As I might have mentioned before on FFG, we don't really consider that there's anything particularly clever about delivering snide analysis of something mediocre. After all, what really qualifies us to pass comment, other than the fact we happen to like games and we can (just about) string a sentence together? To a different extent, the same can be said for a lot of professional -critics - from those in games magazines to the ones who write film and music reviews in the Guardian. They may be qualified journalists, but at the end of the day they just consume the product and tell people their opinion. Can the people who fill the back pages of the papers each day actually play football? Do they know anything about tactics? Or are they just professional "watchers of football" who just happen to be able to articulate their observations on paper?

Okay, so Premiership footballers are overpaid and generally behave like spoilt children, but when the guy sticking the boot in is an obese, middle-aged man who's never even played the game, you begin to wonder what right he has to be so critical. Similarly, when some music journalist is given carte blanche to tear into the latest "mainstream" release, might it just be possible that some of their anger comes from their own frustration at not being able to make music themselves? Or, worse, they tried and failed - and they're still bitter at never having "made it". Well, maybe not, but there's certainly something in that old saying about 'those who can't do it, write about it?.

There are definitely exceptions to this, but while many ubergeeks might be able to design a snazzy web-page or fart around creating maps for the latest FPS, writing and producing a new game from scratch is probably beyond them. I speak from experience: although I can't even design a snazzy web-page or create even the most basic FPS map, for some reason I've always figured that, given reasonably user-friendly "game creator" software, I could write a pretty decent game. After all, I play games - so making one should be easy, right? Well, no (obviously).

The last time I caught the bug was when Europress brought out the supposedly "idiot-proof" Klik 'n' Play, which drew me in with its promises of instant gratification and pre-supplied graphics. While I did have some success, it's fair to say the end result hardly qualified as entertainment (more on this later). More recently, some casual surfing brought RPG-Maker 2000 and Adventure Game Studio to my attention. Both happen to be freely available, ready-made engines for creating a specific kind of game - and reasonably user-friendly, too. Excited, I downloaded AGS and started reading the helpful FAQs on the site while I planned my point and click masterpiece. It all seemed pretty straightforward - there was an easy-to-use GUI for the basic stuff, and for the more complex game mechanics - well, you kind of had to learn a bit of code. But stuff like that could be left until later - nothing was going to dampen my enthusiasm.

It wasn't until I visited the AGS forums for beginners' tips that the sheer scale of the thing hit me: here were people who had been working flat-out on projects for a long time - some had even abandoned their own in order to help others get theirs finished - without producing an end result. Even producing a relatively simple 2D, point and click adventure involves a hell of a lot of work. And that's even if you happen to have a good idea for a game in the first place - which I didn't, as it happens.

The more I thought about it, the more my heart sank. How the hell was I going to draw the artwork for this masterpiece? I couldn't even draw a decent character with a pen and paper, so whatever I could come up with by ham-fistedly swishing the mouse around in Paint obviously wouldn't be up to it. Some poor sap on the AGS forums had spent eight hours working on a single background, although it was pretty good. And then there's writing the storyline, recording some sounds effects and music: putting the game together was probably going to be the easy bit.

Of course, I abandoned the whole thing - even in the unlikely event I managed to magically acquire all the skills (not to mention the time) to put it together, there was still the question of whether it would be any good or not. And given my previous experience, it probably wouldn't have been. Back in the days of Klik 'n' Play, which came with a whole load of preset graphics and sound, the initial barriers to creating a game weren't there, but due to a combination of incompetence and sheer laziness (not to mention the fact that K'n'P was pretty limited), the results were fairly terrible.

On the plus side, I did actually manage to crank out a handful of games, all of which were free of any glaring errors. Initially, my plan was to produce a 2D "space-opera", similar to Wing Commander, with interactive cut-scenes and a branching storyline. This was clearly a little over-ambitious, given that a) Klik 'n? Play wasn't really up to the task, and b) neither was I. After brief attempts to create some pilot graphics (ie. fiddling about with the pre-supplied characters, changing their hair colour and replacing their clothes with something supposedly resembling a flight suit), I realised this was a foolish pursuit. Instead, my first game was a sports title, One-on-One Indoor Footy. Essentially a thin re-working of one of the pre-supplied "demo" titles, the game did exactly what it said on the tin - two players, two goals, and walls surrounding the pitch. After extensive tweaking of the ball 'physics' (to avoid any complications, players had virtually no ball-control skills and were never actually in "possession") the game was actually reasonably playable - although it was two-player only.

Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. Both the abundance of "top-down" car-graphics supplied with KnP and the recent release of Grand Theft Auto convinced me the next game had to involve some kind of auto-japes. The end result was Road Rage in the Car Park, a thoroughly joyless experience which basically involved driving around a car park crashing into parked cars, accompanied by some "comedy" classical MIDI music and the sound of Homer Simpson's Doh! accompanying every car-on-car smash. Next up was Club Simulator, which was essentially a Daley Thompson's Decathlon style hammering-of-buttons challenge to see how much alcohol you could consume within a two-minute period. The final release was Rik Hard - a narcissistic parody of Die Hard in which the enemy was not a group of German terrorists, but a bunch of stationary wooden crates.

It was all a load of self-indulgent, entertainment-free rubbish, and no-one was even remotely interested in playing any of them. I realised this while working on my never-to-be-completed trivia game - which featured old men jumping out from behind haystacks and exploding - what was the point of it all? I mean, despite the undoubtedly low quality of my games, they did actually take quite a long time to produce. And though I was probably quite lazy in my approach and definitely didn't have any talent for making games, I put a lot of effort into them. But at the end of the day, they were still crap.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think gamers should be made to lap up rubbish just because most of us couldn't do any better ourselves. I'm not one of those guys who thinks we shouldn't be too harsh on Daikatana because John Romero probably 'tried his best'. And, yes, I'll snicker childishly if a reviewer manages to deconstruct Safari Park Tycoon in a pithy and amusing manner. But as long as the memories of those terrible, terrible, home made games remain relatively fresh, I'll shy away from giving anything too much of a slagging.

NB: The games themselves are currently MIA - hence the lack of screenies - but I'm trying to track them down. If I can get them running on my current set-up we might even be able to offer them for download....