Then, two or three years back now, Top Of The Pops changed. Out went the crumblies, in came a load of the left-over auditionees for the job as Edd The Duck's straight man, and up went the cry 'Live singing only!'. Result? Everyone whinges that the new set-up was deliberately constructed by the lackeys of Eric Clapton and Tina Turner-type 'real music' to make the popular dance-orientated acts of the time look crap, by highlighting the mostly non-live nature of their music and forcing them to look silly on national television by attempting to sing all the samples on their records. Tch.

Now, you might be wondering exactly what the heck all this has got to do with the price of a dog's arse. Well, I'm not going to tell you, at least not for a minute. First, I'm going to tell you a joke. How many computer-game journalists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: I don't know, I wouldn't stay in the room with them long enough to count. At the ECTS earlier this month, the only thing louder than the sound of fizzy-pop bottles being opened was the moaning of the assembled hacks. 'Where are all the Amiga games?'; 'Everything's just
totally console-orientated'; 'I haven't seen a floppy all day'; 'Get these bloody crap pop stars away from me, I don't want my picture taken', and so on into infinity. Nope, we just weren't happy at all. But hang on, isn't this just what we always wanted?

Thing is, for years and years now, all us little hobbyists have been protesting that the big old world didn't pay us any attention. 'Give us a TV show', we cried. 'We want to be in the newspapers'; 'We're youth culture!' And so it came to pass. Sega and Nintendo seized the bull by the pre-pubescent beginnings of its horns (and Atari stood around looking a bit confused, as usual), and suddenly bingo! Video games are big news, mass-appeal consumer product. But what's the first rule about mass-appeal consumer products? Come on, you know it really. It's Keep It Simple. Lowest Common Denominator. Something Mum And Dad Can Understand When They're Doing The Christmas Shopping. Point your dad at the keyboard of your ST, patiently explain the intricacies of swapping and accessing the 11 disks of Monkey Island 2 on your Amiga, or, for a real laugh, get him to try to load up a game on a PC. Fun, isn't it? Watching the poor old duffer wrestle with technofear never fails to raise a smile. But stop giggling for a second. Ask him who the Super Mario Brothers are. Ask him what kind of a creature Sonic is. Ah-ha. The Big Picture begins to develop. Can you guess what it is yet?

Okay, so no blinding revelations so far. 'Consoles are glamourous, eh? Blimey, Stu, next thing we know you'll be telling us the sky's blue. Soon the Mega Drive and the SNES will go the way of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, replaced by the next fad. Proper computers will always survive amongst people who want something a bit more, well, intelligent'. Are you sure? Sega and Nintendo will never be content with sharing the game market - like any corporations worth their salt, they want it all. What's the hardware buzz on the High Street right now? I'll help you out - it costs 300 quid, it's got huge memory
capacity, fabulous graphics, and it loads software off discs, with all the attendant swapping and loading which today's console kids just won't put up with. It's not the A1200, it's not some miraculous new affordable 486 PC, and it's certainly not the Falcon. It is, of course, the Mega CD. Sega have shifted the goalposts again, boys.

Picture the scene. There's a big meeting at the HQ of Acme Traditional Software Development. MD Dave Acme, is setting out the options for the coming year. 'It's like this, people. We've got this game, it's a bit of a goody, but we're just not sure what to do with it. We could stick it out on the Amiga, ST and PC - with luck and a following wind, we could get universal rave reviews and, if we can keep it off the bulletin boards for a couple of weeks, flog as many copies as the last really huge seller. After all, if Sensible Soccer can shift 100,000, surely we can too. Of course, we could also just slap it onto Mega CD, keep production costs and piracy losses at a minimum, bung an extra 15 quid on the price and sell 7 million copies on the first day of
release, like Shite Hedgehog 2 Con (anag). Shall we put it to the vote?'

What's that you say? 'Oh for God's sake, stop being such a miserable old doom-monger, Stuart. After all, the 16-bit consoles have been existing side-by-side with us for ages now, and there're still plenty of people doing
computer games. Yeah, okay, the ST's gone for a burton, and the PC's
strictly for grown-ups with plenty of cash and a flight-sim fixation, but the Amiga's healthier than it's ever been. I mean, you've got the likes of Accolade, Activision - well, okay, let's forget the alphabetical list, but there's plenty of other stalwarts of the computer scene who haven't decided to pack it all in. Core Design, Code Masters, Ocean, Psygnosis - you'd never catch them deserting the Amiga and 'going console'. Er... Ah. How many new full-price games did you say you'd had for review in the last couple of months? Well, I'm sure it's just a bit of a lull. After all, you've got lots of great new stuff this month - there's, er, Desert Strike, um, Flashback, some A1200 updates, er, a new version of Sim City...'

Not many Amiga games at the ECTS? No kidding? Turn the lights off on your way out, eh?