OLD FASHIONED COMPUTER GAMES MADE A TRIP TO THE PINBALL PARLOUR FEEL LIKE A BIG DAY OUT

In this digital age of 3-D computer games and state of the art technology, the humble alternatives which I was raised on seem to have gone out with Noah`s ark and buckle up boots. 

To this day, I have never played a computer game on a computer itself. Tell me, can you actually still do that? The last time I can remember anybody playing a game on a computer, without having any auxiliary device plugged in the back of it, was when my best friend Mick still had his COMMODORE 64.

Oh man that does seem like a long time ago. It is, because I know that was about 1986.

Judging by the obsessions that many people now have with Facebook, Twitter and all manner of other social networking on the internet, I would have to qualify that computer games aren`t so evil afterall. 

My mum absolutely loathes Facebook, it took her a while but in the end she even convinced me it was a gigantic heap of chit, and not just because I struck about two hundred weirdo women on there.

Slightly off the subject just for a sec but I recently went to my best mate Michael`s wedding, and his cousin Vaughn, who is a lively personality and was the MC for Michael and Jodi`s big day, told me his thoughts on Facebook. 

One sentence summed it up, he said `he`d be damned if he wanted to tell the world what he was having for breakfast`. I cracked up when he said that. 

Getting back to computer games, remember
the days when all the young kids were going WOOooooo over SPACE INVADERS, ASTEROIDS and FROGGER on the good old ATARI 2600 game console. 

It was like WOW MAN!, LOOK AT THE GRAPHICS ON THIS GAME DUDE! (Laugh). 

Oh how things have changed since the halycon days of the early 80`s, and more often than not, not for the better. Okay, the games on the ATARI 2600 may not have been exactly 3-D, in fact they were very what you might say `flat screen` and made a trip to the pinball parlour feel like a big day out.

But the innocence of computer games when

they first come out in my childhood years was not a bad thing at all, and the ATARI 2600 machine entertained me on many afternoons when I had nothing much to do or when I got sick of being picked on by my brothers playing cricket in the backyard (laugh). They weren`t that bad!