It's the return of our definitive unreliable gaming information list!

CASING
For some peculiar reason the internal gubbins of the Mega Drive was concentrated on a one inch-square circuit board, while the actual case in which it sat was approximately six feet in diameter. The Mega Drive was so hollow-feeling and light that it was possible to mis-judge your own strength when lifting the console, and accidentally throw it at the ceiling.

MEGA DRIVE 2
Towards the end of the Mega Drive's life, Sega remedied the hollow casing by releasing a more compact version of the console. For the Mega Drive 2 the empty space surrounding the circuitry was filled-in with gravel and hardcore.

MEGA CD
The first of Sega's notoriously ill-fated add-on systems. The Mega CD - the earliest versions of which resembled black surf boards - promised to quadruple the power of the Mega Drive, or something, but did little more than give us some dire, and grainy, interactive movies, and Core design's Thunderhawk (or whatever it was called).

For all it's £300 price point, and the proud boasts from Sega itself, there was no escaping the fact that the Mega CD merely offered increased storage capacity, and little-used Super Nintendo-style "Mode 7 flat 3D" effects.

It didn't take long to become clear to everyone that this over-hyped black elephant was a complete pile of rubbish, and the £300 price suffered a series of debilitating and embarrassing cuts; the last recorded recommended retail price for the Mega CD was just eight shillings - in old money.

"JIMMY"
Before the marketing gurus behind today's videogames realised that the young gentlemen who play games are more likely to respond to an over-endowed digital woman, Sega's marketing execs approved an - admittedly highly successful - TV ad campaign starring a greasy-haired smoothie known only as "Jimmy", and the fat bloke who plays "Spudgun" in Bottom.

"Jimmy" would be seen in a variety of situations acting cool and playing Sega games. The most famous of these ads featured "Jimmy" walking into a neon-lit barber's shop, and asking the fat bloke for a "Cybo-razor cut".

What followed was a fast-cut montage of potentially fit-inducing images of the grinning fat man, and "Jimmy's" hands playing across a Mega Drive joypad. Not one clip of a Sega game appeared in any of the ads, leading many to believe that the positive effect they had on Sega sales was solely down to the curiosity of those watching being unable to bear never seeing any of the games featured within the constantly playing commercials.

PIRATE TV
The successor to the "Jimmy" ads, Sega Pirate TV was heavily promoted prior to its broadcast, with the date of the first commercial being leaked via teaser ads on billboards and in newspapers. When it finally appeared - watched by the entire nation - everyone was disappointed to see yet another series of montages of the fat bloke's stupid face, and no sign of any games footage whatsoever.

OFFICIAL SEGA MAGAZINE
A glossy promotional pamphlet thinly disguised as a so- called "independent" magazine, which had a really hard time coping with the fact that Digitiser could see through the smoke screen, and was prepared to say so.

A very public war of words raged between ourselves and the staff of the magazine, with our favourite riposte from them being a hilariously frustrated outburst accompanying their copyright notice on the editorial pages. We were personally named. The row eventually spilled over into the magazine's sister publication, Mean Machines, and culminated in us sending an amused letter to the editor, Steve Someoneoranother, which called him "fishback" and "biscuit-skin", thus ending the matter once and for all.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG
A little blue cartoon character who starred in at least one classic platform game.

32X
After the giant smell that was the Mega CD, you'd have thought that Sega would've learnt its lesson. Alas, the firm thought it'd upset its customers a further time by releasing yet another pointless hardware add-on. This time around they experimented with cartridges, offering a Master System adaptor-style object which plugged into the standard Mega Drive cartridge port.

The first few games released for the device - Star Wars Arcade, Doom and Virtua Racing - while impressive, were nothing the Super Nintendo couldn't handle since the advent of the Super FX chip. This, coupled with the anorexic release schedule and rumours of a new standalone 32-bit console from Sega, ensured that the 32X was the straw which broke the back of many a Sega fanatic.

SEGA AND US
It wasn't until the 32X, and our high-profile campaign to denounce the add-on as a white elephant, that Sega took any interest in Digitiser. A change of PR staff at the firm, and dozens of phone calls from the public prompted by our announcement of a design fault in the 32X, drew attention to our clout.

Prior to that our closest encounters came when we arrived at Sega HQ for a meeting, only to be told - extremely brusquely - that we had the wrong day, when we didn't, and then the following week when we went upstairs for a meeting with the PR gentleman only to be asked, "Look, what do you want?" Hey - and now we're the best of friends!

72%
The row over our overall review score for the lacklustre, and short-lived, Sonic 3 raged for over a year. That we dare be honest about a game which was so heavily-marketed seemed to be too much for certain sections of our Sega-loving audience, who had been raised on a diet of glossy TV ads and the Official Sega Magazine.

NEXT WEEK - ENCYCLOSNES