Of all the cliches that exist in the dialect of English known as review speak, the one that really leaves me cold is "jaw-dropping" (as in graphics, of course - jaw-dropping is almost never applied to videogames for their sound effects, menus or control schemes).

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Jaw-Dropping is an adjective invented circa 1980 (suspiciously close to the birth of the videogaming specialist press) to describe "causing great surprise or astonishment".

I don't really want to get bogged down into a rant on the overuse of the phrase, so instead I will just point out that (at the time of writing) the top ten search results from Google for "jaw-dropping graphics" include a reference to "Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare" on the Gameboy Color.

Now I can honestly state that the only time I truly felt my jaw drop over videogame graphics was back in 1982 when I saw about 3 seconds worth of Pole Position footage on Midlands Today during a feature on videogame Arcades - it left me speechless, and for a while afterwards (until I saw the game in the flesh) I suspected that I had imagined the whole thing.

As a benchmark for the phrase, I hope you'll agree this sets the bar a little high.

The trouble is that as a constant gamer since 1981, almost everything has felt like a minor incremental progression, even with a major advance of technology from the colour clash ridden 8-bit ZX Spectrum to the 256 colour palette 16-bit Atari ST - because at that time, my reference point was what was in the local Arcade, not what was under my B&W portable telly.

Here is a very specific example:

In 1993 I sold my SNES, MegaDrive, Game Gear and Atari Lynx together with a huge stack of cartridges to be able to afford a second hand 286 16Mhz PC advertised in the local paper. This was for the express purpose of playing Lucasarts' newly released X-Wing, and although it is almost always a big mistake to sell an entire game collection in order to play a single title, this time was an exception as X-Wing was everything I had hoped it would be and more (but not jaw-dropping).

Oh, I recognized that the depth of gameplay presented in X-Wing was way beyond what a SNES or MegaDrive could handle, but I also remember thinking that it was only really the lack of a Hard Disk Drive that made the game beyond the capabilities of my old Atari ST - and it certainly wasn't any more 'jaw-dropping' than The Killing Cloud or Warhead (which in turn hadn't seemed that much more impressive than Starfox on the ZX Spectrum).

Not true of course - the mind plays tricks.

Although I seem to be incapable of being impressed by the "next big thing" as it arrives one day at a time, thanks to the magic of emulation I am able revisit my old systems and much loved games whenever I want - more often than not causing a car crash when memory and reality meet in the cold light of day.

Only then am I dazzled by the lens-flare of technological progress - and the only sound you will hear is my jaw hitting the floor.