I'm a monster. You see, I've been lying to you, and to myself.

Something you need to know about Digitiser2000 is that I try hard to be a realist on here, isolated from hype or prevailing trends. I try to say it as I see it - from a dispassionate, unemotional place - and if I sometimes don't pull any punches, such as when - say - the Nintendo Switch launches with just one Triple-A game, then that's just me giving you what I think Digi exists for. 

I mean, it's sort of the USP of Digi, and always was. "We hate everyone equally" was the Digitiser mantra, and part of that is because it's easier to be funny when you're laying into something. Plus, people enjoy it. It's the car crash mentality, which makes things such as this go viral.

But the truth is... I don't hate everything equally, and never have. I really have been lying to you and to myself all these years. In fact, Nintendo... Nintendo I don't hate at all. Like, even a teeny, tiny, bit.

Oh, I might get frustrated with them, in the same way you can with anybody you love, but Nintendo is mine. Like so many other gamers of my generation, I've got an almost absurd affection for the company, its games, and its technology. I has a place in my heart where Sony, Microsoft, Sega, and all the rest don't even get a look in.

Much as I've tried to stay true to the Digitiser ethos with the Switch, and its undoubtedly rubbish launch line-up, the real me has - increasingly - gained strength. Consequently, I'm now so excited about the Switch that the other night I even had a dream about unboxing one (although, I'd forgotten to buy any games - read into that what thou will...).

Kids today, eh? They don't know how good they have it. Things are so good now, that they expect everything to be handed to them on the end of a pizza paddle. Oh, how I hate them...

Look at the Nintendo Switch; a device of almost limitless gaming potential, which works as both an under-the-telly console and a handheld games system. Children of the 70s and 80s could never have conceived of such a thing, and were they capable of doing so their brains would've likely shut down, never to reactivate. 

Here's a trawl through some of the electronic garbage my generation had to suffer through.

Vikings, Samurai and Medieval Knights - together at last! It's hard to think of a more exciting historical mash-up... Bolsheviks, Luddites and Tolpuddle Martyrs maybe? Jacobites, Teddy Boys and Cowboys? Dodos, Protestants and Hipsters? 

This bringing-together of three of history's most iconic factions has all the hallmarks of a big budget movie flop, but when applied to For Honor's online battles, it's a surprisingly winning combination.

I'm going to skip a lot of the meat and potatoes of For Honor - you won't hear anything from me about the different character classes, or the move sets, or the perks you can acquire. No, sir. You can probably imagine all of that and, frankly, it benefits neither of us to spell it out here. Suffice to say, Ubisoft has torn pages from the FPS, RPG, and beat 'em up playbooks, then mixed them into a tuna pasta bake (something that's pleasingly its own thing).

Instead of focusing on what For Honor does that you might've seen before, let's look instead at a big tarp catalogue (what it does completely differently - ie; putting hand-to-hand combat into an online shoot 'em up structure... sort of).

​As well as the sorts of game modes you'd expect from an FPS, For Honor also features an online jam called Faction War, which affects the gameplay globally - the Vikings, samurai or knights being awarded "territory" depending on how players are doing across every platform.

This changes which maps and battles can be played - with the world resetting every ten weeks. It's nice, and new, and deserves to inspire loyalty from its players. Or, at least, some small yelps of appreciation.

So this is the week - the week that Nintendo aims its shotgun into your face, and blasts you with a brand new console.

NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, GameCube, DS, Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and now Switch. Given the relative failure of its most recent console hardware, there's a lot riding on Switch for Nintendo. If expectations were jockeys, and consoles were horses, then the Switch has about fifteen little riders clinging to its saddle.

Often, a new machine lives and dies on the quality of its launch titles - and there has been some criticism regarding the Switch launch line-up, not least on this site where it has spilled over into the sort of contemptuous negativity which nobody enjoys.

Originally, Tomorrow Corporation's World of Goo, Little Inferno, and Human Resource Machine were scheduled as Nintendo eShop downloads on day one, but appear to have been delayed. No great loss, given that they've all been knocking around for years now, on far less powerful machines. However, Nintendo's own Snipperclips will instead arrive in their place, earlier than planned. Please... try not to have too strong an emotional reaction to all of this. 

Here's a quick "whizz"  through everything that'll be available on Switch from Friday.

I attended Sega's lavish UK launch party for its Dreamcast with my friend and Digitiser columnist Violet Berlin. I remember her greeting the actor Verne Troyer with the words "Hello, Mini-Me!", which - as I remarked at the time - I'm sure he loved.

The only other celebrity I remember being there was Paula Yates, who had brought her young daughter Peaches along. I never saw her talking to anyone, and though it's easy to read much into her behaviour, thanks to what we now know, she seemed to me rather alone... just sort of wandering around the party with Peaches on one arm, and a large wicker bag on the other.

It's heartbreaking to think that neither mother or daughter are with us anymore. Indeed, it's probably only a matter of time for Sega too; such is the curse of the Dreamcast.

Here's a funny thing: when I wrote my "tribute" to the Sega Saturn, I repeatedly referred to it as the 'Dreamcast'; a grotesque error that wasn't picked-up by my in-house sub-editor, whose knowledge of gaming, we've established, stopped at Duck Hunt.

