I bought my Mega Drive through the legendary Special Reserve catalogue, at a time when I was meant to be saving money due to imminent teenage fatherhood. I kept it quiet from my parents - with whom I was living at the time - knowing they'd have just seen it as further evidence of my irresponsibility. I figured I'd deal with the fallout once the thing arrived.

Unfortunately, my first impressions of the Mega Drive - and yes; its delivery was indeed met with the predicted barrage of condemnation - were not great. It came with the pack-in Altered Beast, and Super Thunder Blade, a game which set out to answer the question "What if Thunder Blade was actually really bad?".

Disappointed, I spent even more money to get Golden Axe, which - at least for a while - made the purchase somewhat worthwhile. 

Fact is, there just weren't many great games early in the Mega Drive's life. I bought Budokan and Sword of Sodan - both objectively appalling - but it wasn't until I picked up Revenge of Shinobi that it was worth suffering through the ongoing parental disapproval.

Heck, the first review I ever had on Digitiser was for a Mega Drive game - Green Dog The Beached Surfer Dude (nice graphics, shame about the insufferably sluggish controls). Fortunately, Sega gradually got its act together, and while I maintained a somewhat playfully antagonistic relationship towards the company once I became a games journo, I retain a real affection for the system.

Heck, by the time the Mega Drive was in its twilight, it was performing at a level which made it feel like an entirely different generation of hardware to the console responsible for something like, I dunno, the risible Last Battle.

Suffice to say, it has been a while since I last reviewed a brand new Mega Drive game. And Tanglewood is indeed a brand new Mega Drive game - developed on, and for, the original Sega hardware, and released on cartridge (though most of us will be playing this via Steam). Is this something we need in 2018? Can it go beyond giving us anything more than a brief drag on the nostalgia pipe?

 Will there ever be another Duke Nukem game? Following the 15 year development - and ultimate flopsy - of Duke Nukem Forever it seems unlikely. There were rumours of a prequel game from Gearbox - Duke Begins - but it seems that the project has since been cancelled.

Regardless, Duke Nukem 3D continues to cast a long shadow. As one of the biggest games of the 90s - Duke himself became a bona-fide gaming icon - he still has fans who yearn for a modern game worthy of that classic. Understandably so, given we don't have any game characters like Duke anymore. Let's face it, all game characters look the same these days. Duke was different and unique. 

But how - how - to update a character rooted in dated gameplay and attitudes? This is how.

How!

Right. I've written about Tomb Raider quite a bit over the past week, and not all of it has been pretty. Thing is... I care. That's the reason why I've written so much on the topic. I genuinely care about the franchise, I care about the character of Lara Croft, and I feel she's been badly served by the reboot.

We've had our three games in the new origin trilogy. It's done. It's over. Time to move on. It isn't too late to fix Lara Croft, and return the character to where she belongs; as the foremost icon of the modern games industry.

Because, you see, Lara is important. Not only is the character a British creation, but she's female, and there aren't enough female games protagonists with the sort of profile Lara once had. 

It's time to put my money where my mouth is. This is how I would fix Tomb Raider. 

As something of connoisseur of poor, home computer-era, cover artwork, it has become clear to me that there is one genre of game with more than the usual share of terrible, inexplicable, or just plain wrong covers. That genre is this genre: the football game genre.

And I present for you now a gallery offering definitive proof of this fact. 

I've been thinking a lot about Lara Croft over the past week, ever since I wrote an article criticising the character's ongoing development, or lack of. 

I mean, aside from getting a bit of grief from TR fans over my "tired schtick", I also get tweeted at by no less a luminary than Rhianna Pratchett - the writer of the first two Tomb Raider reboot games - having mentioned her and Jill Murray (lead writer of Shadow of the Tomb Raider) in the piece. 

Here's what she had to say to me: "Paul - You know how games are made. How many people are involved. The tumultuous nature of AAA development. The relatively low power that writers wield. The story by committee that often happens. You know all this.... Yet throughout the TR games, you seem to aim blame squarely at the writer(s). Myself in the past, and now Jill. Regardless of how you feel about the tone of the games/Lara that is an unfair and inaccurate call out."

Over the weekend, Rhianna doubled down, sharing this tweet by Jill Murray: "Y'all. A game's Lead Writer is not its only writer or the person most in charge of story. We have narrative directors, cinematics directors, creative directors, brand, editorial... I'm flattered ppl know who I am but only tagging or crediting or criticizing me is hecka strange."

It might feel hecka strange to Jill, but she did numerous interviews to promote the game, and her name was all over the marketing, so... well... y'know.

Yeah, so anyway... I wrote that article earlier this week about why I don't like the current version of Lara Croft. I expected a bit of flack for it - and, indeed, I had a few tweets aimed at me implying that I had some sort of patriarchal agenda, or was attention-seeking - but for the most part people seemed to be aligned with my sentiments.

However, I did nevertheless get a load of grief from it in a rather weird, tangential, and unexpected, sense.

In short, while discussing it on Twitter, I drew a parallel between the new and cheerless Tomb Raider series and the DC movie universe. You can read that tweet above. I mean, whatever your feelings about Marvel movies, you can't - on any level - argue that they aren't wildly successful just in commercial terms. It's an undeniable fact that, over the last 10 years, Marvel - under the watch of Kevin Feige - has grown into the biggest entertainment franchise on the planet. 

