This month, chums, I’m filing Panel 4 from dear old Scotland, where the air is clean, the water is soft and the rugby teams are a bit rubbish.

But in one sense, I haven’t gone anywhere at all.

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And since it’s you, I’ll explain what I mean. Y’see, when I’m back at home, I often like to flick through my boxes of old videogames magazines from my 8-bit computer-owning days.

And this week, I’ve been enjoying some vintage copies of Crash, a truly brilliant Spectrum magazine that was the inspiration for my getting into games journalism in the first place.

(Not that that always seems like anything to thank it for.)

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Now the thing is, chums, I’m quite a bit older than most of you are, and I occasionally wonder if that means that I’m not really in touch with the way things are and the way people think in the exciting games world of today.

So it came as something of a relief to me to read all my old CRASHes, and discover that over the 12 years or so since its heyday, things have changed exactly this much:

Not at all.

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One of the first stories I came across, for example, was a tale of Amstrad (who by 1987 had bought all the rights to the Spectrum) releasing a "follow-up" machine, the Spectrum +3.

Not only was the +3 a badly-bodged job that wasn’t compatible with a load of old Speccy games (a ploy that Commodore would use several times in subsequent years with the Amiga), but it was cynically overpriced too.

Who said so? The chairman of Amstrad.

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Yes, Amstrad’s boss Alan Sugar freely admitted in an interview with Crash that the Spectrum +3 had been deliberately overpriced (£250) at its launch in order to "fleece" early adopters, and to provide the opportunity for an impressive-looking price cut six months later.

Sound familiar, N64 and Saturn fans?

(Mind you, Sugar also claimed in the same article that the +3 probably wouldn’t be the last Spectrum ever.)

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But there were more familiar figures to be found in the pages of my old Crash collection, too. One of them was a fresh-faced young executive in a stripy shirt called William M "Trip" Hawkins.

(That’s the name of the guy, not the shirt.)

"Trip" was talking as the President of his fledgling corporation, Electronic Arts, which was taking its first steps into Europe at the 1987 PCW Show. (The ECTS of the 80s.)

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His views were interesting, too. One of the first things Hawkins said was "We really need to have a standardised computer – if every TV was different and they couldn’t receive the same broadcasts it’d be untenable."

(These were the days before games consoles had really caught on.)

It’s odd, then, that "Trip" went on to invent two entirely new, non-standard games machines in the form of the 3DO and the abortive M2.

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In the interview, "Trip" also bemoaned the lack of software around which appealed to women (no change there), the lack of grown-up themes in gaming (hey ho), the dearth of originality and – here’s a good one – the excessive price of games.

(This in the days when an average title cost around £8.)

He further demanded that computers should become much easier to use for ordinary people. Nice to see we’ve made so much progress there.

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So you see, chums, even after two gaming generations, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

(In 1987, there were magazine wars too, with Crash and Personal Computer Games at each other’s throats – PCG called Crash "Trash" – ooh! - while Crash stingingly retorted that PCG’s initials stood for "Pukingly Cruddy Garbage".)