The world of games has been missing something for a couple of years. But it's okay. You don't need to worry any more.

Because PC owners are the new Amiga owners.

Storm the Palace!

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Reasons why PC owners are the new Amiga owners No.1: PARANOIA

If you've been reading almost any sort of games-based publication over the last few months, you'll have noticed a phenomenon. Since the announcements of the Dreamcast and, particularly, the Playstation 2, letters pages are full of PC owners squealing on about how the new consoles will never be as fast as a PC, never have better graphics, etc.

Oddly, they seem to be forming this opinion mostly on the basis of clocks.

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By that, of course, I mean that the PC fans are saying "but the PCs of the future will run at 500MHz, 600MHz and beyond, and that's much faster than a console so nyah!"

You don't need to know what a "MHz" is to spot that this argument is drivel, though. The Playstation has a "clock speed" of just 33MHZ, yet until very recently could outperform PCs running over 10 times as fast.

And do it without crashing every 20 minutes, too.

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Reasons why PC owners are the new Amiga owners No.2: IRRELEVANCE

The other broken old record you have to listen to is "But consoles are just a toy, PCs do lots of other stuff apart from games, like, um, word processing and the Internet and that."

Which, of course, is pretty much the same argument as "Ah, but the Amiga did the graphics for Babylon 5!"

And the new consoles will "do" the Internet too, anyway.

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And it's hardly the point, in any case. Digitiser is about games, as are most games magazines (the exceptions being, obviously, Official Playstation Mag and Playstation Plus, which are about desperately trying to "be" Fry and Laurie, and hating girls respectively).

And if you're only talking about games, what the heck does word processing have to do with anything? Why don't you just buy a fancy electric typewriter? If you just want to process words, they're just as good as a PC and a lot cheaper (and you don't have to buy a printer).

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Reasons why PC owners are the new Amiga owners No. 3: BAD ARITHMETIC

This is the one that really makes me chuckle, viewers. PC owners are fond of saying "But you can't upgrade a console, can you? It'll be out of date in four or five years and then you'll have to buy a whole new one. But PCs can just be upgraded! PCs are great!"

But of course, while consoles do tend to be outdated in a few years, a PC is outdated before you get out of the door of the shop with it. And £200 cheaper.

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The cost of five years of PC upgrading would easily buy you EVERY new console released in the same period, with money left over for chips and pop.

There might have been a small grain of truth in this argument before, but now that the PS2 is going to be fully backwards compatible, even that's gone. (In fact, PS2 will be MORE backwards compatible than a PC, because every upgrade you buy for your PC will more than likely make half your old games stop working. I speak from long and bitter experience here.)

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Reasons why PC owners are the new Amiga owners No.4: BUYING LOSER GAMES

When my old magazine Amiga Power closed down, I had a bit of a rant blaming Amiga owners for the machine's dismal software catalogue, because for the last few years of the Amiga's life they'd bought nothing except tedious sims and football management games.

With a whole world of incredibly exciting games out there, they'd chosen to spend all their time pratting about with dull screens full of numbers.

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And what's the biggest-selling PC game of all time? Championship Manager 3. A slow, cripplingly statistic-obsessed footy manager sim that, unbelievably, STILL doesn't have any graphics.

Can you imagine, viewers, a real-life football manager who ran their team WITHOUT EVER SEEING ANY PLAYERS ACTUALLY PLAYING? They'd be ridiculed the world over and swiftly sacked, and quite rightly so.

If you like Championship Manager 3, you're an idiot and I hate you.

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Reasons why PC owners are the new Amiga owners No.5: REFUSING TO FACE THE TRUTH

The truth is that the PC is dying as a games machine. CM3 aside, PC game sales are desperately low, even though the games are cheaper and there are a hundred times as many PC owners as console owners.

The new consoles are gradually stealing even the PC's traditional territory by doing nearly everything that the PC does, only better and for a fifth of the price.

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(Don't you think it's amazing, for example, that you STILL have to take up enormous amounts of hard disk space "installing" a game like FFVII, when the primitive old Playstation can run it instantly from CD despite having a CD drive 18 times slower than a PC's?)

PC owners, though, simply deny everything, stick their fingers in their ears and go "La la la I can't hear you!" even when all the evidence is staring them in the face.