Recently I've been thinking about crime. And sex. Mostly sex. But in between the sex I've been thinking about crime. And sweets. But mostly crime.

Thing is, I know that in order to rule the world I'm going to have to be able to commit crimes without petty things like moral quibbles getting in the way, so I began my training recently. I don't want to delve right into international terrorism and drug smuggling straight away, I'd be in way over my head, I have to work up to it nice and gentle with some small-scale crime. To this end I acquired a copy of the Big Book of Silly Laws and spent the day letting Welsh people into the city of Chester, driving geese across Tower Bridge and standing under a lamp-post loitering.

Amazingly I did all this for hours and wasn't arrested a single time! Most of the police actually seemed rather embarrassed to look at me, obviously averting their gaze from what they know is an unstoppable criminal mastermind at work! Soon I felt confident enough to move up to theft. I didn't own any black and white striped jumpers or big sacks with 'SWAG' written along the side, so I decided to opt for the ultimate in computer debauchery: WAREZ!

Unfortunately every site I visited in my hunt for warez (having entered 'warez' into Yahoo) either linked me instantly to some other warez site that had been shut down in the 1950's or to a page so loaded with pornographic pop-up ads that I went instantly blind and had to spend three days in reconstructive retinal surgery.

My quest for free games I don't deserve not having born fruit I opted for the next best thing - EMULATION! It's sort of nicking things! In downloading ROMs of old Nintendo and Commodore 64 games I'm probably depriving some stall holder at a rummage sale of 50 precious pence. Eat that, society!

Bear with me, I'm getting to a point with this article. I downloaded emulators for the NES, the SNES, the Sega Genesis and Master System, the Amiga, some computer from Croatia no-one's ever heard of and finally the Commodore 64. I was particularly keen on getting hold of one of those as I'd had a C64 in my youth and enjoyed many happy years of headaches with the delightful thing. I began scouring ROM directories downloading games I remember from my past with a twinkly gleam in my eye, then remembered I had copies of the games on cassette in the attic. Dash it all, I realised, according to the disclaimer that means I haven't committed any crimes yet! I turned my nostalgia sensors down a notch and went out into the unknown.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered a ROM for a little game called 'Nightmare on Elm Street' for the brave little Commodore machine. 'Nifty' was the first thought that entered my head, so I downloaded it with all haste, booted up my Emulator and started to play this shameless cash-in product of the 1980's.

Hear me now as I laugh. HAR HAR HARDY HAR HAR.

This game was so crap.

If you can imagine some Goth wanker sitting at one of those tiny little toy electronic keyboards playing the Nightmare on Elm Street theme, that's the impression I got from the music at the beginning. Then there's a big picture of the man himself, Frederick Kreuger Esq., holding up his claws and looking at us with an expression that seemed to say 'Yes, I know I look stupid, but bear with us, this gets better'.

OK, onto the title page, and we have to decide between choosing one of six characters, who I recognised from Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors [Cheffo - please link that last bit to the appropriate article, there's a love]. Made sense, I suppose, that film had the easiest concept to work into a game. So you choose from one of six, each of whom has a DREAM POWER, like in the film. Except Joey, the mute kid. It just said he was the 'victim' so he doesn't get a dream power.

I chose Will, the kid in the specs, as he got the neatest power (magic lightning) and 'cos on the backdrop of stars his picture looked disturbingly like Harry Potter, and I like that in a man. After a bit of loading time we then find ourselves deposited in Elm Street. Or Elm Streets, as there seem to be several. Our character is a tiny white stick figure surrounded by houses, and a little message box commanded me to 'FIND FREDDY'S HOUSE BEFORE HE FINDS YOU!!'.

"How the hell am I supposed to recognise Freddy's house?" was my first thought, closely followed by "AAAAH! SHIT!" when Freddy appeared, running towards me very fast, about four times bigger than me and certainly far too large to fit in any of the houses. So off I sprint, as fast as my pixel-thick legs can carry me, desperate to escape the freak in the stripey sweater. But oh no! Within seconds I'm trapped in a dead end, the man himself closing in fast! All I could do was shut my eyes and fill my pants as he pounced on my frail form. That was when I discovered I could run straight through him, flashing slightly as I did and losing a bit of energy. I know I shouldn't expect anything graphic from a C64 game, but it was nonetheless dismissive.

Anyway, I eventually found Freddy's stupid damn house, which looked not dissimilar to all the other houses except for a fetching little porch, and within seconds found myself locked inside. Now the camera zooms in and I find myself as a dumpy dark-haired fellow in a white shirt running around the house, which seems to have become slightly larger since I last saw it, collecting money and batteries and coffee. Coffee? Yes, coffee gave me extra energy, even though I wasn't sure if I could trust tasty beverages that had been lying around on the floor in Freddy's delightful little abode.

As for the batteries, that stumped me a little. Perhaps I was going to acquire an electric toothbrush weapon later in the game with which to REND FOES ASUNDER.

Incidentally I later replayed this game and became the blonde-haired chick instead, and when I got to the above section I discovered that I was, once again, controlling a dumpy dark-haired fellow in a white shirt. Obviously the art team objected to creating several sprites for such a dodgy game. In fact the only thing that I could use to remind myself what character I was was the occasional message saying that 'You hear X screaming in agony in the distance'. I knew that I was probably playing whoever's name doesn't occur in these occasional heartening outbursts.

So I'm running around the house being attacked by skeletons. Not Freddy. Apparently Freddy couldn't take time out of his busy schedule to attack me at this point, despite having chased me from one end of the town to the other earlier on, but let's not question the man, he knows what he's doing. So the skeletons are closing in and I lay into them with a baseball bat. Skeletons hate baseball bats as they all seem to be instantly atomized when you hit them with one.

Whatever, I eventually stumble across a ladder that takes me down to the next level, where I'm attacked by wheelchairs. Now, this is a little more relevant as Will (who incidentally I later discovered was played in the film by an actor with a really girly name) was attacked by a wheelchair at one point in said film, but I was attacked by a wheelchair even when playing other characters, so the game didn't gain any points for that. A little more blundering around takes me down to the third level, where a bunch of ghosts (who look exactly like white sheets with holes cut out) attack me mercilessly and green swirly things litter my path. I got stuck at this point 'cos I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to be doing. In a Freddy film I'd have been gutted six times by now, I felt lost and confused. So I turned off and read a book instead.

"Yahtzee," I hear you mutter, "Was all that talk of crime really just an intro to a badly written review of some crap Nightmare on Elm Street C64 game you found?"

Yes, it was. Get over it.

Quality Rating: 26%

One-Word Summary: "Painful"

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