Given the muted response to the Nintendo 64's paltry launch line-up, Nintendo swore on its mother's grave that it would never again make the same mistake twice (on which note: a-hahaahahahahahah!).

To this end, it ensured that its successor - the BronzeHenry-K (GameCube) - would be almost over-burdened with games for its May 2002 European launch. What a terrible shame most of them were about as memorable as a thingy - you know: a whatever.

The Nintendo 64 might've been light on games from day one, but at least Pilotwings 64 and Super Mario 64 were straight-out-of-the-Y-fronts classics. At the moment of its birth, the closest the GameCube got to exhibiting the swollen genius of Nintendo's first-party design was Luigi's Mansion.

​Even then, it was an odd choice of flagship launch title; graphically it was lovely, and played just fine,  but felt like an esoteric side-step from Mario 64. Luigi's was deliberately slow-paced and claustrophobic where Mario was frenetic and epic.

Beyond that, Rogue Squadron II offered some solid Star Wars wallops, while Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Resident Evil 4 were - briefly - tonally incongruous exclusives. However, it's unlikely anybody sported so much as a semi when it came to Donald Duck: Quack Attack, Wave Race: Blue Storm, or Disney's Tarzan Freeride.

The Nintendo 64 was released in the UK in March 1997, meaning there will be a span of almost exactly 20 years separating its launch from that of the Nintendo Switch. It was a bit of a wobble for me, as far as Nintendo went. The SNES - and to a slightly lesser extent the Game Boy - was so defining that any successor was always going to have a hard time topping it.

Making this task all the more difficult, the N64 didn't have the most auspicious of beginnings.

Nintendo shot itself in the stilts by giving its Super NES successor the codename "Project Rectum" ("Project Reality"), implying that we were going to witness graphics which would be almost indistinguishable from real life things, such as trees, flautists and Bangor.

We were led to believe that gamers would be so startled by the fidelity of the visuals, that they would flee their consoles in terror, screaming that Bowser was coming to defile them with a gnarly clam on the end of a broth-soaked branch.

It was a misconception that Nintendo was very happy to let run out of control. Their tie-up with Silicon Graphics fooled us all into thinking that the company had somehow found a way to cram supercomputer levels of power into a home gaming system costing a couple hundred quid.

Yes - that really is how stupid we all were back then! Without the Internet of Facts, the simple people of 1997 were fumbling around in the dark. We didn't know anything; we didn't even know what opinions to have. 

For some reason, the 1980s and early 90s were a time when ripping off intellectual property was the given thing - especially when it came to video games.

In fact, it's a practise which continues to this day, albeit it slightly more disguised terms. Why, were it not for games playing fast and loose with copyright laws we'd never have had the Resident Evil series. Lest we forget, the first game in that franchise shamelessly "played homage" to Infogrames' Alone in the Dark. Imagine how the creators of that game must feel.

Or don't.

​The choice is yours.

Still. Never mind. One of the first, most notoriously - oh-hoh! - aped games ever was Nintendo's original arcade classic Donkey Kong.

​Here are but ten dubious attempts to recreate that Nintendo magic without being sued.

We stand poised on the edge of a new epoch - marked by the release of a brand new Nintendo machine. In just a few weeks, Nintendo launches the Switch - a device that it hopes will be as warmly embraced as some of its earlier home consoles.

​Given that the Wii U was basically the same console as the Wii, but with a unique selling point - actively discouraging people from wanting to buy one - the Switch is essentially the first brand new Nintendo system since 2006. That's a gap of 11 earth years. Mental, bruv.

Like many of us, the SNES is the Nintendo console I embrace most firmly to my pale English bosom (note: I don't have bosoms). Indeed, to this day I raise it aloft as my favourite games machine of all time. 

I hold out hope that I'll like the Switch, while accepting that I'm a toothless old man sustained almost exclusively by a diet of tepid nostalgia. It's doubtful that any new console could ever cause me to fall in love with it the way I fell for the SNES.

As some of you might be aware, I went a bit viral over the weekend. No, no - not in that way. I'm not infected. Not yet anyway. I mean I went, y'know, sort of viral online.

The above picture, of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon as Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is closing in on four thousand retweets and seven thousand likes, has made the front page of Imgur, and been seen by 20,000+ people on Facebook.

