It may not be much, but I finally finished New Super Mario Bros. last night.

Little Mario can finally stop running and jumping for the moment...

...LEGO studs that is.

It's a problem when you start to dream of the games you play.

It is even more disturbing when you dream of LEGO.

Except when you dream of that snake with a human head that just bites you in the nose. I'd much rather dream of the pumpkin. He's such a cheeky little thing. Always sitting in his patch, not minding which way the wind blows.

Turns out, it's water-resistant after a few days.

Not keen to repeat the experiment though...

Water and laptops don't mix.

Merry Christmas.

The process of converting the better half has begun.

Ingredients:

• - 1 x Wii
• - 1 x Wii Remote + Play Bundle
• - 1 x Evening with Nothing Else to Do

Directions:
- Play Wii while partner hovers around television
- Gently stir
- Wait until partner innocently asks "Can I have a go?"

After this moment, you should have yourself an addict in the making. My Wii Widow is now a Wii Player.

Word.

Well, I'm now the proud owner of a Wii console.

Wii are happy with our purchase.

Wii will be spending much of the weekend playing with our Wii.

And thinking up new Wii puns.

Well, I suppose that it isn't too much of an issue if the biggest problem in your life is whether or not to attend a midnight Wii launch.

However, on top of everything else, I now have to worry about Pit Dwellers at work.

As best as I can tell, according to Google Images, they look something like this:



This might be a problem.

Having already resolved herself with the fact that she is an Internet Widow, my girlfriend is coming to terms with the fact that she may lose me a second time to games. For most, this would be a good thing.

After crawling on hands and knees underneath the old staircase, the N64 was uncovered, dusted off and hooked up to the LCD TV for the first time. The old girl still runs fine (the N64 that is, and not my girlfriend, although she runs fine too - just don't let her catch me using the word old in the same sentence). I can foresee many hours parked in front of the telly playing Goldeneye over the coming weeks - until the Wii turns up.

So, will she become a Wii Widow too?

Ever had one of those dreams, right, where the Bee comes down to love but he does not know how to love so he stings you from love and then the bee flies off and dies from love so it is happy yet sad?

I have those dreams all the time. They call me the Bee Dreamer. The Weaver of Honeycomb Slumber. The Thorny Stinger of Hivesville. Some just call me Richard.

Struggling, right now, to get the tiny people to do what I want. They keep going to work and earning money, but they just won't stop leaving their trash on the floor. Another question: two beds, two people - why? A cartoon bunny enjoys the cheesy retro ambiance, but I simply enjoy cheese.

Thirsty. Must go fill my gullet.

Then wait for Wii.

Having only been a member of GameSpot for a matter of days, I find myself returning not only to the games that defined my past, but games that probably should have.

It's the moments where you exclaim "Ooh, I should have owned that in 1987!" When those moments are followed by a purchase of a budget price title and hours of playing a twenty-year old game, you wonder whether site like this have gotten to you.

Is the Games Collection list merely a cunning ploy to get me to relive the local games shops of their bargain bin contents? Is it collusion with sellers on eBay? Or am I simply obsessed with games. (For this week anyway).

It wasn't always like this. I'm old enough to remember a time before computer games were big business. Playing on friend's Ataris and Commodores - not to mention those state of the art Apple IIs - I got a taste for games such as Ghostbusters and Lode Runner. It wasn't long before I got my very first computer/console in the form of the (then) advanced Amiga 500.

This defining point in the late 1980s introduced me to home computing and gaming. After tentatively trying something called Kings Quest III: To Heir is Human, I was not only introduced to bad puns in titles (something Sierra of the 1980s and 1990s would be forever pulling out) but the beauty of adventure gaming. The following years would see me investigate the rest of the Sierra Online Adventure catalogue, before moving on to LucasFilm Games (now LucasArts) and their innovative collection. I went on Police, Kings and Space Quests, found the various secrets of Monkey Island and had my mind bent by aliens with a bloke named Zak McKraken. It was a game called Loom that prompted me to upgrade to a full 1MB of RAM, a big thing for Amiga owners in those days.

As time wore on and games got bigger, the RSI in my disk-swapping hand from titles like Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis caused me to upgrade to a PC. Many more years of adventure gaming ensued, unrestrained by disc swapping as these wonder things called CD-ROMs were introduced, allow me to HEAR the characters speaking! Not only that, but there was only one disc for EVERYTHING!

Then it all came to an unexpected stop. While I wouldn't call myself a luddite, I began to get 'too cool' for these new fangled whatsajiggits, and to this day I refuse to own a mobile phone. Despite a brief dally into the world of N64 - largely due to the lure of Goldeneye - I decided to wash my hands of the things. Multiple CDs were now making my RSI flare up again, not to mention the constant need to upgrade. A few dabbles at Quake, some Star Wars related games and the odd 'classic' replay were all that would comfort me for the following years.

Now it's 2006. I own a reasonably good PC again. I even went out to buy a Nintendo DS on the spur of the moment. Two days later, I preordered a Wii. What caused this sudden change of heart? Games were now coming out on multiple DVDs for the PC.

So with all this technology at my fingertips what am I doing? Playing New Super Mario Bros and Yoshi's Island for the DS and Taito Legends for the PC. Yes, that's right - a compilation of old arcade games.My first purchase on the Wii will be Zelda: Twlight Princess, the latest in a franchise almost as old as gaming.

I guess it never gets out of your system, no matter which one you are running. It also goes to show that after 20 years of advancements in gaming, I'm still content to play something that requires less processing power than a modern phone.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go add some cheese to the wheel. The mouse that runs my generator is getting hungry.