Hey - the Nintendo Switch isn't the only Nintendo product to launch with barely any software support. Released in 1985, Nintendo's R.O.B. - its Robotic Operated Buddy - was heavily promoted alongside the NES, and doubtlessly helped Nintendo gain a foothold, following the 1983 video game crash.

Unfortunately, R.O.B. might've had good intentions - he was designed to be a second player for friendless youths - but only worked with two games; Gyromite and Stack-Up. Aren't you supposed to learn from your mistakes, Nintendo?

Of course, R.O.B. wasn't the only commercially available "robot" in the robot-obsessed 1980s. Here are ten more.

To say that Nintendo's Switch unveiling has received a mixed response would be an understatement, akin to suggesting that octopods have "A few extra legs". The general consensus is: fun games, such as they are... nicely designed hardware... ALL OTHER THINGS WRONG.

My prediction? The Switch is going to sell out at launch (which we're never going to hear the end of). It's going to sell better overall than the Wii U. But it isn't going to do the business that Nintendo would like. Third parties will slowly drift away as a result, and we'll get a system that within a couple of years is going to find itself in very much the same situation as the Wii U. Albeit having shifted a few more units.

Does that matter? Possibly not. Nintendo doesn't need to win the console wars. I mean, Microsoft's Xbox One lags way behind the PS4, but it's clearly turning enough of a profit for them to keep persevering with it. That's all Nintendo needs to do: make enough money to keep producing games for the Switch. 

One other positive to take away from this stream of negativity: people are up in arms because they care about Nintendo. Gamers of a certain age genuinely love Nintendo. They want Nintendo to do well. I want Nintendo to do well. You can see this deranged, blind optimism in the number of post-launch posts and pieces refusing to acknowledge that the Switch's third-party support is actually a bit vague in the exact same way it was at the launch of the Wii U, and how everyone is pretending to be excited about the six year-old Skyrim heading to the console. Inexplicable.

Unfortunately, after almost 25 years writing about games I've got a pretty good track record of reading the tea leaves, and history tells me that consoles which stumble out of the gate find it almost impossible to gain ground. Here's everything about the Switch launch which concerns me.

It's impossible to overstate how popular Masters of the Universe toys were in the 1980s. Not only were the figures colourful and packed with action features, but there was a barely-concealed undercurrent of homoeroticism. 

All those leather harnesses, tiny pants, and bare legs... No wonder they were called Masters of the Universe - they probably spent most of their time sitting around "masting". Ho ho.

Anyway. Masters of the Universe toys might've been popular - but they were also utterly ridiculous, with their calcified knees, and top-heavy bodies. If they existed in the real world, they'd probably require corrective surgery.

Here are the ten stupidest.

Did you stay up until 4am to watch the Nintendo Switch presentation? You did? Well, that was a bit stupid. It wasn't really worth it was it? There was nothing in there which couldn't have waited until a reasonable hour. What exactly were you expecting? What were you so excited about? Think about your life, please.

If you're reading this, I'm assuming you know some stuff about the Nintendo Switch already.

You know it's basically a portable console that you can also plug into your TV. You know it comes with two tiny joypads which combine to make one large, unwieldy joypad. You know it's a return to cartridge-based gaming (albeit little, 3DS-sized cartridges, which you will lose).

Many are speculating that it's a final throw of the hardware dice for Nintendo, following the relative disappointment of the Wii U, but... actually... no... it's too boring to continue to speculate about all that. Just read on, Papa, for my take on the latest Switch launch day deets.

DEET DEET! HONK!

I've probably mentioned before about how I sold all my Star Wars toys for £50 in 1984, to have spending money for a trip to America to visit my sister. It broke my heart, and then it broke my heart again when I saw all the Star Wars toys on America store shelves, which weren't available back home.

Worse still, there was a new action figure craze sweeping America in 1984 - Transformers - which was clearly encroaching on the space that retailers were prepared to give over to Star Wars toys. With no new Star Wars movies on the horizon I could see that the writing was on the wall.

