This is the worst video game I’ve ever played

This is the worst video game I’ve ever played.

This is World Snooker Championship 2007.

I’ve taken the box off the shelf so I type the name exactly right, and it’s made me angry just looking at it. Ronnie O’Sullivan is on the cover looking at you, saying, “what, you can’t even get a break of 15? Are you an idiot?” Two other less famous snooker players are smugly thinking about all the things they can do better than you, including positioning the cue ball for a great shot on the black, and being a tremendous lover.

Snooker, like that other great British pub sport darts, is about taking a skill and applying weird rules to it. Darts is accuracy, snooker is angles. That’s it. Figure out which way the other ball will go when you hit it with the cue ball, and where that ball will stop. All there is to it. Except if you’recack-eyed, in which case it might as well be an exercise in explaining quantum theory in German to an angry walrus.

There, I’m shit at snooker, I said it.

Video games are supposed to be about letting you play sport in a way that don’t mean you have to be good at it. Or it did until theWii came along and meant that you had to play tennis by actually playing tennis (albeit tentative tennis, cautiously avoiding the vase on top of the fireplace and having to pause after five minutes, because really, we’re not all cut out for this.)

You know how some men are into having a dominatrix (I googled that to check the spelling, and I’m gutted – GUTTED – that it didn’t say “did you mean dominatrix, please”) – someone to beat them, treat them mean and put them down for being the pathetic worm that they probably are? That’s sort of how World Snooker treats you.

Take too long on a shot, and by “too long” I mean longer than you’d last if you were screwing Anna Friel, and John Virgo, the more tolerable one on Big Break, starts bollocking you and taking the piss out of how useless you are. I know I’m useless John. I know. That’s why I’m playing this sodding game, so I can pretend I’m not useless and that I can maybe one day beat RonnieO’Sullivan or those other smug fuckers.

The game has 3,000,000 different variants of snooker, pool, billiards and subbuteo, but it doesn’t matter because you’ll be rubbish at all of them and it’ll laugh in your poxy, stupid little face. But don’t worry, because it’s just a game about angles, and who cares about angles?