A really funny thing happened to me on the way to Electronics Boutique the other day.

I saw some really good games.

"That's not very funny", you might retort.

But it is.

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Because it was Christmas, you see. And Christmas isn't a time for people to buy good games. It's a time for their mums to buy them the ones they've seen in nice adverts on the telly.

If you're older than about 9, you might remember a few of the Nightmares Before Christmas we've had to put up with in years past.

Like US Gold's terrible 8-bit versions of Out Run. SNES Mortal Kombat.

And Rise Of The Robots. Obviously.

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So with Christmas being the traditional time for hype to succeed over gameplay, it was a bit of a surprise to look at this year's festive charts and study the stuffings.

(As long as you ignored the success of the massively-hyped and appallingly useless FIFA 97 in nearly all of them, of course).

As I'll show in just a moment, great games were suddenly in abundance. But there's a mysterious and inexplicable side to all the good cheer. Listen.

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The PC did the worst out of the Big Three games machines (the SNES and the MD were both effectively dead at Christmas, with only Donkey Kong Country 3 making any showing at all.)

The dull and lumpy Flight 6.0, the inexplicable Encarta 97, the tedious Championship Manager 2 (ah, so THAT'S where all those Amiga owners went), and FIFA 97 all clogged the PC listing.

But even then, Red Alert, Tomb Raider, Screamer 2 and Formula 1 GP2 assured PC gamers of a fun-filled Boxing Day.

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The Playstation chart was home to the ubiquitous Tomb Raider, as well as the first Command And Conquer, but also a whole slew of (sort-of) PS originals.

The blasty Die Hard Trilogy. The zoomy Formula 1. The brutal Tekken 2. The vastly-improved Wipeout 2097. And the surprisingly-engrossing Soviet Strike.

Every one a genuinely good game. And even iffy platformers Crash Bandicoot and Pandemonium didn't let the side down too badly, being popular cutesy fun choices for the wee youngsters.

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It's when you get to the Top 10 of the horrible Sega's diabolical Saturn, though, that the real shocks arrive.

Being the only machine to escape the blight of FIFA 97, the SS astonishingly managed a Yuletide top 10 without a SINGLE CRAP GAME IN IT.

A dodgy Doom and the ludicrously-overrated Worldwide Soccer were about as bad as it got, and even they weren't actually very bad. And Virtua Cop 2, C&C, Exhumed, Daytona CCE, even Athlete Kings and Victory Goal - all good. Huh?

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So far so dreamy, then. Could it be that finally, after nearly two decades, game buyers (and their mums) have finally got wise to the hype and started believing magazine reviews?

Well, no. Because games magazine sales in 1996 reached a new all-time low. Most mags last year sold between half and a tenth as many copies as they did in their early 90s heyday.

So if no-one's reading mags any more, how come everyone's suddenly managing to buy decent games? Eh?

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Could it be that they're getting their information from other media, like the TV? Hardly. Bad Influence is gone, and Gamesmaster's games coverage has all but disappeared up Dominik's behind.

Players exchanging reliable reviews over the Internet? Nope. One glimpse of the standard of most newsgroups puts paid to that idea (and hardly anybody's actually on the Net really, even now).

A general increase in the quality of games across the board? Yeah, right.

So what's the reason?

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To tell you the truth, I've got absolutely no idea.

Cover-mounted demos have made a big comeback, but as we've already found out, far fewer people are buying the magazines they come on.

Mainstream coverage in "real" media like newspapers and so on is almost non-existant compared to a few years ago. And nothing's replaced it.

Is it just luck? Or what? Tell me.