Indeed, the only "game" she plays these days, is some bizarre app on her phone where she has to combine alpacas into some manner of twitching,  composite, horror, by repeatedly tapping on them.

Fortunately, Digitiser2000's canny-eyed readers wasted little time in pointing out my embarrassing error - but the interesting thing (he says, in a bid to make a virtue out of his sloppiness) is why I made that error in the first place.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have ever referred to the Nintendo 64 as 'GameCube', or the Master System as 'Mega Drive'... though when I consider, say, the various PlayStations, they more or less blend into one - a bit like a twitching, composite, llama monstrosity, in fact.

Stay with me here; my memories of how I became a Saturn owner are a trifle vague. You see, there's a point around the mid-90s, when I was writing about games for Digitiser, where everything becomes a bit of a blur.

​Getting games for free, getting games machines for free... they become less significant events in life, than if - say - you'd blown a quarter of your monthly income ordering a Mega Drive from the Special Reserve catalogue, even though you were a teenage father living with his parents, and were meant to be saving for your own home, and ohhhh... didn't your mo-mah and po-pah tell you just how irresponsible you were being by wasting money on video games...?!

What I do remember is this: I definitely had an import Sega Saturn, and I'm pretty sure I didn't pay money for it, and I'm pretty sure that Sega hadn't given it to us. Where we got it from, I've no idea, but we definitely got a freebie - no way could I have afforded the six hundred quid that importers were asking for Japanese versions. I remember this, because I recall bringing it home from work all excited, and only then realising that a) I didn't have the right sort of plug, and b) Just that really.

I had to go out the next day to buy what was then called a "step-down converter", which - I discovered - cost around sixty quid that I really didn't have. I could've asked my Teletext bosses to buy one on expenses, but it was readily apparent that they barely tolerated Digitiser at that stage, so I had to dip into my own barren pocket.

Although, as it transpired, finding one anywhere in my local vicinity proved almost impossible - and the one I did eventually buy, from a shop which sold everything from World War 2 gas masks to various types of nozzles, was the size of a VW Beetle.

When I did finally get the Saturn powered up, I discovered I could only play games in black and white. You know: like in olden times.

In a rare moment of prescience, Sega made the decision to move into home gaming after predicting the decline of its arcade business (a decline, hilariously, that it then helped to exacerbate - a bit like a sailor saying "I'd better get off this boat, because it's probably going to sink"... before proceeding to exit the ship by smashing his way through the previously intact hull using a clawhammer).

Indeed, the guts of the company's Mega Drive - its third home console - were hewn from Sega's own System 16 arcade hardware, which had provided the power behind the likes of Golden Axe, Shinobi, Altered Beast, and ESWAT.

Something that most of us in the UK either tend to forget, or aren't even aware of, is that the Mega Drive was a flop in its native Japan. Faced with competition from the unassailable lead of Nintendo's NES - or, as it was known over there, the Silk-Henry (Famicom) - Sega tried desperately to gain a foothold.

When Mega Drive games weren't "cutting" the "wasabi", Sega launched a modem and something called The Mega Anser. This plug-in device offered online banking, an answering machine, and life insurance quotes - all of which could then be printed out to show to your friend's dad, excitingly.

​Somehow, this still wasn't enough to dislodge Super Mario Bros. from the top of the charts...

So, Pewdiepie has gone and done it again. You can't have missed the news that the World's Biggest YouTuber - real name Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg - has been accused of anti-semitism, after several of his videos featured apparent pro-Nazi imagery.

In one video, a clip - bought from crowd-sourcing site Fiverr - shows two men holding up a sign reading "Death to All Jews", as Pewdiepie cackles hysterically, insisting: "I’m not anti-Semitic or whatever it’s called".

This, and other similarly dubious content, has led to Disney dropping the YouTuber from their Maker network, YouTube Red pulling the second series of Scare Pewdiepie, and ejecting him from their lucrative preferred advertising programme. Ultimately, it's not going to affect Pewdiepie - his 53 million, mostly young (and therefore mostly impressionable), viewers will see to that.

Nevertheless, Pewdiepie issued a statement reiterating that he's not anti-semitic or whatever it's called - "I want to make one thing clear: I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes" -  while also being supported in turn by the hateful neo-Nazi website The Stormer.

In a since-deleted piece on their site, attributed to "Zeiger", The Stormer wrote: "Some may ask 'Is Pewdiepie really racist? Is he really a Nazi? Does he really want to kill all Jews?' Who knows. He could be doing all this only to cause a stir things up and get free publicity. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since the effect is the same; it normalizes Nazism, and marginalizes our enemies."

And that's the Nazis themselves saying that...

The children of the 1970s and 80s had little access to violent or graphic material. If we wanted to experience true, undiluted, fear, we had but two options: meet a BBC television show host... or play a game of Waddington's Horror Top Trumps.

