1. THE CLATTER OF TINY KEYS

Players control games in so many different ways. Some like joysticks, and hold them in both hands pressing fire buttons with thumbs and trigger fingers. Other stick fans like to fix the stick to the desk or table and hit fire with forefingers, arcade style. Then you've got your joypad fans, divided into thumbsters (again) and those weirdos who prefer to use the pad piano-style, using forefingers for both the fire buttons and the movement pad. Yep, so many players, so many styles. It must be a nightmare for game programmers trying to make all those styles work comfortably. My heart goes out to them.

Except it doesn't. I hate programmers. Want to know why? Well, I, like many thousands of Amiga owners, used to have a ZX Spectrum. On the Spectrum, joystick ports didn't come as standard, so all games had to have keyboard control options. It was brilliant. After a while, user-defined keys became the norm, so you could set a game up any way you liked, never again dying because some idiot had decided to use 'up' to jump, or put the smart bomb control in the middle of the keyboard where you could never hit it in time. (But if you liked it that way, you could still have it that way). Also, using keys gives you more precise and accurate control 99 times out of a hundred - try playing Rainbow Islands both ways if you don't believe me.

So why is it that 99 Amiga games out of a hundred don't have any keyboard opion at all? Imagine - playing driving games in perfect comfort. Millimetre- perfect jumping in platformers. As many fire buttons as you need in complicated beat-'em-ups. But no. "Use that wobbly old 1-button joystick", insist the nation's coders. Cretins.

So it's a big hats off to Super Stardust from those cheeky little monkeys at Team 17, the only Amiga game I can think of off the top of my head that offers choosable keyboard controls. Asteroids, especially, was a game that was never ever meant to be played with a joystick (even the coin-op used buttons), so 500 common sense points go immediately to whoever decided that one of the improvements from the original Stardust to the AGA version should be the addition of keyboard control, and a hearty slap in the face goes to everyone else.

2. I'M (NOT) A CONTROL FREAK

The next-best thing to redefinable keyboard controls is to at least have some kind of other control options. These are almost as rare as keyboard-controlled games, but chapeau removal is once again the order of the day up Yorkshire way as Team 17 atone slightly for the otherwise-dismal Overdrive by allowing you to drive your little cars by either the rotate-and-accelerate method, or the less traditional up-down-left-right routine. Also, the only saving grace of Jeff Minter's useless conversions of Defender and Stargate for Arc was that you could ignore Jeff's repulsive mouse-control pet ideas and play the old-fashioned way that worked so very well for the coin-op games in the first place.

3. EVERYBODY NEEDS GOOD NEIGHBOURS

And there's one other kind of control cleverness we haven't covered yet - the innovative two-player mode. Two-player games themselves are ten a penny, but there are a select few where two players play not to compete with each other, but to work together towards a common goal in a spirit of friendliness and co-operation. Wimps.

But seriously, though, helping each other out can be fun. Virocop and Blasteroids both feature variations on the same theme, where one player drives the ship and the other swings the turret and shoots the bad guys, although Blasteroids is the more interesting in that the two players can join up or split apart and hunt separately at any time. The magnificent shoot-'em-up Apidya also has a cute two-player game, where Player One takes control of the mighty armoured wasp itself, while Player Two controls the less-powerful but invincible drone that flies by its side.

Finally, top coin-op conversion Pang has a two-player mode that's neither strictly co-operative or competitive. Here, the two players share common lives, and if one dies, both players are sent back to the beginning of the current screen. This is so infuriating (and so wonderfully open to cunning deliberate sabotage) that it's a tragic shame no-one else has tried using it since.

