Google Maps may be an excellent service, providing easily the best and most flexible online maps of the UK, but after extended use by someone who doesn’t like to drive - say, me - it begins to reveal a dark heart, the end result of its upbringing in a land where the car is king.

Yes, Google Maps is evidently designed for (and by) fat pies who refuse to step out of their SUVs until they’re inches away from their destination - Americans. Quite possibly Americans like the young couple who once told me in hushed tones, on a train but without a hint of irony, that public transport in California “isn’t for people like us“.

Despite the fact that Google Maps diligently records all known nasty one-way systems, and routes its directions accordingly - with no way of telling it to stop it because you’re on foot - it somehow omits that most basic of locations, the humble train station. No, you can’t find train stations on Google Maps, either by looking or by specifically searching. Instead, for unfamiliar towns and cities, you either have to trust that most major train stations can generally be found on “Station Road” or perhaps “Station Approach”, or look up their location somewhere else and make a mental note.

This is rendered even more bizarre by the fact that Google Maps actually include railway lines, albeit represented in the same way as the rather less uncrossable tram lines, leaving the location of the stations themselves as the only mystery.

All this, of course, means little more than the opportunity to put my limited artistic skills to good use when I have to print a map, or send one to someone else. Trying to remember where stations are when sending directions to friends probably helps keep my brain active, too! In the end, in a twisted kind of way, Google Maps are doing me a favour. Probably.

Forget playing modern PC adventure games, they’re uniformly rubbish. Fact.

This is where it’s at.

More on this exciting development, such as a step-by-step guide on how you can join me in the slightly scary world of running homebrew software on your DS, may follow.

Until then, I’m off to finally play Beneath a Steel Sky the way its creators never intended - on the bog.

We’ve established that I own too many games. What better excuse to play them than to review them for this site?

Of course, when some of my games are as high-calibre as those in The Adventure Collection - three games for a fiver, folks, there’s nothing suspicious about that! - I don’t want to commit myself to playing them all the way through.

With that in mind, I present the first in a potentially regular column: the half-OOUR review. The concept is simple: a game has half a f**king OOUR either to impress me, or make me think it was MORE FOOL ME for tainting my computer with such gash. The time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Without further ado, the first candidate: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one of the games in the fine Adventure Collection.

I didn’t have high hopes.

12:35 am

Installation went well enough. Actually, what am I on? Of course it did. This is sounding like a JA+ review already, scrambling for compliments like a pig scouring marshland for truffles. But still, it’s true: there was even an installation splash screen that didn’t burn my eyes.

Of course, as soon as the game began, I found myself making allowances for it. Good cutscene, I thought, for an adventure game. In reality it’s amateurish in the extreme and looks about as visually stunning as a Blue Peter competition entry. One unconvincing rockfall and a crashed helicopter later, and our sexy female protagonist (I’m sure that’s the look they were going for, anyway) is stranded in the middle of nowhere.

What does the game smack me with first? Terrible pathfinding? Naturally. A character who has to turn laboriously on the spot before she sets off in a new direction? Of course! Tiny hotspots? Yep.

The interface is unresponsive, to the point that it only does something when you try something you’re allowed to do. Objects you can interact with - but not necessarily pick up without manipulating them first, for reasons the game does not offer - are highlighted with an icon. There are no descriptions or even text labels, so if you can’t make out what an object is or why you can’t pick it up immediately from the illustration alone, you’re out of luck. Oh man.

What’s outside the helicopter? A vast expanse. What happens if I click on the footprints icon that appears over this tiny, tiny piece of land?

Oh, I see. It’s slipping. Thanks for that. As you can see, no expense has been spent on the visuals, nor on the protagonist’s dialogue.

At this point, I’d picked up everything possible from the downed helicopter. I’d found a crevice in a rock, only to be dropped what felt like a heavy hint, “there might be a way out over there”. I located the tiny hotspot for ‘over there’ and found a panoramic view over the sea, at which point my spunky heroine proclaimed that she “should tell the office about the accident”. Well, yeah.

12:45 am

Ok, enough blind stumbling around. I decided I must have missed something about the interface. It couldn’t really be this bad, could it?

Sadly, it could and it is. There really is no way to tell what an object is other than by sight. There is no feedback when something doesn’t work, only when it does.

Thanks to a walkthrough in the manual, I found I had missed some objects in the helicopter cockpit - a medical box that I initially couldn’t pick up (the game couldn’t tell me it was screwed to the wall, natch), and some wires I had to cut loose.

12:50 am

At this point I decided to screw wandering around the same three screens of the crash site, searching for new ways to pit myself against the interface in battle, and went back to the walkthrough from the manual. It transpired that “telling the office” equates to “sending an email from your laptop”. Sending an email from a laptop while stranded in a remote spot in Iceland, of course, makes perfect sense, but only when you have a panoramic view over the sea!

Email sent. I was no further forward.

12:53 am

Walkthrough again.

You see her there, brazenly saying “over there”? She means here. There’s a way out here, where she’s standing. Getting rid of the rock I didn’t even know was a problem - no feedback, y’see - had me on my way.

1:00 am

Only five minutes left, thank God. It was set to be a telling five minutes, though.

