I took to Tetris like a duck2water.

Recently a friend sent me a link to a retro gaming site which offered internet versions of all the games I grew up with in the video arcades and eventually on my dad's ZX spectrum.

It has Frogger, Asteroids, and Pac Man - all seminal moments of gaming wonderment that left children breathless with excitement and adults exclaiming, "Oooh, isn't it amazing how they get the little space ship to move like that!"

The one omission from the list that I can spot, and I'm sure there are many others apart from Galaxians, which both my friend and I would have put on the list, is a game I can't remember the name of. My friend knows it as "Scramble" where his rocket ship flies along horizontally dropping bombs on small planetbound targets and the pilot has to negotiate the rise and fall of the rocky crags that make up the landscape of the game.

My dad had a slightly different version - which I have just been informed was called Defender, or WMS Defender, and, despite being a girl, I was quite good at it. Much to their annoyance, I would regularly beat my dad and my older brother at this particular game - a fact of which I am even more proud now that I have found it is deemed to be one of the more difficult games of those early days.

Aagh, fond memories of a bygone era - thank goodness we got past the monotonous bip, bop, bip of Pong video tennis.