A few of my favourite things ...

You'd never guess which games Son has been playing. You might saychart toppers or ones with favourable magazine reviews, writes Jack Schofield

But the real world isn't like that. The magazines - rightly - concentrate on the most exciting new titles, many of them still in development, and the latest consoles, which may not have reached the shops.

Real players stick to a mixture of past favourites, spiced with the few new games they are lucky enough to own.

On Friday and Saturday, for example, the most played game in our house was Secret of Mana on the Nintendo SNES. This role-playing adventure is far from being finished here, though Son and a schoolfriend are co-operating to solve it. Each of them is playing on his own machine, and from time to time they phone one another to compare notes.

On Sunday, Son had another friend round, and when they play computer games, they take it in turns to choose. One result was that the Sega Megadrive version of John Madden 93 was brought out of semi-retirement. It's still a good game, and one day we might buy a more recent version, though there are things we want more. The Playstation version of Actua Soccer, for example.

The Playstation game that got played most was Terry Pratchett's Discworld, which I've just bought cheaply second-hand. We've had the PC version for about a year, but Son's PC isn't powerful enough to handle the sound.

It was interesting to see how easily the Playstation ran a game that has given some PCs such problems. And it was fun revisiting familiar scenes, because hearing - rather than simply reading - the dialogue adds a lot to the game. However, Son also found a way of apparently crashing it: go to the doctor's waiting room, sit down next to the troll and look at the diploma on the wall ...

Another recent acquisition proved less popular: a promotional copy of Acclaim's Alien Trilogy, programmed by Probe Software. Son spent a few minutes on the opening level before dismissing it as just another DOOM clone, saying: