This column was original published on the ITV Teletext service GameCentral in 2003

All the gamers I know are lean and muscled and tanned. Square white teeth and sun-streaked hair.

But somewhere, just maybe, there might be one with really really bad skin.

And for him, I would recommend a swim, naked, in a tank of doctor fish.

These useful creatures have a knack of nibbling the dead skin – and only the dead skin – off itchy, flaky humans.

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They emerged from the water clean and fresh and pink, and the fish retire with a belly full of person-scruff.

It’s a system I would like to see extended to games. Or at any rate, to sequels.

Each new project would be dunked in a seething pool of doctor fish, whose sharp teeth would strip away the rotten old flesh leaving only what is clean and fresh and probably not pink at all.

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What would have survived of the Resident Evil series, say, if it had been plunged into their pool, like James Bond into that piranha tank?

Not the door-opening load screens, that’s for sure. Or the menu screens from hell.

And maybe not the clunky, awkward control scheme, either. Please, don’t accost me with the indignant shrieks of ‘It’s traditional, you philistine!’

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Tradition is always listening to Nat King Cole on a Christmas morning.

Smooching up to something which passed its sell by date years ago is more like necrophilia.

Next up on the diving board is Final Fantasy. Those fish must be licking their fat fish lips.

You don’t need me to tell you what they’ll be feasting on.

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Not that I’m the first to advocate these handy aquatic grazers.

The creator of Crash Bandicoot dumped his beloved invention in the nibbling pool to see what would survive. The peckish fish devoured the lot.

Designed around the limitations of the PlayStation, Crash’s big head and brash colours provided a feast for the scaly little surgeons. And so the PS2 gave birth to the altogether fancier Jak.

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Jordan Mechner, the man behind Prince of Persia, strikes me as another closet doctor fish admirer.

The Sands of Time shows every sign of being stripped clean of scruff, right down to the lean and muscled and tanned game that most of us grew up with.

Although, judging by wait we’ve had, he can only afford the one. And it must be a tiddler at that. Care for a whip-round before we hit the sunbeds?