I've played an absolutely massive amount of games.
On the Commodore 64 alone I would have 'loaded' around five hundred different games in the first year I had it. Then came the Amiga, and finally a PC.
And don't get me started on consoles, with which I still possess everything from the six-switch wood grain Atari 2600, to the Vectrex, N64 and PS2.
But with these games, I've always known back in some part of brain that I'm not really part of a crack special forces team. And I'm really not wearing a leisure suit trying to buy a condom so I can have sex with someone.
Enter a strange little game called Noctis. Now in its fourth incarnation, Noctis puts the player in a space ship that zips around a complete, fully 3D make-believe universe. The gameplay involves you pointing your ship at a distant star, warping over to it and then checking out the planets.
You'll come across gas giants, ringed planets and earth-like worlds, each with their own moons. You can then land on the planet, run around the landscape, and watching sunsets and moonrises. If you see something you like, take a photo of it. If you come across an unnamed planet, name it.
And that's it.
After about four hours of searching for a ringed planet, I found one. I took some photos from my ship, and then dropped down on the surface to check out the flora and fauna. I watched the sunrise and took some shots of that too.
So there I was. For hours I was flying around a galaxy that didn't exist, naming planets I liked and waiting for the perfect photo. The graphics are crappy, the interface is terrible and there is no real point to the 'game' at all.
But this small piece of code, weighing in at around a single megabyte, was cool enough to take me away from Freelancer, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Morrowind.
Does this say something about me, Noctis or the state of computer games? Let me know at dkidd@pcauthority.com.au