Play any number of ‘fan games’, amateur efforts generally created as a labour of love by one person, and you’ll find one common thread running through most of them: pointless player missions. You know the sort of thing: find the shaven llama and take it to The Insidious Overweight Moon God before Mars is in the eighth house. Usually there’s no plausible reason for these missions, because the amateur adventure maker can’t be bothered with a plot or a cohesive storyline or any of that nonsense, but you have to do them to progress through the game.

Guess what? Journey to the Centre of the Earth has one of those.

Mmm, so I have to find a crystal and polish it? Like you polish your ‘wand’? Sounds intriguing, do tell me more.

Naturally it isn’t intriguing at all, it’s boring and rubbish. I found the crystal, and the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. How do I pick it up?, I wondered. Do I use everything in my inventory with it? Go out and find more inventory and then try that? Tinker with this fusebox - with no feedback - in a vain attempt to repair it?

Or did I just Alt-F4 the hell outta there?

Admittedly, by this stage the game was beginning to show at least a smattering of potential. If I was interested enough in adventure games not to mind the bad gameplay (see signature), I might have persisted for, ooh, five minutes. But as it turned out, my time was up.

1:05 am

Half an OOUR? Seemed more like three. Just out of interest, I decided to take a look at how JA+ reviewed it. I’ll give you a clue: it scores more highly than Monkey Island 2.

Next up in the series, the demo of Al Emmo: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I might have to steel myself first, though.

I used to have a serious problem: I couldn’t stop buying games I didn’t have time to play.

Actually, who am I kidding? The problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just loosened its grip slightly. There are still games on my shelf I’ve barely unwrapped.

Prince of Persia. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Deus Ex. Eternal Darkness.

Just last week I spotted an irresistable deal on play.com: three adventure games for £5! Granted, I’d never heard of them, and even the reviews on Just Adventure were prepared to admit they were sub-par - meaning they were each a pathetic waste of space, and playing them would compare unfavourably with repeatedly impaling your head on a fork - but still, that’s three games for £5. How could I resist that?

And of course they’ve joined the ever-expanding ranks of games I’ve never touched. I did manage to make inroads into the pile a few years ago, by forbidding myself from buying any new games until I’d given each of the existing ones a fair chance. Obviously, with my self-dislipline, that lasted about five minutes - but it gave me the chance to play some decent games, seemingly for free.

Ah, so that’s why governments stockpile some of their natural resources.

So yesterday there was a classic Internet furore as AOL publicly released a pile of search data from users of their search engine. Anonymised, mind you, but that’s not quite the right word. When I think of something being ‘anonymised’, I think of dodgy electronic voices. Interviewees in impenetrable silhouette. Details changed to protect the innocent. The whole shebang.

What AOL mean here is that they didn’t attach the name and address of each user directly. Very good of them - but they still gave each user a unique ID number.

And tagged each of their search queries with a date and time.

What this means is that anyone can quite easily track the search history of user #3, and - if they happen to have insider access to any of the sites user #3 found through the AOL search, say a government site or one owned by any of the big media companies - crosscheck AOL’s data with their own web server logs to lift the veil of anonimity. Oh dear.

You don’t even have to be that big a site to score a victim. So congratulations, Case Study User X - you stumbled upon a site for which I have the logs.

Huz? Stalker more like. Thanks Ryan.

The guy - and, judging by his search history, I’m assuming it’s a bloke - is from Texas. He came to the site but didn’t stay. The bastard.

Probably because it doesn’t contain many pictures of actresses. He likes searching for info on actresses, you see. And paparazzi pictures of them. And sometimes, he can’t help but wonder where they live.

Nothing too bad there, I suppose. Harmless enough. At the beginning of his search oddysey with AOL, he was looking for ‘free puppies’. By the end, his search had moved on to the subject of puppy food. Is this a touching tale of dreams fulfilled?

Probably. Unfortunately, not many dreams are likely to be fulfilled by people having their search history posted for the world to see. My stalking victim was relatively innocuous, searching mainly on mundane topics that any one of thousands of people could have. The fact that he was looking for careers with a specific company, evidently owned a particular model of printer and had a poor credit rating - but wanted a loan - might help to pin him down more precisely, but not without a lot of educated guesswork.

It’s highly likely that for dozens, if not hundreds, of people represented in the 2.1GB of raw search data, the effects of someone who knew them trawling through the data would be much more damaging. Even a quick perusal of the first 65,000 records revealed some woman - evidently a woman - with an unhealthy interest in post-natal depression and ‘infanticide’, and a few less savoury examples.

The sad thing is that without the inclusion of unique user IDs - and the associated loss of privacy for those concerned - the data becomes much less interesting for research purposes. It simply becomes a collection of words, without context. As it stands, the AOL data is intruiging; it represents something akin to a stream of consciousness as ordinary people interact with the Internet, revealing more about themselves to the ether than they might reveal to their friends.

It’s a bit of a scary thought how much of ourselves is likely to exist in Google’s vaults, really.

Remember kids: Big Brother might not be watching you right now, but he’s probably saving everything you do until later. And if you’re not careful, he’ll release it all in an ill-advised and incredibly naive philanthropic gesture.