Do you remember when you were a kid, and your parents would say to you: "Only boring people get bored"?

Yeah, well... you know what? Fuck off.

I've been bored loads of times; watching TV, having a wee (never a poo), and even while playing video games. That doesn't make me boring. It just means others have failed to entertain me sufficiently. 

Anyway, some games are born boring, while others have boringness thrust upon them. I don't know what that means, but it's as good a way as any to introduce this definitive list of the ten most boring games ever, and something has to go in this bit. Please note: some of these games are deliberately dull, and some are simply dull by nature of their subject matter. 

Regardless, all are so soul-crushingly mundane that I defy you to reach the end of the list. 

GUEST REVIEW by SUPER BAD ADVICE 

Hoooooo boy. Where to start with this one, eh?
 
Let’s go with the safe ground to kick off: Anthem is a multiplayer online game in the ‘looter shooter’ genre – you rob various sweet old pensioners at gunpoint (shoot villainous types) and then trade in all their silverware at Cash Converters (get guns and gear). Then you do it all again when they’ve claimed on the insurance and got a new tea set (respawned). 
 
If you’ve played Destiny or The Division you know broadly what you’re getting here (and indeed whether you like playing this sort of hobby grind game or not), though I say ‘broadly’ because there are differences – the way the loot system operates is more Diablo-like than simply ‘here’s a new gun that shoots a bit more quickly’. The perks and stats of gear and how abilities work mean you have a lot of scope to build a character to play exactly how you want to.
 
As you progress through the story, side missions and freeplay (pottering about on your own), you level up, allowing you to take on tougher and more numerous enemies, missions and the like. After you defeat the final boss, there are ‘endgame’ events – missions and quests to do that are much harder, designed to keep you playing until new story content arrives.
 
Well that’s that out of the way. Now on to the part you’ve really come here for: Anthem is like buying a mystery prize hamper where it turns out some of the gifts inside are really cool stuff like funky expensive trainers and iPhones, but most of them are month-old dog turds. And then it turns out the trainers are full of furious wasps.
 
Basically, it’s a ruddy great mess.

You might think you know the full story about how Michael Jackson created the soundtrack for Sonic 3... but you don't know it all. Digitiser presents the dark, disturbing conspiracy at the heart of The King Of "Pop"'s association with Sega - and reveals the OTHER games affected by the allegations made against him.

You've possibly heard that first week physical sales of Anthem - developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts - have been less than half of those achieved by Bioware's previous release, Mass Effect Andromeda.

Furthermore, Anthem Is already being heavily discounted in the UK - down to £39 on Amazon, as I write this. These are not promising signs for a big budget game which EA was clearly positioning as a property with a healthy afterlife. 

Suffice to say, the usual outlets are picking through the potential reasons why - an iffy demo, poor word of mouth, the damage done to Bioware's reputation by Andromeda - but nobody is really looking at it in the context of where the market is at this month.

In recent weeks we've had the release of Apex Legends - another massive online battle royale (and free-to-play to boot) - plus Crackdown 3, Metro Exodus and Far Cry New Dawn. All are big games, all are shooters, and all are shrieking for attention from similar audiences at precisely the same time. And that's before you factor in the long shadows cast by all of the games released last year. 

I mean... are all these games companies run by idiots?

​Yes.

And not any old idiots: epic idiots.

Biffo and Gannon attempt to get to grips with another obscure old games system, Waddingtons' 2001: The Game Machine console. Whoop with excitement as they get to grips with Grand Prix, Shooting Gallery, and the thrilling calculator mode!

A talented wunderkind who created two of the ZX Spectrum's most iconic games while still a mewling teenager, when Matthew Smith slid from public view for a decade and a half it allowed a legend to build up around him. He was labelled the Syd Barrett or JD Salinger of gaming, an alleged acid casualty who'd blown the small fortune he'd made from Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. 

The reality is... Smith is far from the smelly, broken, hermit he has sometimes been depicted as. In recent years he's resurfaced on the Software Projects Facebook page - where he's lucid and articulate . He has also made appearances at conventions (including the upcoming Play Expo Manchester) and in documentaries, where he's been happy to discuss his experiences, and talk about plans he has to release new games.

