Never let it be said that game publishers can't sniff a cash cow a mile off. Over the past few months, we've had the likes of Sega, Capcom, Namco, Midway and Taito raiding their back catalogue to lump together packages of their old titles, and promptly slapping at least a £20 price tag on top.

It's not a new trend of course, and some of those companies have been happily doing this since the days of the original Playstation. But is this actually much cop for the end user, or are we just being royally shafted? To some extent, it's a bit of both.

Certainly, when we first got hold of Taito Legends back before Christmas, we had a whale of a time. Games such as Rainbow Islands, Qix, The New Zealand Story and Operation Wolf had us harking back to golden gaming days from the past, and the retail price made it all add up to less than 1 a game. Conversely, Midway packaged the third of their Arcade Treasures packages just before Christmas (on PS2 and Xbox) - they'd gone from putting around twenty games on a single disc to just eight. Eight predominantly below average old games for £20 doesn't really add up for us, and increases suspicions that the retro scene is being increasingly commercialised with scant regard for those who support it.

It gets more interesting when you look at some of these packages in a bit more detail. You'd assume, for instance, that if you bought a package of old classic coin-op games, you'd look for a bit of care to be employed in compiling them. For instance, why not include rare versions that never made it to these shores, and be absolutely certain that the games you bundle onto the disc are the actual arcade originals.

But that's not always the case. And when you get to the point where publishers are asking the equivalent of a few quid for each game, then that's hardly fair. After all, many of us have already financially supported many of these titles back in the past, and should a fair price be charged, we'd be happy to do so again.

It's a similar position on the Xbox 360's Live service, which allows you to buy downloadable games direct to your console. This is slowly opening up a market whereby some - and we're looking in Midway's direction again here - are happy to charge a few quid for a downloadable version of Gauntlet, for instance. Yet as anyone who has spent some time with Gauntlet of late is likely to agree, it's hardly the social extravaganza it once was.

Of course, the PC community has, rightly or wrongly, been enjoying many of these retro games without payment for many, many years courtesy of MAME and other emulators of its ilk. But the legal position on this has always been clear: the game ROMs themselves were - with a few exceptions - never legally available to download. Yet the overwhelming passion, energy and success of the emulation scene identified a thirst among users for classics of yesteryear, and the success of the assorted retro compilations has shown that people are more than willing to stump up when a legal way to get hold of such content is provided.

Yet those who have abused this enthusiasm to simply shovel out back content - to make their Excel spreadsheets look more encouraging should hang their heads in shame. Those, meanwhile, who have bothered to put some enthusiasm and care into their retro compilations - Taito and Atari spring to mind, who at least bothered to include some historical materials too - deserve your support. At least that way the message might get across...