Night Trap is getting a re-release to celebrate its 25th anniversary. No, really: one of the most dubious games of the CD-ROM era is set to be smeared across yer actual Xbox One and PlayStation 4, like a foul-smelling paste.

Arguably, Night Trap was the most high-profile release ever for Sega's Mega-CD, the needless CD-ROM Mega Drive add-on, which many (me) consider to be the start of Sega's impressive downfall.

However, it also became mired in a "videogame nasty" storm, which led directly to the creation of America's games industry ratings system, the ESRB. You know: despite being about as provocative as an episode of The One Show. Tellingly, the re-released game will be rated "teen", down from the original version's "mature".

Could it be that full-motion video games are ripe for a revival? Or is this just a slice of retro-gaming kitsch, a throw-back to an era when people became outraged over the slightest little... oh.

Oh no...

Also, which other Mega CD games could be ripe for a re-release? Frankly, it's not an easy question to answer: there were barely any truly classic system exclusives, and most of the Mega CD's best games were "special editions" of older games with extra levels, and nicer music, and an animated cat which popped up on screen at regular intervals to put a hot cone in his "Henry".

​Still... y'know... I gave it a shot.

Parents often tell their children that it's the taking part that counts. Of course, we all know what abject rubbish this is, little more than a flimsy balm on the damaged egos of untalented juveniles. The main reason to enter any competition is to win - and winning is never lovelier than when you win a sweet prize. Especially if that prize is something you can eat!

In recent years, controversial game creator Peter Molyneux offered players the chance to "be" a digital god in the disastrous Godus, for being the person to unlock the mystery of a giant cube in his social experiment Curiosity. As history records, that backfired massively for the beleaguered Molyneux, when the winner, Bryan Henderson, never received anything for his hours of patience in tapping repeatedly on a screen.

However, the history of real-world prizes in games dates back to the early-80s - some of which even gave their winners something tangible. Here are but ten examples.

Sur-prize!

Yesterday was the 35th birthday of the ZX Spectrum... while over on Kickstarter a brand new version of this machine, which was meant to be dead and buried, subsumed beneath generations of more advanced technology, is being born. At the time of writing, the ZX Spectrum Next has been backed to the tune of a quarter of a million groats.

How is that possible? How could this three-and-a-half decades old system still be alive? Even at the time, the Spectrum wasn't the most powerful machine. The first iteration was a weird little thing with scarcely enough power, a keyboard made of dolphin flesh, and a tendency to scream at you whenever it loaded software.

Alright, every Commodore 64 game was created in Brownaround, but let's settle it once and for all: of course it was the more powerful machine. Likewise the BBC. Doesn't mean they were the best. Much as it pains me to say it, the Spectrum should never have been the phenomenon it was - and yet... somehow it booted the competition into a latrine.

Sir Clive Sinclair might've been a very clever man with a taste for ladyblondes, but the success of the Spectrum was down to two things: timing, and the imagination of the burgeoning British games industry.

I can think of no better tribute to my most beloved games machine than to list my ten favourite Spectrum games. Please note: this is not a definitive list.

Well now. It looks as if the reason Nintendo has cancelled its miniature NES Classic console - a decision which baffled all but the least baffleable - is because it's doing this: inserting a hot cone into Rod Stewart's furtive puncture (preparing a miniature Super NES for release later this year).

As the years grind on, and the crushing inevitability of my death draws inexorably closer - towering over me like a vast granite question mark - I come to realise that the Super NES is my favourite games machine of all time. Probably. Apart from the ZX Spectrum. 

Suffice to say, we're going to get most of the classics on the SNES Mini, as it shall henceforth be known. Yes; expect to see Super Mario World, A Link To The Past, and Super Metroid. But the SNES was more than just its headline games, see; it was also a treasure trove of brilliant, less well remembered titles.

Here are ten that I grasped bawdily 'twixt my fleshy gentlemen, which I demand be included on Nintendo's newest wee machine (note: that's the Scottish wee, not the slang term for piddle - more on that subject very shortly).

You can't go back. No, really: you cannot do that. You are stuck here. You can only go on. The past is hidden behind an invisible wall, and all you can do is look back at it. 

