This month, chums, I'm going to stick up for something that's an old friend to most of us, yet today is shunned and maligned by all.

Yes, let's have three cheers for... the single-player game.

PAGE 2

Y'see, you can't turn the page of a games magazine these days without reading something like this:

"And of course, the eight-player deathmatch game is just out of this world! 95%!"

Here, however, is a list of all the normal people in the world who have access to eight-player deathmatch games of anything:

PAGE 3

We all know this to be true: the only people who can play networked PC games are (A) journalists, (B) games programmers, and (C) firemen.

I might be wrong about the last one.

The same applies to link-up Playstation games - if a single person writes in to Digitiser and says that they've honestly ever carried a TV round to their mate's house to play two-player Ridge Racer Revolution, I'll eat my pet lizard, Bill. ("What? Hang on." - Bill)

PAGE 4

And even if we did all have access to multi-player games, perhaps in some freakish Utopia in which BT didn't require to be paid 400 million pounds every three minutes for simple telephone calls, there's another thing:

You don't have seven friends.

Otherwise, you'd never have bought a PC in the first place.

Otherwise, games machines would never have been invented. Do you see?

PAGE 5

So let's hear it for one-player games. Let's hear it for Super Mario 64. Let's hear it for Tempest X. Let's hear it for Tetris. Let's hear it for Cannon Fodder. Lord help me, let's even hear it for Starblade.

Because one-player games are what made video games so great in the first place. One-player games give you something to do when you're bored. (And if you've got seven friends round and you're still bored, then frankly you need some new friends, not more games.)

PAGE 6

But if we must have multi-player games, let's have multi-player games like Bomberman, and multi-player games like Mario Kart. Anything, in fact, where you need to be in the same room as the people you're playing with.

Because otherwise, how do you know it's a person at all? How do you know, sitting there haemorrhaging money down the Internet, that your computer's not just playing a funny gag on you and sending you joke badly-spelled messages from your "opponent" by itself? Eh?

PAGE 7

And the next time some idiot reviewer gives something like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter 95%, on the grounds that "the solo game is useless but the eight-player deathmatch is a riot, we play it all night here in the office", let's kill them. Just as an experiment.

Just, you know, to see if it teaches them some basic manners.