Maybe it was bitterness, maybe it was me telling myself that I needed to grow up, but I always viewed Transformers with suspicion after that point. Consequently, even with the dollars burning a hole in my thigh, I was never tempted to buy one... however cool I might've felt they were beneath my affected disinterest.

This is long overdue, but it is at last time for me to enact some degree of retribution on the toys which I associate with throttling my childhood prematurely. Here are the ten worst Transformers ever.

It was actually harder than I thought to find ten really bad Fighting Fantasy covers. All of them, without exception, had something to love.

Still, it's always fairly easy to be mean, so of course I rose to the challenge and have decided to be needlessly nasty about a subject which brought joy to millions of 1980s children. This is investigative journalism at its finest.

Therefore, following the ten best that I chose yesterday, here are the ten Fighting Fantasy covers which I declare to be this: the worst.

There's a theory about drug addiction which is often overlooked when it comes to the so-called "War on Drugs". Popular opinion has it that drugs contain chemicals which cause an individual's body to crave them, so that they find it almost impossible to give up.

The emotional side of drug abuse is all too often overlooked. Drug addicts are typically dehumanised, portrayed as skanky monsters, as losers, or wasters. A drain on society. Indeed, there's a good reason for that: addicts are a nightmare. Potentially, they're a disruptive element in society, the more serious addicts are willing to say anything, and do anything, to get their next fix. Long-term drug addicts stay stuck, emotionally, at the age they were when they started using.

However, what this tends to overlook is the emotional damage that not only creates an addict in the first place, but which keeps them trapped in their addiction. However, there's a school of wisdom that's gaining traction, which suggest that if you improve an addict's environment, and offer them social connections, you potentially break their addiction cycle.

Early experiments with addictive substances in the 1960s would place rats alone in cages, and give them a choice of plain water, or water laced with heroin or cocaine. Ninety percenty of the rats would choose the drugged-up water, and keep choosing it until they overdosed and died.

However, in the 1970s, a Canadian professor of psychology called Bruce Alexander tried a different approach. Instead of the bare, basic cage containing just one rat - he gave rats a luxury, shared habitat called "Rat Park". It offered mental stimulation in the form of coloured balls and tunnels, and he fed them the best quality food. Less than a quarter of the rats in Rat Park opted for the drug-laced water.

The rats who went from a depressing, isolated cage to Rat Park would - after some initial symptoms of withdrawal - return to a normal, drug-free, existance.

Those of a certain age will no doubt remember the Fighting Fantasy books. Before the advent of Game Boys and smartphones, it was the choose-your-own-adventure books written by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson that we'd smuggle into school.

​Indeed, so taken was I with the books that I wrote my English Literature O Level essay on Deathrap Dungeon (albeit in part because I knew it wouldn't require me to read an entire proper book). I got a C.

For many of us, part of the series' appeal was the covers. At least initially; the later Fighting Fantasy artwork lacked the gorgeous, painted, detail of the early ones - which we are right celebrating today.

Or you can just skip ahead to the crap ones. 

Next week, Nintendo hammers another nail into the coffin of its Wii brand, as it unveils further details about its Switch console.

It feels like only yesterday since we all baulked at the name of the Wii - speculating that everyone would be laughing too hard to actually buy the thing. Well, we all got that wrong, though many of us put our money were our laugh glands were when the Wii U came out, and never bought one.

Please, embrace this one final chance to have a giggle at the Wii's expense, with this gallery of barely-concealed Wii bootlegs.

Guest Article by SuperBadAdvice

​​In space, no one can hear you go "Oh, is that it? Really? Oh. OH!"
 
So the tree is back in the toilet cistern, you’ve unravelled your novelty jumper ready to re-knit it next year, and we’re all sick to the gills of leftovers from traditional festive favourites such as boiled pelican, parsnips in Lilt and croquembouche.

