Strategy games. Command and Conquer clones. Role-playing games. Flight sims. No PC owner ever bothers with anything else, which is a good joke on the publishers who busily convert all manner of top console releases. Network gaming is absurdly primitive in Britain thanks to the prohibitively mediaeval phone system, but multi-player games such as Quake always score highly in magazines. Coincidentally, mag reviewers have large, free, extremely fast inter-office networks. If you want to play a Quake clone, become a student.

Considering they're computers, and so don't need costly additional development kits with which to write games, the PC's range, though vast, is surprisingly unadventurous. The number of thrilling new games emerging from singly occupied fusty back rooms is negligible, as all the hobbyist programmers are working on emulators. Though, say, the Playstation has its Namco Museum compilations, every games machine (except, I think, the Jaguar) can be emulated on the PC, so, if nothing else, you could have a splendid historical library using one. If it doesn't crash and irrevocably wipe your hard drive, of course.

(Slight tangent. You may not be interested in old games, but ignoring them altogether - or actively suppressing them as this whole anti-emulation crackdown appears bizarrely to be aiming for, with official industry support - means all the gaming principles they established will be lost. There are people making games now who have no idea of the history, and consequently go on to revive crass design errors eliminated years ago. "Up" to jump, anybody? End of slight tangent.)

If you want a PC to play new games, don't buy a PC. Buy a Dreamcast. That's the point, after all - it's a console-shaped PC that takes all the horror out of trying to make one work. Except Sony's just killed it by waving a piece of paper.

J Nash's PC rating: Many games, some fantastically excellent, but an unreliable and horrid machine. If you can show me three people who'll recommend buying a PC to play games on, all three will be lying.

Next week, I shall conclude my investigation by investigating the thing that is the machine called the N64. In the meantime, why not try the new J Nash thing, which is called The Weekly? Oh. All right then.