4. MOB! HUT!!

There's more than one way to be more interesting than the old-fashioned two-player mode, however. Instead of using your two players in a new or exciting way, why not have more than two players at a time? Why not three? (Brilliant abstract future sports game Projectyle, or shallow-but-fun dinosaur-based destruct-'em-up Rampage). Or four? (Arcade classic Gauntlet 2, or fascinating action maze wargame Bug Blaster). Or even five? (The indisputable master of multi-player video games, Dynablaster. Even the much-hyped console versions of this under the rather snappier Bomber Man moniker could only manage four players at a time, but if you could crowd one more person round your Amiga monitor, up to five of you could blow each other up with cute little cartoon high-explosive devices). Sadly, the 3DO console was first to the idea of daisy-chainable (and hence theoretically limitless) joypads, but at the moment the Amiga can cope with more of your friends than practically any other games platform in the world. Aren't you proud? (And for the ultimate in multi-player capers, why not sneak a peek at No.9?)

5. YOU'RE SO ("VERY") SPECIAL

What's that, Mister Publisher? Too late? Released your game with crap controls? Bumpy difficulty curve? Obvious missing bits? Embarrassing bugs? Well, it happens to the best of us sometimes. But it's *never* too late - why not release another version of it, a 'remix' if you will, adding a few tweaks here and there, maybe the odd new bit and some general tidying up. Budget-priced special editions have come to the rescue of more than one game in the past, and yet again we have to tip our titfers in the general directions of those sensitive Wakefield boys, Team 17. Alien Breed, Assassin, Body Blows and Project X have all benefitted from a second (or third, even) stab, especially the last-named of the above. The first Project X was ridiculously, unfairly hard, and riddled with badly thought-out control features. The updated release was still a tough shoot-'em-up, but in a hugely less annoying way. If only more publishers were prepared to admit their mistakes in such a public way, how happy we game players would be, eh folks? Kudos is also due to Titus, who improved their corking Crazy Cars 3 in the only way it could have been improved, with the addition of a 2-player mode for the licensed update Lamborghini American Challenge. But still nobody bought it. Tch.

6. I HAVE NO DATA ON THAT, CAPTAIN

Closely related to the Special Edition is the data disk. A way of extending the life of a game, adding things to it it should have had in the first place, or just doing something a little bit different and out of the ordinary with it, the data disk has been a much under-used device in the computer games industry, a world where 'after-sales service' is a dirty word. Or two. Maybe three. Anyway. Even where it has appeared, quality has been wildly variable. Oh No More Lemmings was a rush job, a shoddily-planned paste-on of all the levels that were too dull or too irritating to make it into the game in the first place, but it least it was another fix for out-of-control Lemmings addicts. Similarly, Populous Challenge Games and Their Finest Missions gave you nothing you couldn't really have done for yourself with the original game and a bit of thought.

Utopia and The Humans fared rather better with a couple of decent sets of new levels, although neither showed any great imagination, but it was a pair of football games which really showed the potential of the medium. Kick Off Extra Time (brrrr) and Sensible Soccer 1.1 took slightly different approaches to the idea, but both were worthwhile additions to their parent games, adding new and improved features at relatively little cost (compare the £3.95 for the Sensible upgrade, which also gave you your original disks back for the purists, with the £19.95 charged by Psygnosis to gullible Lems fans).

Again, most publishers would rather try to sell you a sequel than admit any inadequacies in their original games, but this kind of thing really ought to happen more often.

7. BUILD A PLACE WHERE WE CAN PLAY

Following on neatly from the data disk is the construction kit. This is real customer care, and as such is rarer than hen's teeth (does anyone know where this saying comes from? Has anyone ever seen a hen's tooth? Do all hens have them, or just spookily genetically mutated ones? How rare are they, exactly?) in a 'New! Improved! More Expensive!' world like this one. So extra-special respect to the authors of Spindizzy Worlds, Fears, Gloom, Gravity Force 2, Lode Runner and Boulder Dash, who cut off their own chances of lucrative sequel larks by including the means for the player of their games to build their own levels to their own designs, for ever. Spindizzy Worlds seems to have done so almost by accident, for the level designer is only accessible via a secret cheat mode, and you have to work out the instructions by yourself. Rainbow Arts' marble-rolling puzzler Logical also gave you a construction kit only accessible by secret password, this time obtained by completing all of the game's 100 set levels, a great idea only spoiled by the fact that you were unlikely to want to play 100 levels of Logical in the first place, let alone devise your own extra ones afterwards.

