It has finally happened: I've become obsessed with a YouTuber. Well, two YouTubers; Kay, the Sheffield-based host of the Kay's Good Cooking channel, and her son Lee, who vlogs on the channel Leeiscool1 (his Leeiscool2 channel features his gaming videos, while Leeiscool Singing has two videos of Lee "singing"...).

I'm not the first person to notice Kay - in fact, I was alerted to her when one of the Pickford Brothers - they of Plok and Wetrix - linked to her videos on Facebook. She's even appeared on TV with Harry Hill, and boasts a considerable 19,000 subscribers. 

As the title of her channel implies, Kay presents cooking videos - introducing them with a screech of "Hiiiiiii people!" - all filmed by Lee, who usually makes an appearance at the end to do a taste test. Unless Kay deems there's no point "because everybody already knows what chicken tastes like".

Typically, Kay will front her videos wearing either an Iron Maiden t-shirt (she professes not to be a fan of the band - she just likes the shirts), or, for some reason, a Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain shirt. Seemingly without even trying - she started making her videos at Lee's suggestion, simply because she enjoyed cooking - Kay has become a bona-fide icon.

Unlike other YouTube channels, where everything is filtered and stylised, and posed, and polished, and strives to look professional, Kay and Lee do none of this. For me, that is precisely their appeal; they're an antidote to everything we've come to expect from YouTube. And I love their videos un-ironically. 

This might surprise you, but I didn't hate Sega's 32X.

You remember it don't you? Yes. Yes, you do. It was the other add-on for the Mega Drive - the cartridge-based one, rather than the one with the flat, shiny, roundies. It was able to play games with real nice 3D graphics and stuff, but get this: everybody in the land hated it.

I remember going to the UK launch, and being rather impressed with it. I was surprised by the amount of stick it got for all sorts of things - not least its version of Doom, which was played inside a smallish window that PC owners found hysterical. Really, though... by that point, I think people just wanted  reasons to hate anything Sega did.

Truth is, if you were a Mega Drive owner, being able to play any sort of Doom was still pretty impressive. Star Wars Arcade was decent enough. Knuckles Chaotic was an interesting - oh-hoh! - "spin" on the Sonic forumla, and there were respectable ports of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing.

So, in theory - in isolation - the 32X wasn't, in and of itself, bad. It refreshed the Mega Drive at a point where the Mega Drive needed refreshing. Unfortunately, timing is everything, and the 32X had the worst timing in gaming history. Indeed, were the 32X a stand-up comedian it would've taken a two-week holiday prior to delivering the punchline to the opening joke of its set.

Sega fans didn't want it, because they knew the Saturn was around the corner, and had been burned once already by an add-on - the Mega CD. Nobody else wanted it, because they were waiting for the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. Not enough third-party developers made games for it. And, well, Sega pulled the plug after little more than a year.

Which meant that there were a lot of already-announced 32X games left in limbo. Some of these were reworked for the Saturn or other consoles. Some simply disappeared altogether. Here are ten of the latter.

Last week I detailed the other side of the greatest gaming brand of the 1980s, Ultimate Play The Game - the side less celebrated. You know: the side that was a little bit less good. The one that we've all chosen to forget, because it doesn't quite fit with the accepted version of events.

Today, it is time to do this: to look at what happened next.

We know that Ultimate was sold to US Gold, and the company's founders - and creative driving force - The Mysterious Stamper Brothers, fannied off to form Rare. Establishing a close connection to Nintendo, Rare would go on to bestow upon us the likes of Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Blast Corps and Perfect Dark.

Like Ultimate, it has become an established fact that the vast majority of what Rare has produced is peerless. 

However, just as the true story of Ultimate wasn't always as rosy as we might've come to believe, so Rare's early days developing for the NES were something of a proverbial "mixed bag". Let us now peel open that bag, and take a deeeeeep sniff... 

"Urrrgh! Smells like poo!"

This is a fact: Ultimate Play The Game released the best home computer games of the 1980s. That's written in stone. Hewn into the very DNA of history itself.

Founded by the enigmatic and inscrutable Chris and "Tim" Stamper, Ultimate discharged one classic after another, from Jetpac through Atic Atac, to Underwurlde, to Knight Lore. Like a crop-happy jockey that's hepped-up on "bennies", it's common knowledge that the company rode the ZX Spectrum faster and harder than anyone else.

Now get a load of this: everything you believe is wrong.

There's another side to the Ultimate story, a darker side - a side which doesn't entirely feature classic after classic. Indeed, there's an Ultimate which released a whole load of rubbish.