Until the release of the two Horror sets in 1978, Top Trumps had focused mostly on vehicles - cars, helicopters, tanks and the like. The Horror Trumps were different; luridly hand-drawn, and giving youths the opportunity to finally settle the age-old question of who was more horrific - Dracula or Frankenstein. And it wasn't just the big screen monsters who got an outing in these Top Trumps packs - but monsters that were conceived entirely for the two sets, such as The Zetan Priest and "Maggot". 

It didn't matter to us that all of the images had been copied from elsewhere - that the Venusian Death Cell jailer was clearly a Sea Devil from Doctor Who. All we knew is that the Trumps, offered without context or comment, depicted scenes more grisly and violent than our young minds could've ever conceived on their own.

Brace yourselves - for here are just ten of these truly horrific Trumps...

DONALD TRUMP JOKE!!!!!

Little Jeremy - please - ask yourself: if you'd been Nintendo would you have done it any differently with the Wii U... at the start at least? You're coming off the back of the most successful hardware launch in your history, with unprecedented brand awareness; you look around, and everyone's got their faces in their phones or iPads...

Of course you'd release a new type of Wii, which blended everything that made the original great with some sort of a touchscreen controller. We're living in a dual-screen world now. It's smart to embrace that, probably.

See... that's the thing: the Wii U gets a lot of stick, but it's mostly from the lofty, arrogant, perch of the hindsight bird. On paper, the Wii U isn't an obvious balls-up. We didn't know until it was over that Nintendo had behaved like the corporate equivalent of a dirty fox thrashing around in a bath. If they'd announced that they were releasing a console with a controller that was basically a couple of raw carrots dangling from a bell, then maybe we could've all leant back on our sofas and exhaled... "This isn't going to go well".

I mean, at the time - before it came out - I think most of us thought that the idea, in principle, was reasonable enough. Even the name - after we'd all mocked the Wii for sounding like "wee", only to realise that it was actually quite clever - seemed okay. We didn't want to make the same mistake twice (something which Nintendo would never do... oh... a-hahahahahahahaahahaaaaaa!).

"Oh yeah... yeah... so, the original name meant, like... 'we', and this one means, y'know... 'we-you'... uh... so... yeah."

Yes, alright. It doesn't work as well, but I defy anybody to admit they knew that Nintendo was stumbling into a flop-hole. Relatively speaking, of course. After all, around 13.5 million Wii Us were sold over its lifetime. That's still a lot of Wii Us... but, well, not so good when you consider that around 26 million Xbox Ones have been sold, and 53.4 million PS4s - in less than the time it took the Wii U to finish mashing its own face against a wall.

Grandstand Leisure Products was part of the Harrogate-based Adam Leisure Group, a company upon which there is very little information to be found. This leaves me to speculate that it was named in honour of Adam, the first man, and initially promoted the recreational benefits of apple-eating and concealing your wicked parts beneath a frond.

Having had limited success in the 70s with a couple of Pong clone consoles, and a variant of the Fairchild Channel F system, the Adam group had more success importing electronic games from the Johnny Foreigner likes of Tomy and Epoch, rebranding them under the name Grandstand. 

While sports fans of the 70s and 80s tended to think of Frank Bough or Desmond Lynam when they heard the name, for most children of the era Grandstand became synonymous with tabletop electronic gaming.

Though the company's later handheld LCD titles were somewhat less memorable, those earlier, bulky machines, brought a slice of the arcade into the home. Even though the games were far more limited than most of the other game systems of the 1980s, it was all about that style over substance. The latter of which is something which Grandstand presenter Frank Bough knew all about.

​Here are 10 of Grandstand's best-remembered machines. 

Everyone agreed: Nintendo's new console had a really good name. They were calling it Revolution - which promised a) A revolution, and b) No lavatory jokes. Oh, how silly we felt when we learned that was just a code-name, and that the real name for the follow-up to the GameCube was going to be a piddle-based invitation to a laughter party.

We really did have a good old chuckle when Nintendo announced that its new machine was going to be called the Wii, didn't "Wii" (we)? Remember that? Remember all the jokes we made?

"Are they taking the piss?"
"Oh, Nintendo - urine for it now!"
"What's next - the Nintendo Poo?"
"Please, what is Shigeru Miyamoto's favourite nut? A pee-nut!!!!!"
"Where does Nintendo keep its most secret consoles? Urea 51."
"What did Nintendo name its new console after? Super Mario's dirty drips."

Suffice to say, the jokers practically had a meltdown when it was announced that the Wii would arrive with a game called Wii Sports...

The funnies gripped the Internet to such a degree (for a day or so) that the BBC news website even published a story on the Wii pun phenomenon. One radio station in California also ran a competition to win a Wii, for which contestants had to drink as much water as possible without visiting the toilet. Sadly, it ended in tragedy when a female contestant died from water intoxication after downing seven litres.

Of course, all this hilarity lasted about 24 hours before we all got sick of the jokes, and then started to realise that Wii was actually quite a clever name. It summed up the new machine's philosophy of social gaming ("We" play together, see?), while the double-i portion of the logo looked like two players side-by-side - as well as two of the versatile Wii Remotes.

​All those people who claimed that the console would fail, based on its name alone, suddenly felt very stupid, and spent the remainder of their sad, lonely, lives, scrawling wee-based puns on their bedsit walls.