I am not a gamer.

I don’t own an X-Box or a PlayStation — even though as a father I’ve paid for several of these over the years — and I have probably logged in less than five lifetime hours on Halo or Call of Duty when my kids have asked me to play — I spend most of my time in corners trying to get my character to turn around and sober up.

But having been a college student in the early 1980’s, I have spent more than my fair share of hours in dark arcades; dumping quarter after quarter of my Guaranteed Student Loan into various Tron, Xevious and Pitfall games — swearing that this will be the last one and then I’d do my laundry and try to locate where the library.

I have good memories of these days— usually with a group of people thinking we would be eighteen forever and the world was ours — if we ever got out of the arcade and did any real work. Which we would, right after this game.

One of my favorite arcade games was one called Dig Dug. I’m not really sure why I liked Dig Dug so much or what it really was about; as the object was to guide a man in a space suit underground to either avoid orange creatures with scuba masks and fire-breathing dragons, or destroy them with a bicycle pump — hey, I’m not saying it’s literature I’m just saying it was fun. So when my kids got one of the Plug-N-Play games as a gift a several years ago — have you ever seen these? They are not a counsel but a square box with a few buttons and a joystick that you just plug into the TV and go — I was excited to see that it had Dig Dug on it.

We played this game for hours and for the first — and only time — I was the Big Kahuna of video games in our house — smoking them at every turn.

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Then the game broke and the party was over and I went back to my status as game outsider.

About a month ago I told my wife that I wanted to see if we could find another one of these Plug-N-Play games — for the comradery with my kids of course, I have better things to do — and she found one on e-bay and bought it.

The unit she bought was by Namco and was called Plug-Play TV Games.

Now, the great thing about these classic arcade games is that they follow a specific pattern. If you memorize the pattern on Level 1 and react the same way every time, the game will react the same way as well. Every time. So once you mastered that level you would move to level 2 and keep going.

This game had none of that — which I know exists because the other unit we had reacted as the old game did. Here, each level was random, responding differently every time which meant there was no way to build up skill and move up levels. It was simple luck that may, or may not, allow you to survive. There was absolutely no way to develop any skill in the game.

Also, the timing was delayed so if you tried to lure an orange guy or a dragon into a corner as you could on the arcade game, this game would simply eat you. But the absolute worse thing about it was in the design of the box itself. The RESET button is on the upper left of the box and is not recessed. So when you gripped the box tightly to fire or move, you often hit the reset button with your hand — usually right in the middle of a game — and the screen would go black and start over.

I know, I know. It’s just a toy. But there are some of these Plug-N-Play games that react like the old ones did and are pretty fun to play. Not just so you can relive the glory days but because you can get to levels that your wallet wouldn’t allow in the 1980’s — you can go back and remove the limits our finances dictated back then. And we can finally have closure.

Unfortunately this game is not one of them.