It also pushed my Twitter followers over 5,000 - which is small potatoes compared to some of my peers, and ultimately rather meaningless... but nevertheless some sort of milestone, I suppose (watch them flee this week, as they realise they're not going to get stuff like Trump-Krang every day...). 

It's virtually impossible to find out the names - or Twitter account names - of everyone who retweeted it, though somebody did tell me it had been shared by Guillermo del Toro, which is nice (and almost as exciting as the time Colin Baker retweeted me).

I've had a few things go viral before (though this is the first time it has been artwork I've done with my own fair hand), and it's a boost to have created something which lots of people think is worth sharing. I'm not above admitting that a bit of positive reinforcement goes a long way.

Of course, it also brings with it a certain degree of frustration, given that my brain can't always think up stuff like that on cue. It seems that the magic formula is grafting something with pop culturally nostalgic significance onto some sort of witty topical observation.

Unfortunately, that sort of inspiration can't be forced... though at the same time, you can't do it if there's not at least some part of your mind dangling a rod in the river. So to speak. But get this: I realised something else from the whole nonsense... being liked, or loved, is nothing short of seductive.

Parents: do kids get too much homework these days? I think I used to get about an hour a week (which I'd bang out in about five minutes, natch). My kids would be give a couple of hours a week, maybe... and now my stepdaughters are expected to do a minimum of two hours a night.

They're literally doing homework until they go to bed. Isn't that a bit on the excessive side? What about kids having a life? What idiot sanctioned this massive increase in homework? If I'd spent my entire free time doing homework, I'd probably not be doing whatever it is I'm doing now (sitting on the sofa in my underpants, with one hand in a bowl of crisps).

Of course, back in the day they attempted to foist extra-curricular learning upon us by stealth - with ill-considered edutainment video games. Here are ten of the most wrong-headed.

Pac-Man: what is he? It's unlikely to be a question which troubled Namco when it was originally developing the game.

​Unfortunately, when Pac-Man became a phenomenon, licensees made efforts - inconsistent efforts, but efforts nevertheless - to ascribe some sort of personality upon him. You know: something a bit more than just "Disembodied yellow gob who eats ghosts and drugs".

The game's unexpected success no doubt accounts for the rather scattershot nature of the merchandising which followed initially in Pac-Man's wake. Here's a selection of it - with a bonus bawdy joke as your reward if you make it all the way to the end.

No scrolling to the bottom before you've looked at everything else though....!

Despite its origins as a tobacco company, and subsequent transformation into a chewing gum manufacturer (the company was responsible for the mono-eyed instigator Bazooka Joe), Topps is mostly synonymous with collectible trading cards.

In the 1970s it had great success with card sets based upon movie properties such as Star Wars and Superman: The Movie, yet it was only a matter of time before Topps dragged its sallow torso aboard the video game bandwagon (destination: Pootown!!!!).

​In 1982, Donkey Kong became the subject of the first video game cards produced by Topps - so named by its founders, as it aimed to become "top" of its field (it did) - and would kick off a relationship with Nintendo that would see two further sets of Nintendo-based cards released in the coming years. One of these would feature characters from the Zelda series, the other boasting cards and stickers depicting various bare-skinned despots (NES games such as Punch-Out and Double Dragon).

Apropos nothing, other than the fact they're a quirky and rather pretty part of Nintendo history, here's a gallery of these so-called Donkey Kong "cards".

Can there be a single person alive on earth - not counting all those countries where they live like pigs and don't even have access to Freeview - who didn't get to see an 18-rated film before they were 18? 

I was 11 when Blade Runner came out, and even though it was a '15' I begged my parents to let me see it, because it had Han Solo in it, and was a sci-fi film, and they got so sick of me moping around the house, and howling in my sleep, that they caved.

For some reason, they decided that dressing me in a red turtleneck would make me look more like a 15 year-old (remember all the teenagers in the early-80s in their red turtlenecks? 'Rednecks' the media called them - 'The Redneck Menace'... No?). Sceptical as I was, it apparently worked, as my father and I made it into the film with no questions asked.

Of course, for an 11 year-old, Blade Runner was deeply disappointing; nothing like Star Wars, and with long, boring conversations about what you'd do if you found a turtle on its back in the street. Rubbish.

And there weren't even any toys out for it, even though it starred Han Solo.

Which seems strange, as almost every other movie of the era - 18-rated or not - had its own range of toys. And here are ten of them.