Now I’ve read around on this already and supposedly the blender game engine doesn’t support it and after clicking around I’ve discovered that you can sort of get things working with billboards or actuators? I’d need some kind of tutorial to have that explained to me properly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2KREEPuNDs - There are plenty of tutorials like this where the person using the engine is clearly having particles working in preview.
separate thread made by mod request
what you see in the tutorials are particle systems from the blender render module and or the cycles module.
when you need particles you need to use the game logic and that only is available when running the bge
Maybe use the easyEmit Addon:
In theory though, couldn’t you create a particle add-on that would add particle objects when in the standard blender mode, and would add a particle emitter at runtime? it’s just a theory.
Woh thanks guys for all the replies, I think easyemit on looks like the easiest option 
the reason I want this is because I just want to have a simple and quick way of just seeing everything working when you’re walking around the game, I don’t expect full detail or anything it’s just so I can see things have actually worked.
I recently tried messing about with a particle emitter only to discover my particles looked far too big etc. and I need to do minor tweaks to get everything looking nice.
Edit: Just messing around with easyemit and it looks like exactly what I needed thanks!
Found a tutorial in the link you gave me that I completely missed 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEiKX_xXTVQ
Just a quick note guys for anyone who might have run into the same problem as me if your textures aren’t displaying properly click the render tab and then go down to the shading collapsible menu and click GLSL and your particles will then look GLORIOUS! 
Everything is coming along nicely but I have another new small question that should be easily solved, the particles work great and already my game is starting to look much prettier now however I’m trying to replace objects with the particle emitters from easyemit and unfortunately only the mesh seems to get replaced so you just end up with a cube and the texture I’ve put on it.
Here’s what my logic bricks are organised like:
Collision - Always > And > Edit Object - add object - object 01
mesh object - mesh 01
add object - particleparent
As said before, the game engine only acknowledges the mesh replacement for some reason, I’ll dig around and see if I can find a solution.
Edit: I think the solution would be to somehow convert the particles to a mesh, but the engine doesn’t seem to like it very much as even though I’ve tried the usual methods posted up to do it object 01 which should be the main particle system doesn’t appear in the mesh replace when you try to look for it.
HURRAY! Solved the problem myself!
All I need to do was put the particles on a separate layer.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Game_Engine/Logic/Actuators/Edit_Object
Add Object Adds an object at the centre of the current object. The object that is added needs to be on another, hidden, layer.