I've always been a late adopter. While my friends lurk perpetually on the bleeding edge of technology, I'm happy to exist where it's most blunt and blood-free. This is partially due to frugality, but mostly due to distrust. I prefer to watch my peers jump feet first into the pit of new-fangled electrical appliances while I stand back and wait for the screams. Let them deal with the iPods with screens that scratch within hours. Let them put up with the deathly red rings.

Until just after Christmas, I still had one of those boxy CRT televisions sitting in my living room. You know, the kind you see in wood engravings. Some friends of mine were among the first to get a fancy flat screen television, and it was its hulking presence, a colossal Shire horse-like object crammed into their otherwise bare front room, that put me off buying one of my own. The monstrosity would sit there, glowering, sucking down power from the national grid and daring me not to stare back at it.

It was the day after Boxing Day when, for no logical reason, I decided to buy a decent television. Staggering into my local branch of Currys with half a hangover clinging to one eye like a cold fried egg, I realised that I'd had the same idea as every other person in the county. Grey figures shuffled listlessly from television to television, while others tested the opening and closing action of fridge doors like obsessive compulsive zombies. Everywhere, people murmured numbers.

Unshaven and unkempt, I followed suit. I wandered between the graveyard of skinny TVs, reading specification cards with bloodshot eyes.

I called a salesperson over, who looked hollow-cheeked and exhausted. In his hair rested a tiny fleck of tinsel. I pointed a jaundiced finger at one of the screens. Is that a good one? Apparently it was. It had over a thousand peas, hundreds of hurts and a contrast ratiocination of 80,000,000:1 against. I liked those odds, so I handed over my cash.

HD is a revelation. It's as though a portal into Narnia has opened up in my living room, and now even mundane things leave me wide-eyed and childishly agape: the tiny pores on a news reader's face; the searing colours of a Cillit Bang commercial; even episodes of Top Gear. Films have taken on a bizarre, hyperreal quality, and games are simply incredible. In fact, I've taken to playing all my old games again to see how different they look in HD, and I've even begun to like games I previously despised.

In the old days of my CRT, I tried Geometry Wars and threw the pad down in disgust. Too shallow, too hard and too chaotic, I thought. But in glorious HD, those retro, vector graphics take on a new, psychedelic hue; it's a shoot-em-up staged inside Carlos Santana's mind, an explosion in a glowstick factory. What was once unplayably difficult has become unspeakably addictive. After a few hours, its enemies - little more than a collection of boxes, pinwheels and circles - take on their own malevolent personalities: some circle dozily around, others are afraid of gunfire. All want to kill you.

It was last week, in fact, when I gave each enemy its own nickname, that the recurring nightmares began. Tortured dreams of endless pursuit; of being trapped in a darkened room with graph paper walls, a room that steadily fills with malevolent glowing polygons.

The game is itself an addictive nightmare. It's the bastard offspring of Robotron and Asteroids, or a Tron game programmed by the Devil. It's nightmarish because, as good as you get, you'll never, ever win; you merely hold out for as long as you can, taking as many evil shapes down with you before you're finally overwhelmed.

It's a vectorised Night Of The Living Dead, a digital Stalingrad. And I can't stop playing it, or dreaming about it.

There are distinct advantages to being a late adopter, and I've just found another one to add to the list: if I'd stuck to low-def, I'd still have my sanity.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.