"The same thing we do EVERY night, Pinky - try to take over the column!"

"Poit!"

This one's for you, Brain. Sleep well.

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My old chum T Mott wrote an interesting and thought-provoking column last week on the subject of attention spans.

If you missed it, (or if your attention span ran out halfway through) Tony's point was that people who get to play lots and lots of games, whether it's because they're pirates, very rich, or magazine reviewers, tend not to invest as much time and effort in playing them as ordinary people who only buy perhaps one or two a month. A game gets barely ten minutes to make an impression, then is cast aside and never loaded again.

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The implication was that this took a lot of enjoyment out of the games by making them less "special", and perhaps also contributed to over-harsh reviews.

Now, we'll skip over the fact that the very last thing anybody needs right now is an excuse to have EVEN SOFTER reviews in the specialist press (new multi-format mag Arcade's debut issue rated no fewer than 58 games as "above average", with just TWO out of 73 deemed "below average"), and address the main issue instead, which is this: Games are supposed to be fun.

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Now, saying "games are supposed to be fun" doesn't sound like a particularly dazzlingly perceptive observation. But the point is, they're supposed to be entertainment. You're not supposed to have to "work" at them. It's bad enough having to work in the first place, never mind having to do it again with your games when you get home.

The head tester at Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios recently said in an interview that "If a game's designed well enough, you shouldn't even have to look at the manual." He's right.

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I remember when Final Fantasy VII came out. I'd played it for about half a day, and I was bored out of my mind with the tediously linear gameplay and cheap, annoying random battles. Asking a few chums why they all loved it, every one of them told me that it apparently "doesn't get interesting until about five or six hours in."

Can you imagine sticking with a book, movie or album which took five or six hours of boring, tedious effort before it got interesting? Nope, me neither. So why should games get away with it?

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You see, the flipside of the original observation is this - if you play a lot of games, and one DOES grab you by the neck and won't let you stop playing until you've finished it, then you KNOW you've found something really good.

It happens with Mario 64, with Pilotwings, with Blast Corps, with Banjo-Kazooie, Zelda, (anyone spotting a pattern yet?), Resident Evil 2, even with Ridge Racer. Truly great games shouldn't - and usually don't - hide their lights under bushels. They DEMAND to be played, right from the off.

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When we're being asked to fork out 40 and 50 quid for games (okay then - when YOU'RE being asked to fork out 40 and 50 quid for games), I think it's a bit rich to be expected to have to put in hours of work as well before we get any entertainment out of them.