What has been the biggest videogaming let-down for you last year?
I think the sameness of a lot of the games - the same old genres, the same old tired cliches, more first-person shooters, more realtime strategy games, more lame science fiction settings - it’s tedious. There just aren’t enough really original, detailed strategy games coming out. Some of the best strategy games over the last year or so were Warlords III, Alpha Centauri, and Caesar II, but none of them were actually brand new styles of game, just sequels basically. Really, the freshest stuff came from some of the sports management games like Baseball Mogul, which entertained me for weeks (and still does). I know you get a lot of sports management games over here but in the US they’ve been ignored by the big publishers, though I can’t see why.

Any titles you’re really looking forward to in the near future?
Now that Alpha Centauri is out, I’d probably say Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. It’s been a while since I’ve played a new Master of Orion-type game, and that one seems to be the nearest. Plus it’s Star Trek, which is pretty cool. I also want to play Starfleet Command, Omikron, Kingpin, and New Worlds, among many, many others, and whichever deathmatch game comes out first: Quake III or Unreal Tournament.

When all’s said and done, what’s your favourite game ever?
I’d have to say Civilization II, which is a pretty easy answer. You’ve heard a million reasons why it’s a great game, many, many times before, I’m sure, so I’ll just say this - unlike a lot of other games, winning at Civilization always left me with a feeling of accomplishment. Part of this was probably due to the replay screen at the end which shows how your empire evolved over time - a small feature, really, but one that always amused me.