No. Please. I'm not threatening you. Well, not yet. It's just something I realised upon looking at some videos of old Sierra point-and-click adventures.

I loved those games, see. Getting a new Sierra game was a genuinely exciting thing for me. The packaging, the ritual of installing it and loading it up, the loading screen, the music... It was magical. It sort of didn't matter that I was rubbish at them, because puzzles; I just liked being part of those worlds. It was hair-raising, palpable... it felt like a privilege.

And I'll never again have that thrill. I've tried over the years to replicate it. I play the old games. I try to tell myself I'm as excited about new games as I always was... but the truth is that they don't have that buzz anymore for me. I wonder if they do for those who are just now coming to games for the first time.

I'm guessing that the demographic of Digitiser2000 isn't teens and whippersnappers. And if you're reading this and you are under 25... well... get away from my bins, you little shit. But for most of us here I'm going to assume that games are not a new thing; we are, generalising wildly, the generation that experienced the dawn of video games. We were pioneers, in a way. Our impact might've been tangential, but together we helped to build the modern games industry.

I don't know whether that means we had a vastly different experience of games to those who came after us, or whether contemporary kids have the same reaction to games that we might've done. I don't know if having had the opportunity to experience that has coloured - or, rather, stripped the colour - from everything which followed.

But I'm going to speculate that, yes, a combination of our formative ages and the newness of video games means that we got to have an experience with them that no other generation ever will.

And that is both sad and excellent. 

Long term readers of this site will know that I've had my ups and downs with Nintendo. The emotional rollercoaster is all borne out of love, of course; just because you love someone or something doesn't mean you can't tell them when you think they're going wrong.

Allow me to remind you of this thing here; I wasn't sold by the messaging surrounding the Switch in the run-up to its release. That started to change as the launch approached, and when I finally got hold of one it literally blew my trousers off. They landed in a tramp's lap!

Alright, it helped that I had Zelda: Breath of the Wild to play on it... but I got what Nintendo was trying to do with Switch. I got the local multiplayer focus of the hardware... and it felt refreshingly at odds with Sony and Microsoft's approach.

However, regardless of what the hardware can do, every console lives and dies on its games. I, like others, criticised the Switch launch line-up, but those criticisms fell away as we all realised just how good Breath of the Wild was. With hindsight, I was potentially blinded by it - and I suspect I'm not alone in that. Now we're sort of post-Zelda, and having to deal with the hangover.

It was never going to last forever, of course; just as many of us are grinding to a conclusion on BotW, Nintendo has unveiled its Switch line-up for the rest of the year.

Underwhelming barely covers it.

We had my mum's 80th birthday party on Saturday night, and I saw a lot of friends and family that I haven't seen in a long time. We're all connected via Facebook, as is the modern way, and though I don't do a lot on social media - outside of Twitter at least - I have been sharing bits and piece of Found Footage filming.

Consequently, I had to answer some questions from the intrigued...

Surprisingly, after explaining the idea behind Found Footage, the main question people had was "How are you making money out of it?". I also had a meeting with my exec producer on 4 O'Clock Club last week, and he also advised, when he learned how much I'd spent: "You are allowed to make money out of it you know..."

Thing is... when all is said and done, I probably won't make a penny out of Found Footage. Well, not directly - unless it becomes some sort of viral sensation, which seems unlikely given that it's weird and niche. I'm very happy with Ep 1's 11,000 views. 

Making TV shows is expensive and hard and time-consuming - especially at the level we're trying to do it. Were I not doing the animation and editing myself, and had so many people not offered their time free of charge, our budget would probably be at least four times what we raised on Kickstarter. I'll probably end up out of pocket when all is said and done.

But the thing is... making money on this isn't important to me. I've got my day job to keep a roof over our heads, just about. Weirdly, it never bothered me that Biffovision didn't get green-lit for a series, because I so love the one episode of it which exists. I never did that show for the recognition or any sort of ambition, or for money. All I wanted was for that one episode to be exactly the sort of thing Tim Moore and I wanted it to be. Which it was, more or less.

