When I was Seventeen ...

Or sixteen or fifteen or fourteen - it doesn't matter. The point is it was not a very good year.

I remember it started innocently enough; I was dredging through a CD compendium of 500 of the 'greatest' PC games of all-time (as advertised in the guide to Harvey Norman's Ekka show bag), in search of just one good game.

Most (correction, all) of the games were atrocious - shareware or freeware; games that didn't work; games that must have been created as university/ high school projects then abandoned by the more commercially-minded. I was just about to give up my search, when a cricket game caught my eye: Sticky Wicket.

As you can see, it was thoroughly ridiculous. It was basically a text game with no skill involved - you pressed the space bar, and the computer told you what happened:

'Space' - Moody bowls
'Space' - Atherton drives
'Space' - Two run scored
'Space' - Moody bowls ...

And so-on. Forever and ever and ever.

I became addicted. Really addicted. I could not stop playing. I could acknowledge that there was no skill involved whatsoever, but I could not stop myself from pressing the space bar.

Eventually it all became too ridiculous, and I resolved to destroy the game. I took the CD compendium of 500 games, snapped it in half, and (in the absence of a raging sea) hurled it into the lantana overgrowth behind our garage. Obviously I believed welding a CD back together was easier than retrieving something from lantana.

Life got better from that point on; I maintained a respectful distance from slot machines, and believed things might just work out OK. Until yesterday, when old mate Gerrod emailed me with this alarming news:

yes julian, i think this is it.... you can thank me later.

http://www.cricketgames.com/games/freeware/sticky/index.htm

Believe me old friend, I will thank you later.