There’s nothing wrong with looking to the past, as long as it’s to learn its lessons.

And remember, chums: Kill all hippies!

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Yes, viewers, this month we’re concluding our look back at the historic first 50 Panel 4 columns what I’ve wrote over the last five years, and seeing if the world of videogames has become a more excellent place to be, or what.

When you left us, in March 1998, we were bemoaning the fact that Sega had finally messed up so many times that it was dead as a major force in the games business. The firm is still twitching, like a chicken with its head cut off, but the knacker’s yard is close.

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Column 26 tortured an analogy out over nine pages, in order to make the point that sometimes, it would be nice if people in the games press had the guts to stand up for its own beliefs, instead of just going along with whatever that month’s biggest hype was.

Since then, of course, the only thing that has changed is that magazines now publicly ADMIT that they give out review scores according to what people expect, rather than whether the game is any good or not. Which is progress of a sort, I suppose.

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Column 27 suggested a load of ways in which to apply just a hint of originality to all the tedious old formulaic Tomb Raider/Quake clones which have suffocated the life out of the games charts.

Ideas included setting games in a hotel, on a train, in a school, in an office or in a prison.

Today, two years later, every Tomb Raider rip-off is still set in a spoddy fantasy world populated by demons and big bug-eyed monsters. Sigh.

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In Column 32, we noted that videogames couldn’t compete with other forms of culture like books, movies and music, because they were emotionally stunted, stuck at a 9-year-old’s mental level.

(As usual, the rest of the world has caught up with Panel 4 a couple of years later, with bigwig Jack Knoll saying the same thing in Newsweek magazine last month.)

Shenmue on Dreamcast has at least attempted to address this issue. But no-one else has. Or probably will.

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Column 35 was a shocking, serious and controversial piece, which exposed some truly outrageous behaviour on the part of the games business.

Accordingly, Digi’s terrified subs completely suppressed it, and it was never seen on screen. (If you want to see it now, visit my website at http://come.to/worldofstuart.)

And in case you’re wondering, despite subsequent promises from games industry chiefs, the charities have still never seen any of the money.

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An unusually cheerful Column 37 was blown away by the excellence of the then-new Game Boy Color.

The only fly in the ointment was the price of software, which was absurdly being sold for almost as much as Playstation games which cost hundreds of times more to produce.

Now, of course, things are different. Now you can buy new PS games for LESS than the price of the Game Boy version.

Which is pretty weird, really.

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Column 38 had a good Rod Hull joke in, which also didn’t get past the censors.

Column 39 accused PC owners of stupid paranoia, an allegation which they cleverly refuted by sending in thousands of really paranoid letters.

Column 40 noted that even after two decades, gaming was still an almost exclusively male pursuit. It still is.

And in Column 41, Sega were still messing up. There are some things in life you can always rely on.

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Column 44 cast doubt on the reasons for the delay in launching the Dreamcast. Sega claimed that the console – being sold on the strength of its online-gaming abilities - had to be held back for several weeks in order to get the online features ready properly.

And yet, six months later, there are still precisely NO online multi-player DC games, and none are apparently going to be ready until this Christmas.

Strangely, no games magazines have taken Sega to task on the matter.

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In Column 45, we sobbed quietly for a while about the way Dungeons & Dragons-loving nerds were taking over games again, after a couple of years of gaming being "cool". The trend, tragically, continues.

Column 46, in a post-modernly self-referential way, noted how little things in the games business had changed since 1989.

And Column 47 said that the new version of Pong was fabulous, but that idiot mags would slag it off. And they did.

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And finally, Column 49 said that maybe the Dreamcast would have a last-minute chance of success if Sega concentrated on its strengths and brought out loads of ports of its excellent arcade games, and stopped trying to be a Playstation with slightly more expensive software.

Since then, Crazy Taxi has rocketed up the charts and made Sega a big bunch of money. Number of other coin-op conversions on the company’s latest release/development schedule: None.

Sega’s losses last year: £250 million.

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And here we are. I hope you haven’t been too bored or depressed by this look back at five years of the games business totally failing to learn anything about anything.

I would have ranted on about Sony’s mess-ups with the PS2, but I have to write a certain number of columns every year that don’t offend anyone or I get in trouble.