This month, dearest comrades, I'm going to talk about progress. Ironically, I'm going to do this by talking about a game several decades old.

There will be a point at the end.

I hate Christmas.

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The game I'm going to talk about is the ancient world domination board game Risk. And more specifically, a couple of computer-game versions of it.

Version 1 ("New Risk") is the exciting new all-singing, all-dancing updated-for-the-90s PC CD-ROM version just released by Hasbro for £45.

Version 2 ("Old Risk") is a PC version published by Virgin several years ago, which is a direct copy of the original board game with no new features, and can be picked up for about a fiver.

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The most obvious difference between New Risk and Old Risk is the visual one.

Old Risk has the entire board visible onscreen all the time, so you can see the entire world situation at a glance and conduct your strategy accordingly.

New Risk, however, adds lovely detailed new graphics, which unfortunately means you have to spend half the game scrolling messily around the map to find out where your armies are.

New Risk 0 Old Risk 1.

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Presentation-wise, New Risk is packed to bursting with new options, lavish music and lush animations. Which means it takes you about five minutes to actually get a game started.

Old Risk, on the other hand, requires you to press F2.

Old Risk also has all the commands on standard Windows menus, whereas New Risk features stupid icons which you have to work out the meaning of.

New Risk 0 Old Risk 2.

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When it comes to actually playing the game, things are much the same.

Except that in Old Risk, the PC does all the tedious dice-rolling and number-crunching, so the CPU players' turns are over in seconds (unless you want to watch them, which you can).

New Risk, however, insists on showing you it's lovely dice animations, little marching soldiers and everything, on every single turn. It takes hours.

New Risk 0 Old Risk 3.

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The whole of Old Risk occupies slightly over 1 Mb of hard drive space, and will run on a rusty old toilet of a PC.

New Risk recommends having a Pentium with 12Mb and a 4xCD-ROM, and the smallest possible installation is over 5.5Mb, although to do it all properly you'll need almost 70Mb.

Plus it hides lots of other bits of itself all over your PC where you can't find them to delete them again. Git.

New Risk 0 Old Risk 4.

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Now, to be fair, New Risk has a lot more to it than Old Risk. There are whole new types of game, and complex new features like POWs, fortresses, and army command infrastructure. (Honest.)

Old Risk can play standard, original boardgame Risk, and that's all.

However, it can play it in 15 minutes. The same game played with New Risk, with the same number of rounds, takes about two-and-a-half hours.

New Risk 1 Old Risk 5.

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I suppose you'll be wanting the point now, if you haven't worked it out already. It's not really about Risk.

Progress is good. New things are frequently better than the old things. But it's not automatic.

Here, for nine times the price, you can play something that's slower, more annoying, greedier and more confusing than the original. This is progress?