Thanks to all of those who backed Found Footage - and those who have helped spread the word - I'm getting to make something I love, that feels entirely true to me, that I believe in. The process of making it is proving to be one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

​We've been utterly blessed in that every day of filming - as exhausting as it has been - has been full of laughs. Everyone involved so far has committed above and beyond, and the atmosphere has been joyous. No tantrums, no snappiness, no prima-donna behaviour.

It's the sort of experience that money can't really buy. Though I've been keeping the Kickstarter backers updated on progress, I thought I'd share with everyone how it's going, and what we've been doing.

Board games are all but banned at gatherings of my family, following decades of terrible arguments. They're usually between my dad and my two sisters.

My dad will be a stickler for the rules, my sister Alison will question his interpretation of the rules, and my sister Sarah will inevitably storm off in a huff because she's losing, but blame it on the argument between my dad and Alison.

Here are ten bizarre vintage board games which you might like to track down, and use to cause arguments between your own parents are siblings.

Sigh. According to reports, Call of Duty is getting its own "cinematic universe", akin to the Marvel movies, as films can no longer just be films these days.

​In an interview with The Guardian Stacey Sher and Nick van Dyk, co-presidents of Activision Blizzard Studios - the film and TV arm of Activision Blizzard - have revealed the company's plans to "use the multi-layered, interconnected approach that has made Marvel’s superheroes a dominant force in cinema to turn the first-person shooter into an all-conquering film franchise of its own".

The article continued thusly: "According to the pair, work on the Call of Duty films has already generated multiple scripts, and involved extensive research with military experts and retired soldiers.

"They are mapping out a Call of Duty universe which will draw on the feel of the different incarnations of the game rather than transposing existing plots. A first instalment could start shooting as early as 2018 and, if all goes to plan, there will be more to follow."

“We have plotted out many years,” Sher told the Guardian. “We put together this group of writers to talk about where we were going.

"There’ll be a film that feels more like Black Ops, the story behind the story. The Modern Warfare series looks at what it’s like to fight a war with the eyes of the world on you. And then maybe something that is more of a hybrid, where you are looking at private, covert operations, while a public operation is going on.”

Van Dyk added this: “It’s going to have the same sort of high-adrenaline, high-energy aesthetic as the game, but it’s not a literal adaptation. It’s a much more broad and inclusive, global in scope - a big, tentpole Marvel-esque movie."

Van Dyk says the aim is to emulate the way Marvel has created “these individual universes that interconnect and a timeline that makes sense with consistent themes and Easter eggs."

I scarcely even know where to begin with pointing out how wrong-headed and stupid and ignorant and depressing this all is.

The mangrove finch is one of the rarest birds in the world; it is thought that there are just 100 left alive today, all living on one small island in the Galapagos. They're split into two colonies - one of about 80 birds on the west coast, and another 20 living on the east coast. Due to the volcanic terrain between them, the two colonies have had no contact for over a century. 

In the intervening years, the split colonies have continued to evolve - as living species do - albeit without contact with the other. Consequently, they have diverged, and no longer sing the same songs; a vital part of the species' courtship ritual. Additionally, the eastern finches have developed a dark stripe along their breast, which their western counterparts lack. Studies have found other, less obvious, genetic and morphological differences between the two. 

As a result of all this there can be no interbreeding between them, and due to such a tiny population size, the mangrove finch is likely to evolve itself extinct. What a bunch of idiots.

The point of all this is to say that evolution doesn't always get it right. The natural world is all about survival of the fittest, and sometimes evolution gets it wrong, and heads down dead ends. Newer isn't always better, see. Sometimes natural selection kicks in, and boots a species into the dust.

And it isn't just the natural world this happens in; think of technology. It's full of evolutionary dead-ends, and "better" isn't always better; Betamax, Digital Audio Tape, 3DTV...

This "speciation" happens all the time in gaming. Sega's hardware business evolved itself to death. See also Atari, 3DO, Philips CD-i, Nokia N-Gage... Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's slow... and sometimes... crocodiles win. And in terms of modern gaming, Nintendo is our crocodile; ancient, effective, and robust.

What?