And, by comparison, DC has failed to achieve the same with its movies. Wonder Woman is great of course - adopting some of the escapist lightness of tone that Marvel manages to balance with the more dramatic moments and action beats - and this was reflected in its box office. The Zack Synder-led DC movies did okay, but failed to land a Marvel-sized hit, and - crucially - are simply  not as beloved or well-received as Marvel films.

That's what I was rather clumsily getting at, rather than bringing my own opinions on those movies into it. Although, y'know, I struggled with Man of Steel, Dawn of Justice, and Suicide Squad. Though admit that I enjoyed Justice League more than expected (albeit perhaps because my expectations were so low). I loved Wonder Woman and I'm very much looking forward to Shazam (again, because the trailer suggests it has learned lessons from Marvel).

Anyway. None of that was contained in my tweet, which is perhaps why a mob of furious DC movie fans - clearly searching for criticism of the films they love (as none of them follow me, and wouldn't have otherwise seen the tweet) - sought me out to tell me why I was wrong. 

It was inevitable, but Sony has announced that it's copying Nintendo, and releasing a miniature version of its original PlayStation. The PlayStation Classic - due later this year - will arrive with 20 pre-loaded games (including Final Fantasy VII, Jumping Flash, R4 Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3 and Wild Arms).

​So, that's exciting, probably.

To celebrate this news, here are a bunch of things which anybody who owned a PlayStation will remember... WITH THEIR MINDS.

I'm not a misogynist but... any time you open an opinion with such a statement then something has gone a bit wrong.

Nevertheless, I want to talk about Tomb Raider - specifically the character of Lara Croft - and I have no option but to do so from the position of being a man. Albeit a man who has written scripts professionally for almost 20 years, and has a bunch of awards and nominations which he can shove in your mouth if you decide to tell him he's wrong about this. 

You see, I'm some way into the new game Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the third in the Lara origin series which began back in 2013. I've not played enough yet to feel I'm ready to review it, but I've played enough to know this: I don't care for the story, or for Lara Croft. In fact, I actively dislike her. I mean, I hadn't exactly warmed to her murdering ways over the previous two games, but I went into this one with something of an open mind. 

Unfortunately, within the first couple of hours of the game, Lara has directly caused a tsunami which has killed thousands of people - including, on-screen, a child - and stabbed a jaguar in the ear with a sharp bit of metal. Alright, the jaguar was trying to eat her, and Lara has always killed animals, but never has it been done on screen so graphically, with the player mashing the square button to shove the blade right into the animal's brain, with a nice spurt of blood.

​I mean, what were they thinking?!? In movies the Save the Cat moment is a point early on where the lead character - even if they're otherwise reprehensible people - does something selfless, in order to make them more likeable, so the viewer will buy into their story arc. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider this is replaced with the double whammy of the drown-everyone-and-stab-the-cat-in-the-brain moment. 

Worse still, Lara's best friend Jonah even seems to go off her a bit. If secondary characters' responses to our antagonist tell the audience what they should be feeling, then clearly Shadow of the Tomb Raider is telling us that Lara is an unlikeable dick. 

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but we all do it. I mean, even if a tramp had the magical ability to bestow unlimited riches upon you in return for a kiss, it's unlikely you'd plant one on the mouth if his lips were smeared with dog dirt. Actually, I probably would do that. But anyway. 

Sadly, video games have reached a point where there's a decent amount of work and skill and money that goes into today's unremarkable, identikit, game covers.

It wasn't always the case - as evidenced by this exhaustive gallery of the worst, most wrong-headed, and poorly-conceived Commodore 64 box art...

True story: last month, while I was still in bed on the morning I was due to go on holiday, a spider fell from the ceiling and landed on my nose. Being a frightful wuss, I howled like a startled bonobo, leapt to my feet, smashed the bed apart with a chair, set fire to both chair and bed, and then moved out of my home for ever.

Unfortunately, such were my cat-like reflexes, the spider never had the chance to bite me, and I didn't develop any spider-powers. Indeed, I was disappointed to learn later that I couldn't even excrete silk from my anus. And believe me - I tried. I even ate a taffeta scarf! 

What sort of actual spider-powers does Spider-Man actually have anyway? He can stick to walls, and that's about it. Spiders do this because they have special hairs on their tentacles or feet or whatever they are. Do we ever learn that Spider-Man has hairy hands and feet? And if so, how do the hairs work through his shoes and gloves? Because, let's face it, even his other most notable "spider" power - spinning webs, any size - is something he invented, rather than a natural ability.

I'd like to see him adopt some other spider traits, like the courting ritual of the male wolf spider, who taps on "dry leaves" to attract a lady friend. Or maybe he could develop "pedipalps" - a pair of appendages between his teeth and his legs, which he uses during mating to transfer sperm from a special "sperm web" right up the female's lady parts. Horribly, some male spiders even rip off their own pedipalps to bung up the female so that other spiders can't go there.

That's all pretty horrific and graphic - not least when you spend upwards of an hour thinking about a human "spider-man" doing something similar - but it's just how it is. Nature is a misogynistic freakshow, and David Attenborough should be ashamed of himself for promoting it. 

Fortunately, while Sony's Spider-Man does take some liberties with the character, this is one area that their new game stays away from.