Lotus 3 had a sort-of track designer in the RECS system, whereby you could design custom tracks to vague general specifications rather than planting bends just where you wanted them, and the Sim City Terrain Editor let you fiddle around with dirt and water in an almost-but-not-quite-entirely-ineffectual way (Sim City also came with a whole clutch of data disks featuring new graphics, preset scenarios and suchlike, incidentally), but it's perhaps a sign of the times that most games with construction kits included are among the most recent releases. Perhaps those friendly software publishers know something we don't, eh?

8. YOU CAN'T HIDE YOUR LOVE FOREVER

But it's not just construction kits some games keep up their sleeves. Some games conceal entire new, different games that are just a password or a sneaky trick away. The Lotus games come up trumps here again, with number one featuring a little asteroid-blaster called Rox, Lotus The Second hiding Dux (a conversion of likeable arcade zapper Carnival), and while my memory could be playing tricks on me here, I'm sure the third one had a tremendous Gridrunner-style shoot-'em-up called Pod lurking in its depths.

Gremlin (the publishers of the Lotus trilogy) are the patrons of the hidden game, in fact - the biggest hidden game of all was a neat platformer called Chrome, buried inside (ooh crikey, now you're asking) either Venus The Flytrap or Switchblade 2. But there's another honourable mention to our friendly old chums at Team 17, who put a version of the venerable Pong into the first Alien Breed, as well as one to Psygnosis who devoted more space to hidden bonus games in cutesy platformer Wiz'n'Liz than they did to the game itself.

Other authors haven't even tried to hide their lights under a bushel - the original C64 Impossible Mission is selectable as an option at the start of MicroProse's inferior follow-up Impossible Mission 2025, and the Amiga version of Speccy classic Manic Miner was also rather less fun than the pixel-perfect 8-bit version supplied on the same disk. But the saddest loss is suffered at the hands of Sensible Software, whose gorgeous and under-rated Wizkid boasted a brilliant Asteroids clone called Wizeroids, but failed to include (as far as I know) any way of getting to it other than playing the game through to the very end. Bah.

9. COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD(WARE) ENOUGH

The toughest, but potentially most rewarding way to make more of your Amiga games, though, is to call on the help of some extra hardware. Simply running many older games on a standard A1200 can make a huge difference (check out F1 Grand Prix, or Knights Of The Sky, or almost any other aged flight sim), but if you've got an accelerated machine or an A4000 then the world can be your texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded, multi-polygonned oyster. Unsure? Ten seconds on TFX, or Gloom, or Fears should see you raid that piggy bank sharpish. Other games (like ace frenetic blaster Uridium 2) will at least notice if you've bothered to buy additional RAM and load in extra animations and sound effects. Or for the ultimate F1GP thrills, why not invest in an A1200, a Quickjoy Footpedal controller, and a steering wheel?

The very best, though, I've saved for last. If you're lucky enough to have access to two A1200s, two monitors, one null modem cable and seven friends, then why not go the last mile and get yourself a couple of copies of Super Skidmarks? Playing this fab racing game with eight players and a widescreen picture stretching across two screens is the best time you'll ever have withing touching distance of an Amiga. Anyone for a one-player game of Daytona USA? Thought not.

So there you have it. Just some of the easy-peasy ways in which even the most everyday game can enter a whole new world of enhancement excitement. Let's hear no more excuses for the dull and workmanlike - the Amiga might be under seige, but there's no reason why it can't go out in style, with all guns blazing and all flags flying. More games like Super Skidmarks, making gameplay more of an experience, and maybe real game lovers won't be in quite such a rush to flock to the 'new' generation of machines. Or at least, if they do, they'll know just what they're giving up.