Paradroid was excellent. Geography homework competed with it in the manner of plankton competing with a blue whale, and Andrew Braybrook – the game’s creator – must bear at least some responsibility for a wave of poor O Level results in the mid 1980’s. For those of you unfamiliar with this bona fida classic, Paradroid was a simple game, in which the player adopted the guise of a weak but clever low level robot – an Influence Droid – placed aboard a series of rogue space cruiser fleet in which some kind of crazy android mutiny has taken place. They were robo freighters on the way to Beta Ceti system by all accounts, but that wasn’t really important, as your task was to kill everything. Or was it? Yes. Well no. Well yes and no, and kind of. Your Influence Droid had about as much combative power as the Commodore 64 you were probably playing the game on but – and here was Paradroid’s great hook – it had the ability to take over the brain of other robots, effectively gaining mad power ups. This game-within-a-game took place amid a lateral grid of backgammon-meets-Connect 4 hardwiring complete with circuit splitters and logic gates. You have one side, the host robot has the other. Whoever controls the most circuits after an allotted time is deemed the winner. If it’s you, you get a shiny new set of weapons and armaments. If it isn’t, you run the risk of being consigned to on-board litter duty for ever.

Considering that there were many levels of droid, it was advisable to start taking over brains as quickly as possible. One of these levels is a dalek, for heaven’s sake. An actual dalek. Although you only know this by accessing information screens around the various ships, because as far as you can actually see all the robots look somewhat like revolving Burger King signs. I was always greatly amused (in the loftier branches of the droidic evolutionary tree) and highly annoyed (among the undergrowth at the bottom) that the higher spec robots could destroy the less impressive classes simply by walking into them. If memory serves, mid and high range battle droids had weapons like – and I’m guessing the exact name here – interrupter rays, which were akin to a small nuclear device that would wipe out whole roomfuls of luckless adversaries. These weapons used huge amounts of power, however, which drastically shortened the life of the droid. But never fear – if you could find the requisite portal, you could plug yourself into the in-game national grid and gulp down replacement volts, which made everything nice again.

Happily, Auntie Internet has woken Paradroid from it’s cryogenic state. There is more than one website dedicated to the game, and this http://paradroid.ovine.net/, is a complete remake, with slightly better graphics. To recreate the authentic ’80s adolescent experience, leave your already overdue report on the quarterly figures from Kennet (south), or whatever the equivalent of geography homework is in your current workplace, to do on the train in the morning, and spend the evening working your way up the robotic ranks aboard rogue and drifting space cruisers. There’s a Wispa and a Thompson Twins 12 inch on offer for anyone who finishes it before the end of Open All Hours.