Yes, Christmas is over again, and it’s now down to the important business of selling all the stuff you didn’t want to fund buying the stuff you did want that your mum wrote down the wrong number for when she went to Argos (which is why you ended up with stuff you didn’t want in the first place).
​
One such thing I bought myself with my ill-gotten gains was a copy of EVE: Valkyrie for the PSVR. An offshoot of the EVE Online MMORPG (whatever that means), it’s a 3D space shooter. Except of course,  because it’s in VR, it’s a space shooter where you can spend an inordinately long time staring in wonder at your own simulated knees before falling off your chair from motion sickness.
 
Mr Biffo reviewed the game last year (observe here), so I won’t retread the same ground too much – suffice to say I felt much the same as he did: it looks lovely and occasionally stunning, but it’s far too short.

​Plus the pay-to-win microtransactions on top of a huge asking price for not very much is really pushing the cheeky boat far too far up everyone’s canal for comfort. In fact, had I not snagged a copy for well under half price in a sale I’d be fairly livid about the meagre offerings.

Pocketeers. Remember them? I didn't until just now. And then I remembered that I owned tons of them. In fact, I owned every single one on this list - and more. What a horrible spoilt child I must've been.

How is it possible I could've forgotten them though? What else have I forgotten? Where am I? What happened to my trousers? What's all this soft stuff in my undies...?

Tomy's Pocketeers - distrubuted by Palitoy in the UK - were pre-electronic games; wind-up handheld whimsies, which sometimes attempted to emulate popular arcade games through mechanical and magnetic means.

I mostly recall being bought them for long car journeys - in motorway service stations and the like. Though given the precision required for most of these games, it's unlikely that a bumpy car ride was particularly conducive to success, not least when being slapped by your mother for asking "How much longer in minutes?" over and over and over.

In an age before smartphones, before the Game Boy, before Game & Watch even, Pocketeers were the only way kids could enjoy on-the-go gaming. Here are the ten Pocketeers I remember best, sort of. 

One Christmas, many years ago, I asked my parents for a watch. Of course, I didn't want any old watch: I wanted one of those new digital watches, which all my friends were getting. Foolishly, I assumed that my mother would understand this, and forgot to specify on my Christmas list the type of watch I wanted. Consequently, on Christmas morning I had to feign appreciation as I unwrapped an old-fashioned analogue watch. 

"Is this a wind-up?" I probably should've asked, hilariously.

Adding insult to injury, it was a footballer-themed watch - a player's vibrating leg operated as some sort of second hand, as if he was having a seizure - and I didn't even like football. 

When I returned to school after the holidays, it was without a watch on my wrist. Gallingly, Patrick Frieze was there in the playground, proudly showing off his massive new calculator watch, and asked me if I got the watch I'd asked for.

"Yeah," I mumbled... 

"Digital?"

"Yes."

"Good man. Let's see it."

"I left it at home, in case it got damaged."

I did eventually get a digital watch, but it had a metal strap, and it used to pinch my skin. Be careful what you wish for, chillen.

Hey - did you know that you used to be able to play games on your watches? Of course you did. Here's a gallery of some of those things what I just done mentioned an ting.

I had a pretty decent haul of gifts this Christmas. Partly, this was because I kept buying myself stuff and asking my other half to wrap it up for me, and this is why I am now so poor.

One of the things I did get, which I'd almost forgotten asking for - though, let's face it, I was so ill over Christmas that I'd forgotten most of my name - was this: a Nintendo Classic Mini. That's the official name - you know it better as the NES Mini, the shrunk-down version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. That's correct: the one with 30 games stuffed into its guts.

A few people have been a bit sniffy about the NES Mini (I'm steadfast in calling it that, in the hope that they'll do a SNES Mini), because all of the games are already available on the Nintendo Store.

Or - let's face it - freely available online.

Or because they think scoffing at popular things makes them look cool.

​Plus, some people have even made their own miniature NES out of a Raspberry Pi, and believe that being able to do that makes them better than the rest of us.

​Well, bully for all of them, the bunch of sneering, arrogant elitists. The second I laid eyes on the NES Mini I wanted one, and now I have one, and it's one of my favourite things ever, and I don't even feel the need to show off about it.

How do you like them apples?