Over the coming months - no, years - I'll be picking out a few of the more interesting - no, thrilling - developments, rumours and hypes in what those fantastic marketing people we all love so very very much like to refer to as 'the leisure environment'. But - hey - that's enough of my laughably transparent 'intro'. Let's talk games.   

It's a funny old games machine, the PC. Where's the cartridge slot, for one thing? And it hasn't even got a joystick port! What's going on? (Start again. - Ed)

Schizophrenia. That's what comes into my head when someone says 'PC games' to me. (Billy my invisible ferret tells it to, you see.) On the one hand, you've got something like WING COMMANDER: PRIVATEER (Origin, £39.99, coming very soon). Astonishing graphics the like of which your average SNES owner just wouldn't believe, half-a-film's-worth of utterly convincing speech (if you buy the extra Speech Accessory Pack, natch), and truly interactive gameplay that makes a mockery of the notion that Mega CD-style Full Motion Video 'interactive movies' where you press a control once every 30 seconds and go to sleep once every five minutes are the future of video games. It looks amazing, albeit in the same way that Wing Commander itself was amazing, ie aesthetically rather than in terms of incredible gameplay depth, but amazing all the same. And the really great thing is (if you've got a machine that's big enough to run it on in the first place, of course), the PC appears to do it all without even breaking sweat.

But then, on the other hand, sometimes the PC tries its hand at platform games, and everything gets a bit embarrassing. Suddenly, your £1500-odd hardware set-up looks like a Master System having a bad day. Why is this? Why should it be? Why does ZOOL (Gremlin, £29.99, out, ooh, weeks and weeks ago) on the PC, say, look like a bad take on the Amiga 500 version, not even the sexy A1200 incarnation? (These are rhetorical questions, by the way. Please don't write in and tell me, I wouldn't understand you) Frankly, I don't know, but if you want to watch your PC struggle for yourself, you could do worse than take a look at OSCAR (Flair, £25.99, full review this issue), like I did this month. See? It just can't do it.

What I want to know is, if a £99 SNES can handle Wing Commander AND Super Mario World, why can't a £1000+ PC? If you've forked out all that money to play games (which you almost certainly haven't, but this is a games magazine so bear with me for the sake of argument, okay?), surely the least you could expect would be a machine with a bit of versatility, yes? I'm sure it's not the hardware. Let's see, just for a change, someone do a great PC game that doesn't need 15 megs of hard disk space just to be playable in less than three days. I like more than one kind of game, and I'm sure you do, too, and you're never going to make a leisure experience for all the family out of Ultima Underworld. Let's get populist, why don't we? Come on, you know you want to.