I'm not ashamed of it, I love video games. I always have, and since I am now 31 and haven't grown out of them yet, I've come to the conclusion I always will.

Since my first handheld game, the Nintendo classic 'Parachute', which my parent's bought for me in 82, I have been truly a video game junky. I used to hide under my doona with a torch until way after I was supposed to be asleep playing that sucker until I 'clocked' it. I then did the same with the more new fangled double screen games, with Donkey Kong II taking up the lions share of my time.

From then I graduated to the Commodore 64 in 84, and spent untolled hours of my youthplaying games on it when I should have been outside getting exercise. My particular favourite was the quintessential platformer 'Impossible Mission', a game which had a blood curdling digitised scream that helped spurn a life spend loosing my temper at innanimate computer programs. My mother used to loose her temper at me for screaming at the tv and calling it a cheat. I still have the photo I took of the score screen with my trusty Koday 110 camera to prove to people that I actually completed the thing when I nonchalantly started calling it 'Possible Mission'.

I did the usual run after that, NES, Super NES, Sony Playstation, Sony Playstation 2 (bought on release day), a game cube and various PC's. I never did own an Amiga though, and I always felt I missed out on some quality games.

So today, when the guy a couple of cubicles away from me at work posted a message on the corporate intranet that he was giving his Amiga away, with over 100 games to boot, I got mildly excited. I then had second thoughts, I mean this whole adult life caper, with a full time job, and housework and all the other responsibilities one assumes in adulthood has left me with a pretty substantial backlog of books to read, games to play and films to watch. I need about a 3 month period of paid unemployment to catch up - perhaps I'll try breaking my leg.

Fortunately, while I was debating the idea of bringing this nostalgic doorstop home, I overheard the guy give it to someone else. Lucky really, because I am pretty confident Karen would have been a bit dark on the idea of more clutter in this already cluttered study.

I think I'll just download an emulator.........