.

Paperboy