Dear Future Gamer,

Yours is an emag that is very much appreciated in this here cowboy town. Mix FG with Top Gear for a lethal Thursday Nitro Toluene quarry-maker! Timed explosion!!

Ah, liquid nostalgia - it fuels my Happy Rocket and blasts me off to the moon of my past. Sensible World Of Soccer, Frontier and Elite, Dungeon Keeper Mistresses, Spindizzy! I am not alone! It makes me so joyous that I feel like shouting to myself during a major Snooker tournament. Let's play Draughts!!

Scoring system debate - enter Richie stage left, holding up (for the benefit of the audience) a mildewed copy of ACE. Our sweaty insomnia-cursed hero staggers to stage centre, and hams until dead, like Peter Sellers' Bugler in The Party. ACE drops from hand, falls open to reveal (pillow) scores out of 1000 nestling snugly beside (duvet) graphs of gameplay longevity. Audience: "Could he be trying to tell us something?" All together now: "Paw, paw, whine/there's a boy trapped down a mine!!"

Hey, Patrick Allen Gannon - when you were younger (about 10-12), did you have light blonde curly hair, wear a suit, speak received pronunciation, and deal in antiques? I disliked you intensely. You're right about principles, unfortunately. A politician's job awaits you, young sir.

Rich Simisker

FG: Phew Rich. You may be in a cowboy town but someone's dealing some heavy Class A down there! What the blithering heck was most of that about? As to the ACE scores, I was staff writer on the magazine and remember the Predicted Interest Curve we used to score games - it was written by our Cambridge Maths grad and reviews editor Andy Wilton, and it worked like this: We scored a game out of a hundred in the following categories - minute's play, hour's play, day's, week's month's and year's play. The formulae then decided the game's score. It was great. Onto your second point, I know I said we'd leave Patrick alone, but I remember seeing the kid you're on about on telly! Didn't he run his own flower shop as well? A right precocious little git he was.