Sometimes I buy the gaming magazine Edge. It’s supposedly the magazine for ‘serious’ gamers, which I like to think I am – perhaps that’s why I buy it – but almost every time I do, I come across something that makes me think it isn’t aimed at people like me at all.

Such as this for example. It’s a retrospective look at the merits of the PlayStation game Ridge Racer Revolution. Back when I owned one of those grey-box things, I came across this game myself, and I have to say it didn’t strike me as the kind of thing anyone would look upon with any great fondness.

Still, that’s not really the issue. Whoever wrote the article obviously disagrees with me, and that’s fine. What disturbs me is what he/she (Edge don’t like to put their writers’ names on anything, for whatever reason) has actually written about the game. How’s this for starters?

”The primary rule of a great pop song: always leave your audience wanting more…The primary rule of a great arcade game: follow the rules of the great pop song. Ridge Racer always had it nailed. If the straights are the verses, the corners are the chorus – the build-up and the anticipation, followed by the emphatic and joyful release.

And Ridge Racer Revolution is the exemplar of that concept, a three and-a-half minute explosion of colour, excitement and optimism that acts as an adrenaline shot to the heart.”

Pretentious? Oh yes. But at least you can kind of follow what’s going on. Ridge Racer – it’s like a pop song, apparently. But what about the graphics? What are they like?

“The sunset that greets the player on the first lap of the second track consists of the richest Del Monte orange imaginable. Water lapping up against the thin stretch of road halfway around the novice course is turned a beautiful shade of peppermint green thanks to its shallowness and the sand underneath, a section of track made all the more memorable and heavenly due to the flash of lens flare that appears for a split second just out of the corner of the player’s eye. Planes jetting off to new destinations, sailboats idling on all sides: the atmosphere is clubland holiday, a paradisiacal Ibiza.

Hmm, now you’ve lost me. It’s been a while since I played the game, but if pressed to come up with a description of my own I might have gone for “ugly” or “blocky” instead.

Anyway, the article continues in this vein, and there are times you could be forgiven for forgetting that he/she is, in fact, talking about a game – an old game in fact, where you drive a fake car around in circles on a fake island while ridiculous techno music pumps away in the background (go here if you’re not familiar with it yourself).

I’ve got nothing against taking games seriously, or using long words to talk about them occasionally, but it’s usually worth stopping right before the point you start to come out with this kind of bollocks.