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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

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Reader Reviews Retro Special

Your take on Desert Strike, Gods, Dragon Force, Phantasy Star, Sweet Home, Monkey Island, Kid Chameleon and Starquake. Cripes!

As I half expected, last week's call for more reader reviews has been well and truly answered. Since begging for your help seven days ago, our depleted supplies have been replenished to the point that this week's Reader Reviews is the biggest instalment in living memory. Submissions have piled up relentlessly, and this week we'll be delving in to those that stuck to the proposed retro vibe, mining attics for nostalgic thrills and pouring rose-tinted excitement into a Word document.

But first of all, a Thomas Holzer of Wokingham Memorial Jaguar CD-ROM Unit will shortly be winging its way to the Eurogamer reader who tried to hoodwink me into handing over a prize in exchange for poorly conceived fake retro review. Having copied and pasted vast swathes of text from a rival website's review of Sonic Advance into an email client, our budding thief subsequently repackaged it all as a review of the Mega Drive Sonic the Hedgehog, book-ending his plagiarism with barely literate scrawls aimed at concealing the subterfuge. Given the hard work that you all put in to your own, genuine reviews, I felt it only fair to use up a paragraph denouncing this foolish theft and alerting the world to the deceitfulness of one "Jack G. Evans".

Not content with that either, I'd also like to make it explicitly clear to another reader (and presumably an acquaintance of Jack G.) that I couldn't give a flying act of procreation whether anybody is getting bored of my whimsical SNES-related - nay, SNES-inspired - nostalgic ramblings. If revisiting the games of my yesteryear is somehow "unbalanced", and symptomatic of my apparently continuing descent into "raving Nintendo fanboyism", then I'll be sure to play more Solitaire and Minesweeper this week in order to restore the equilibrium. And if anybody can think of a Sony-related gaming pursuit pre-PlayStation, I'd be obliged if you could please let me know at the usual address. By the sound of it, my very integrity rests on its existence.

Without further ado then, it's onto the reviews. Join us again next week when we return to our scheduled demolition of modern titles, and until then I leave you with news that 50/60Hz switch-able gaming consoles apparently contravene eBay's increasingly hilarious sales policy, something that mercifully didn't prevent me completing the transaction. Hey, Mr. eBay moderator! [Flips the bird.] Right here, buddy!

The Rules

Reader Reviews should be submitted to contact@eurogamer.net, and can be written about anything you like - hardware, games, peripherals - even if we've already written about it. In fact, that's kind of the point! Also, thanks to lobbying from various long-winded people, there is no word limit! Just please try to keep it clean and legal - like we do for you! The best candidate each week will receive a random bit of game-related tat (possibly even an actual game) as a prize. Lucky, lucky you. And of course, your work will be displayed for all to see.