I've been giving some time recently to turning a word processor into a column processor. This is a sample of how future Views from Japan might begin: "How are the mighty fallen. No sooner said than done. Tis the season to be joyful. A fool and his money and easily parted."

The theme of this gibberish and the reason for the exercise come from the same cause. It is the last desperate throw of a man who is determined to keep the games tide at bay by finding useful and serious things to do with a micro. Christmas is ultimately responsible. I hate it, forgive me. But I must confess it... I was in the market for an MSX machine as a present for my seven-year-old son.

Actually my wife helped me for into the market, but that's no excuse. It was either MSX or a bunch of games for my micro, and have half the kids in the neighbourhood coming in and getting the Japanese equivalent of peanut butter and jelly all over my keyboard. My Christmas spirit doesn't extend quite that far.

As a matter of fact, as I tried to point out to my faithful helpmate, Japan being a Buddhist country we should wait until Buddhamas before becoming a two-computer family. She didn't bite.

Instead, she handed me a brochure delivered right to our door by Daiei, Japan's biggest mass-merchandiser, with pictures and prices of all kinds of MSX systems.

There was one from Pionner listed at £300, discounted to £279. The Christmas spirit overwhelmed me. "Let's have three, one for each kid," I cried. The brochure also listed a Casio at £99, discounted to £89, and in between there were similarly discounted offerings from Yamaha, Sanyo, Toshiba, Sony, Mitsubishi, National and Matsushita.

No fool I, it was clear that if I could get that kind of deal at my door I could do even better in Aki-Habai, Tokyo's electronics discount centre.

A quick run through a few of the major shops told me I was on the right track. The Sony HB55, listed at £149, was going for about £100. National's CF-200 was similarly priced and discounted, and ROM packs from General with what appeared to be decent games were going for £9.50, down from £16 (the standard games price here).

Products from other makers were less generously discounted. So as far as I was concerned it was a choice between Sony and National, with the latter favourite because of its real keyboard and two cartridge slots. Unfortunately neither could be linked up to an RGB monitor, a grevious fault with all MSX machines.

It was at this point that I realised, as I've said before, that I don't have any overwhelming affection for games and consequently don't know much about them. It was conceivable that my son might feel that same way. Perhaps, I thought, I should test him out first. I bought Donkey Kong III for £2.80 and took it home. That evening I tried it out for a couple of hours - I made it to stage two and scored a few hundred points.

The next morning my son tried it out and made it to stage seven with several thousand points. On his second game he did even better, displaying beyond doubt his attitude towards computers as game playing machines.

So I came to hate the thought of Christmas and probably will come to loathe the days that will follow. The very thought that from now on, whenever I have to lecture him about his youthful transgressions, he'll be staring me in the eye thinking, no, knowing, that all he has to do to reassert himself is to challenge me to a game of Donkey Kong.

Even more terrifying is the possibility that my wife, who so far has avoided micros like I avoid dirty dishes, will get hold of some kind of home budget program and start running my bar bills.

But there under the tree was the MSX micro, a witness to my abject failure to bribe Santa Claus, surrender my keyboard to peanut butter and jelly, or convince my family to join some obscure Zen sect that requires them to spend every idle moment meditating on the evils of middle-tech.

Maybe eventually I'll come to terms with it and meet it on its own ground. Maybe by then its ground will have shifted, and I'll only need to use it in a video-recorder or a television.

In any case, the view from Japan is that 1984 was an interesting year. Hope it has been for you, and until next time the season's greetings from Donkey Kong's latest victim.