Nevertheless, Smith made two near-perfect games, and then - essentially - disappeared off everyone's radar for the best part of two decades, during which he spent a stint in a Dutch commune. When he finally returned to Britain, and gained access to the Internet for the first time, he professed to being surprised and flattered at the number of websites there were dedicated to Babylon 5 (how much interest there was in him). 

However... Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy aren't the full story. We all know that Smith had been working on a third Miner Willy game - the long-lost Miner Willy Meets The Taxman/Mega Tree - but they weren't the only games he'd been responsible for.

Grasp your straps: here's a terrifying, whistle-stop, tour through his other, less remembered, works.

Before and after the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Sir Clive Sinclair invented a whole ton of other stuff... and not all of it was a hit. Digitiser presents a brief history of Sir Clive's less-remembered creations...

For me, the cover artwork of a game was always part of the experience. It's partly why I never really engaged with the industrial level of piracy that was rife in my school; I saw games as a complete package. I wanted to enjoy that ritual of choosing a game, taking it home, then studying the cover and the inlay while it was loading.

It's a lost joy; nowadays games either feature dull, identikit, photorealistic covers, or don't even have a cover because you've downloaded them from an online "shop".

Admittedly, it's fair to say that there were a lot of terrible games covers back in the day, but the truth is I'd still take one bad 1980s cover over 90% of modern ones. 

Roger Tissyman - ha ha, funny name - worked on somewhere between 20 and 30 game covers back in the 1980s, yet his name is barely known. This is despite the fact he was responsible for one of the most iconic game covers of all time; Jet Set Willy.

Sadly, Roger is no longer with us, having passed away in 1991, but his artwork lives on. Here is a brief celebration of the idiosyncratic work he did as house artist for Software Projects.

You know what I want? A new Miner Willy game.

It might seem a trifle perverse to desire a reboot for a series which choked to death on a frond some 35 years ago - unless you count NumFun's terrible 2005 phone racer Jet Set Racing - but Miner Willy is, arguably, the greatest British video games character of all time. After Lara Croft, who  - let's face it - these days is British in accent only. 

How can I make such a ridiculous assertion? Because games have become homogenised and safe, and there was nothing safe about Miner Willy.

Try and think of another British games character who is as iconic, or has endured, to the degree Miner Willy has. He is - or was on his way to becoming - our very own Mario or Sonic. What's more, his games had a personality all their own - a wry, uniquely British, sense of humour, filtered through the cracked, unhinged, worldview of the young Matthew Smith.  Even the character's name was a double-entendre, the game's humour being a weird blend of Carry On, Python and satire; the surreal mixed with the mundane. 

How much better would the world be if Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that Jumpman's real name was, I dunno, Huge J'bottom, or Max Johnson, or Buster Hardy.

Sega Toys released a number of quirky products in the 1990s. This week, Mr Biffo and Paul Gannon get to grips with one of them - plus A CAT JUMPS ON THE DESK!!!!!

Back when I was first writing Digitiser, something myself and Mr Hairs were keen to stay away from was the cult-of-personality thing which most games mags of the day engaged in.

I mean, it backfired completely - giving ourselves ridiculous names, in response to a reader's query, was meant to be flippant, and yet they stuck. And here I am 26 years later still calling myself Mr Biffo.

At the age of 22 - the age I was when I started writing Digitiser - I was possessed of a slightly forced cynicism, but in reality that was mixed with a little bit of envy. We acted like we thought games journalists who plastered their photos - or, worse, cartoons of themselves - all over their magazines were tawdry attention-seekers.

In reality, we didn't care as much as we made out, but so far did my self-depreciation go back then that I didn't dare do anything which might've appeared like I wanted anybody to know who I was. It went so deep that even though Digi was written by individuals, we adopted a collective "we" when it came to any opinion.

It was ridiculous really. Just another way for us to strut around like we were better than everyone else. I mean, the games journos-as-celebrities thing never bothered me when I was on the outside of the industry. I liked feeling I was getting to know the writers of my favourite magazines.

​It was only when I accidentally became one of them - albeit writing for Teletext, "The scrag-end of journalism", as we used to say - that I felt uncomfortable drawing too much attention to myself. But that might've been because, on a barely conscious level, I believed I didn't deserve to be one of them.