The games I played: Keeping it simple since the start

Even though I still get stuck into some Serious Sam when I need to blow away some demon scum, my video gaming days are long behind me, and I've missed out on the last three or four generations of technology that have come out in the past 20 years.

But I was also born in the mid-70s and the first few lightning-fast generations of video games were the fucking future, man. It was genuinely mind-blowing stuff.

And the first proper video game I ever got to master was a Pong rip-off that we got for Christmas in the early 80s. It promised 32 games, but only nine of them worked, and they were all some variation on the Pong thing, with two lines blocking a bouncing pixel.

It was basic as fuck and still stunningly addictive, and I spent vast amounts of my childhood bashing on that controller. As well as giving me some hand/eye coordination that was off the charts, (which proved stunningly unhelpful in life), the game also inscribe don me that the simplest games were the best

And even as the consoles came and went, and got progressively more complex every time, it was still the simple shit that I liked the most. The blockiness of Tetris, and the simplicity of Spider Solitaire, (even if you do have to cheat).

Even now, in this science-fiction world that can conjure up all sorts of altered realities, it's the Sudoku or 2048 on the phone that I'm still playing every day. There's a time and a place for things to get more complicated, but there's always room for some basic shit.