You don't see many compilations these days. Not legal ones, anyway. There was a period in the late 80s and early 90s when companies like Ocean, Elite, Gremlin and US Gold would spit them out like, well, spit. In the week we're time travelling 14 years back to though, compilations were still fairly rare and Virgin Games - hugely respected now, not really the case then - decided to borrow the name, logo and artwork from its music biz division so that us geeky anoraks would understand the concept. Now Games cost £8.95 and its c30 tape contained six Spectrum titles: Lords of Midnight, Brian Bloodaxe, Strangeloop, Arabian Nights, Pyjamarama and Falcon Patrol II.

The first game, Lords of Midnight, was one of the early home computing classics and the final title, Falcon Patrol II was an okayish plane game. In between were four 'arcade adventures'. Yes, four; all essentially the same game. The popularity of arcade adventures was due to the excellent and imaginative epics released by Ultimate Play The Game (now known as Rare, of course), such as Atic Attack and Knight Lore. The punters loved 'em. As a result, every publisher worth his Porsche - including Ultimate - began churning them out non-stop. Eventually, of course, we all became heartily sick of them and stopped buying them altogether, but I digress.

What the Now Games publishers didn't take into account when they were putting their compilation tape together was the differing levels that the original games were mastered at. This meant that getting a game to load - never an easy task on a Spectrum - became even more difficult because if the cassette deck settings for Lords of Midnight were correct, it was highly unlikely that the next game would load. And if that one did then the next one certainly wouldn't, not without altering the volume and tone controls anyway. What was even worse was that many people didn't have tape counters on their cassette decks, so the only way they could find each game was to load the previous one, reset the computer and then load the next. Fine, if long-winded. But when one of the games failed to load it was easy to get lost on the tape, and after subjecting everyone to audio blasts of the cracklin', hissin' and a-poppin', the only solution would be to press rewind, go back to the beginning and start all over again...

You're right. It wasn't worth it. Tape loading sucked, but loading compilations, well... Just another example, I suppose, of the rubbish those early pioneers put up with and overcame so that we, their successors, could all have reliable, error free computers which play every game as and when we want them to...