You see, for every great Ultimate game there was a really awful one - whether excreted onto the Commodore 64 (for which the Stampers outsourced all the work to two men in a loft), or on the Spectrum after the brand had been pimped-off to legendary shovelware facilitators US Gold.

​Here, then, are the ten Ultimate games which The Official Version of Events would rather you forgot...

Released in Japan at the honk-end of 1998, and in the rest of the world around 12 months later, the Dreamcast was Sega's final games console. It was a final throw of the dice, a lottery ticket bought with a couple of quid found down the back of the Sega sofa. And the gamble failed to pay off.

The system was discontinued in March 2001, with the company announcing that it would henceforth be a third-party software publisher - even going as far to release Sonic The Hedgehog on Nintendo systems. In gaming terms, this was akin to Jeremy "Red Jez" Corbyn stepping down as leader of the Labour Party, and opening an octopus cafe with all profits going to support UKIP.

After 18 years or so as a hardware manufacturer, the company no longer had the resources or support to compete. Years of poor decisions - from the Mega-CD, to 32X, to the Saturn - had damaged Sega's bottom line - and, indeed, its bottom. 

Whatever you might think of Sega, the Dreamcast has to be seen as a fantastic machine that was simply a case of too little too late. The self-harm Sega had done to its own brand, and Sony's continued dominance of the games industry, ensured that confidence in the Dreamcast was virtually non-existent. Electronic Arts and Squaresoft - two of the industry's biggest third-party publishers - declined to support it, ensuring that many of the big brands never made it to the system. 

Really, it's a massive shame. The Dreamcast deserved a better fate than the one it received. Sega's time as a console manufacturer didn't end with an ellipsis so much as an exclamation mark.

Here are ten reasons why it should've "twanged" more "of" your "goitres".

Do you remember Shakin' Stevens? He had a string of solo hits in the 1980s, despite having been knocking around as the lead singer of Shakin' Stevens and The Sunsets since the 1960s. Although punk had seemingly throttled his particular blend of wobbly dancing and anachronistic rock n' roll, a late-70s lead role in a West End musical - playing Elvis Presley, no less - propelled Shaky on his bandy-legged journey to the top.

After the hits shrivelled up at the end of 80s, you'd be forgiven for thinking Shakin' Stevens hadn't done anything since, apart from a Heineken advert - but you couldn't be more wrong!

My friend Jon is the world's biggest Shakin' Stevens fan (he also really likes Status Quo, suggesting that he mostly listens to music played by men wearing double denim). Through him I have been made starkly aware of Shaky's ongoing career, and his grumpy reluctance to play the big hits live. Or at least, his stubborn insistence on playing them in a minor key, through gritted teeth,. 

It's also via Jon that I was alerted to the fact that Shaky once released his own ZX Spectrum game. It came on the cassette tape for Shaky's 1983 album, The Bop Won't Stop.

Yes... yes, let's take a look at that, shall we?

GUEST POST by PAUL DUNNING

I remember when I was at school that every now and then Smash Hits (and probably other magazines) would give away stickers. I remember one series being small, oval shaped things with “exciting” words and phrases printed on them, such as “Cheap Thrill” and - probably - “Disco Rules”.

​Anyway, such stickers ended up pretty much everywhere, much to the annoyance of our form teacher (who probably wished we were all slightly better behaved, and weren’t so keen on sticking things on the walls and furniture). Look: we were competing on stuff. Like chairs, desks, and the blackboard.

Moving on to today, stickers have become digital. You can slap them all over messages to your friends on your phones, to add “emotion” and “character” to your messages. Of course, you can’t put a digital sticker on the back of a classmate, but you can lob them at him (or her) over the electronic ether.
Apple added stickers to their Messages app for iOS last year.

They were not creating a walled garden where only a select few “big brands” and carefully chosen designers could play. Anyone could create sticker packs. That could be YOU.

I'm a sucker for nice artwork. I mean, I suppose we all are; nobody wants their eyeballs assaulted with ugly art. And yet it's amazing how few truly iconic video game covers there have actually been.

I mean, look at all the greatest albums ever made. Even if you're not a fan of music, it's likely you could recognise the White Album, or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders of Mars. 

Can you even remember the cover of, say, last year's Horizon: Zero Dawn, or Ghost Recon: Wildlands? Those responsible for most modern cover art seem to favour the generic over the truly memorable. Why? We can but speculate that they are history's biggest idiots.

Still, it hasn't always been thus. Here are 12 of the most iconic video game covers of all time - and not all for the right reasons.

When I was three or four,  I went on a family holiday to a caravan park in Dimchurch.

