But why so sad? Well, I've had to change my mind about something again.

2D beat-'em-ups, viewers - they're great, aren't they? 

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Y'see, the other day I was playing around (as I often am) with MAME, the ever-increasingly fabulous multiple arcade machine emulator that's pretty much the only good reason I've ever found to own a PC.

MAME is now capable of running an emulated version of Street Fighter Zero, the 473rd game in Capcom's absurdly milked SF series, and since I've always avoided the console versions (huge ugly borders, ugh) I thought I might as well have a go now. And wasn't it just the best thing ever?

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Well no, it wasn't. Don't be silly. But it WAS a lot of fun, in a pick-up-and-play kind of way, and that got me to some thinking.

The thing that I thought specifically was this: 2D beat-'em-ups probably represent the last game genre that would be recognisable as a videogame to someone who fell into a coma after the release of Space Invaders and had only just woken up.

Because the videogame as we used to know it is dead.

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Think about it. Videogames started in arcades, so they all conformed to arcade values - they had to be easy to understand quickly, they had to give you some excitement pretty early on to get you hooked, and they had to be enjoyable enough to keep you pumping cash in when they got tough.

(And here, incidentally, I'm talking about having another go when you got killed, not the more modern, depressing House Of The Dead sort of thing where any chimp can finish the game as long as they've got enough cash.)

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And then, of course, games moved on to the old 8-bit home computers and consoles, where all the same rules applied but for different reasons (ie the machines were so primitive that they simply couldn't cope with hugely complex games).

What this meant - as people are always saying without really understanding what they're talking about or what the implications are - is that old videogames had to have engaging gameplay, because there was nothing else to hide it behind.

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Nowadays, of course, things are different, but I'm NOT talking about fancy graphics and stuff. Better graphics are, quite clearly, both inevitable and a good thing.

But these days, writing a game that's immediately accessible and playable is actually seen as a mistake. Bring out something that people can just pick up and play and idiot spods will sneer that it's "a kid's game", or it lacks "depth", or it "doesn't make use of the machine's capabilities", whatever the flip that's supposed to mean.

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Because now that games are so much more expensive than they used to be, developers are forced to justify the cost by making games superficially complex, so that it at least LOOKS like you're getting a lot of gameplay for your money.

But big fat manuals are a red herring. A game like Command And Conquer doesn't actually have any more "depth" than, say, Diddy Kong Racing. In fact, quite the opposite. In C&C, everything is handed to you on a plate, whereas in DKR you have to dig for it. Ironically.

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In a game like Diddy Kong (or, say, Super Mario Bros) you have to use a very simple set of rules, and your imagination, to discover endless new strategies, tricks, shortcuts, secrets, and so on and so forth.

With C&C, though, once you've spent three days learning all the keys you'll never find anything new again. All the "gameplay" and "depth" is in the manual, rather than being in the game.

Which brings me, in case you thought I'd forgotten, back to 2D beat-'em-ups.

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Because 2D beat-'em-ups are probably the last genre where it's still more or less respectable to bring out a game that anyone can pick up and get into straight away, yet get better and better at the more they play.

(Even racing games these games are often hideously complicated, with 15 car set-up screens to plough through and complex physics to learn before you can actually go and do some racing.)

And I don't know about you, but that makes me pretty sad.

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Because the videogames of today aren't the videogames I fell in love with.

They're designed either for total spods (PC games, characterised by those fat manuals and using a mouse - the worst action-game control device EVER - to play a game like Kingpin), or simple-headed morons. (And here I'm thinking of the people who found even Mario 64 too complex and had to have Crash Bandicoot written for them instead.)