One evening, we attended a talent competition in the clubhouse, during which the host - Uncle Ricky Dinkle (no, really) asked for boys and girls to come up on stage and sing him a song. At my sister's urging, I lined up with the other children next to the stage, ready to give my showstopping rendition of The Wheels On The Bus.

I had long curly hair back then - admittedly, not much has changed - which might be why Uncle Ricky Dinkle greeted me by saying "Here's a nice little girl". 

"I'm a boy not a girl!" I corrected furiously, to waves of laughter from the audience.

Uncle Ricky recovered well with a comedy double-take, apologised, and asked me where I went to school.

"Bay school", I huffed.

"Bay school?" asked Uncle Ricky.

"No - Bay school," I replied, becoming increasingly frustrated by someone who seemed intent upon misrepresenting me.

"Bay school?"

"NO! BAY SCHOOL!"

Admittedly, I was recovering from having most of my teeth knocked out by a swing - for which I'd required years of painful dental treatment. My speech wasn't perhaps the most easy to understand, so I can almost forgive Uncle Ricky for not realising I was trying to tell him that I went to "play school".

​Bear with me. We're getting to the Nintendo bit.

It's possible that the first ever Digitiser has been widely seen in recent times. Though by "widely" I mean  "a couple of thousand people". Still, there's a video of it up on YouTube, if you've missed it.

It's fine for what it is.

Here, though, is second edition of Digi ever - a sacred relic which has not been seen for more than 25 years - once again unearthed by teletext archeologist Jason Robertson.

I'm assuming we had most of the first week or so of Digitiser written before we went to air - though I don't quite remember - but there's a sense here that we're still trying to fill pages. 

As before, it's something of a jarring read if you're familiar with the later, more anarchic, tone that we adopted; no Man Diary, no reveal-ohs, silliness kept to a minimum... not even the charts are in place. Furthermore, there are a few wince-inducing moments for myself and Mr Hairs. But anyhow. That's okay. Do your reading of this now. Just start, please.

Huge thanks on behalf of us and Jason to @amylrob1863 for supplying the tape upon which this important historical artefact was splayed.

Crime doesn't pay, apparently. Unfortunately, it's an all-too-frequent consequence that being born into a capitalist society doesn't pay either, so it's just something we're going to have to live with.

Yeah, what's that you say? "I hear you're a Communist now, Mr Biffo..."

​Whatever. 

Aside from being stopped once for speeding, many years ago, and another time in Norwich, because I got confused and drove into a bus lane, I've only ever been in proper trouble with "the po-po" once. I was 8 years old, and I'd broken into an abandoned vicarage across the road from my house.

​My mother was, ostensibly, the caretaker of the place, and I assumed this made it a sort of extension of our garden shed. After being caught, myself and two friends were driven off in a police car and taken to a police station where we were told, in no uncertain terms, that - caretaker mother or not - we had no place being there. 

I was hardly Ronnie Kray, admittedly, but this early brush with "The Fuzz" served to instil in me a lifelong fear of being sent to The Big House. Which was, I suppose, their intention with all the unnecessary shouting. Honestly, the way they were bellowing you'd think we'd thrown a nest full of endangered bird eggs at The Cenotaph.

It worked, though, and certainly contributed to why I didn't never do no computer game piracy not never.

I'm not a big one for parties. As a form of socialising they seem to be broken in a fairly fundamental way. For a start, they're too noisy so you can't hear what anyone is saying over the blare of SOMEBODY ELSE'S CHOICE OF MUSIC. 

Plus, you either know too few people there - so you stay huddled in a small group all night - or you know too many, so you don't get to speak to anyone in any sort of satisfying way. Plus, whoever the host is - the person you'd probably like to spend the most time with - will typically be too busy working their way around the room. 

The one upside to a party is the buffet table, and - little tip here - if you've got a vegetarian or vegan partner, get them to pick up extra chicken drumsticks and picnic eggs and vol-au-vents and handfuls of raw meat and then get them to shovel it all into your mouth while you lick your lips and make disgusting throat--noises. Ugg-gg-guh-gluh. And then throw up on the host's mother's head. Once word gets around, you'll never again be invited to a party.

Don't get me wrong: I like a celebration. I'm not a nihilist or a sociopath, probably. I just don't get the traditional notion of parties (and don't get me started on dinner parties which, as a working class boy, seem designed to expose my ignorance of rugby clubs, investment funds, and school fees).

​Whenever I have to attend a party these days, out of obligation or to keep certain family members happy, I typically arrive looking for an escape route, then spend most of my time letting my mouth focus on the smalltalk while my brain crunches data to calculate the earliest possible opportunity to leave without offending the hosts.