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 Pedals and shit game not pictured You know, the one that came with the huge controller designed specifically for the game. So huge you had to assemble it yourself with an allan key. The huge controller with 40 buttons (all of which lit up as they had LEDs underneath them), two full size sticks, a gear stick with light-up gear indicators, several switches, a dial for radio communications, a set of pedals, and a special red eject button with little plastic cover you have to flip open if you want to press the special red eject button. I bought this when I worked at Game in Portsmouth, so it wasn’t £120 – more like £90 after staff discount. Travelling home to Southampton on the train was the first problem – The box was massive, and the train was reasonably busy. Then, when I got home, both Jane and my Mum went mad at such an extravagant purchase. Eventually I decided that in order to restore peace within the family, and to regain the £90 which would’ve been more useful spent elsewhere, I’d return it, then buy it back with £90′s worth of my old games. So, the next day I went back to work with a slip of paper with the barcode written on it (yeah, like I was hefting that massive damn box to Portsmouth and back to Southampton again), and a pile of games to trade in against it. Wait, it gets better. A little later, it transpired that the guy who put the transaction through messed it up so bad (he put the stuff I’d brought in to trade against it through the system as returns) I actually got sacked from Game for the pig’s ear he made of it. Well, that and the fact the item wasn’t in the store when I returned and re-bought it, but I thought that was a little short-sighted of Game’s Loss Prevention team considering the size and weight of the damn thing, and the distance I had to traverse with it. The rest of the staff were also sacked – they were abusing the trade-in system – and this particular transaction was flagged up as “part of that”, when in fact, it wasn’t. But they didn’t see it that way. Put off by the bad memories it had caused, I never touched it for months and months. Late one night I finally decided to take the plunge and see what all the fuss was about. I moved the Xbox down to the big TV in the lounge. I unpacked the box, located all the screws and put the controller together. I moved the coffee table nearer to the TV and put the controller on it – it was too wide to sit nicely on my lap on the armchair. I moved the armchair around and put the pedals in front of it. I turned off all the lights, booted up the game, and within half an hour I was thinking “This is shit”. Two hours later and I was still no closer to liking it. It was far too much a simulation for my liking – I found it hard keeping my bipedal tank upright, just turning a corner made me topple over, and I don’t think that even after four hours with it, I’d even seen an enemy. With that, I decided it wasn’t for me. Really, I shouldn’t have bothered with the fucking thing. In the end I sold it to ex-Gamesradar moderator and founder of Gamufi (the ill-fated videogame, music and film website), Cobra for £150 – which was £60 more than I paid for it. At least one good thing came of it then.
“Oh man, this game is so scary, you need to play it!”, said my cousin Stuart, handing me a copy of Resident Evil for the Sega Saturn shortly before going on holiday. My Mum and brother were going on holiday with him, so I had the house to myself for a week. All alone in a house, at night, curtains drawn, lights off, volume turned up high – perfect scary game playing environment. My expectations for the scary game to be scary were high. Sadly, it wasn’t scary. Nothing made me jump, nothing made me feel uneasy, nothing made me feel uncomfortable. If anything I was amused by the schlock cinematics, the forced dialogue and the not-at-all-scary zombies. But then, I got to this shack.
I stepped on a creaky floorboard. Thanks to the sound being up so loud, and there not being any other noises for a while, I jumped out of my skin. It’s not even like it was put in the game to be scary. I feel like such a wuss. As you may have read in my post detailing the blessing of Karl and Hannah last week, I teased that the view from our hotel window was interesting. I am now going to expand on that and go into the gory details. Be warned – it gets quite racy.
This is one of my earliest memories, I was still in Middle School at the time. I was staying round my friends house and when his Mum went to bed, we silently made our way downstairs. We put the Spectrum +3 on and played this really odd game called N.O.M.A.D., made ourselves some cheese on toast and had a glass of red wine each. N.O.M.A.D. is a top-down shooter with really awkward controls, coupled with realistic (annoying) gravity and realistic (annoying) inertia. Did anyone else out there play N.O.M.A.D.? Here’s a video of it, if you’re having trouble recalling it. That guy is playing it far too cautiously! We got much further than him, but didn’t quite complete our plan of finishing the game – we got bored of it and I think the wine must’ve made us sleepy, so we went to bed.
It was October or November, 1991 or 1992. I forget, it was a long time ago. David had asked for a Sega Megadrive II videogame console for Christmas. Mum told me she had bought one for him. Now comes the bit where I cringe. One day when everyone was out, I went into our Mum’s room and found where she had hidden the Megadrive. I took it downstairs, unpacked it, hooked it up to the TV and played the hell out of Streets of Rage. I ended up getting the Megadrive out at any available opportunity, and by the time Christmas rolled around, I had completed Streets of Rage and had no desire to play it with my brother, who had been looking forward to it so much. I’m not sure what was more exhilarating – playing a cool new game on the big lounge TV, or that I was doing something so bad and could be caught at it so easily. Had I heard Mum’s set of keys jangling at the front door, there would’ve been no time to have unplugged the Megadrive and packed it away and got the massive box upstairs back to it’s hiding place. I would’ve been caught and been in big trouble, no doubt about it. But I never was.
 Also: Incompatible with Amiga 1200 As soon as we sent off our entry, we forgot about it, never expecting to win – It was just a way to pass the time! We never noticed the tiny little feature in a future issue of the magazine notifying us of our win, the first time we knew we’d won was when it turned up in the post! Now, in the time between entering the competition and receiving the prize, we upgraded our Amiga 500+ to an Amiga 1200, not even considering that we would win. Funny thing is, the Amiga 570 CD Drive isn’t compatible with an Amiga 1200. We had just won something totally pointless. We never got any use from it, and for the most part it stayed in it’s box, being useless. For some reason we kept it, and it was only when we moved over here with Jane’s Mum and Dad that I put it on eBay. Let’s hope the next thing we win is more useful, eh?
One day, my Dad came and picked me up from school in his car. He very rarely did this. He told me he had something very special to show me when we got home – I’m sure he then took the long way home, as the car journey that should have lasted 3 minutes seemed to last hours while I tried to guess what it was that had compelled him to come and get me. We arrived home, and before me sat a ZX Spectrum, hooked up to a little portable TV, with a tape deck sat beside it and a small pile of cassettes in front of it. My Dad asked me which one I’d like to play first, I picked Penetrator (that name would sound so suggestive today – but back then… Ah, innocent times). As you can see from the image of the cover on the right, it promised amazingly fast arcade action, and proclaimed it was the fastest and most exciting game for my 48k Spectrum. And not only that, but it had a training mode and offered a unique customizing feature! No wonder I picked it! It blew my mind, totally. The only games I’d played previously were on the Vic-20, this was something else. It was quite a simple game, but it was moreish and insanely playable. Bomb the radar dishes so the enemy missiles fired at you are less accurate, survive until the end and bomb the core, WIN. At the time I had no idea it was a Scramble-clone – I had no idea what a Scramble was! I got so good, I found that the last bit of the last level was essentially a kill-screen, with the cavern becoming too narrow to get your ship through. I didn’t really mind though, as with the level editor I provided myself with new maps for new challenges. Although it wasn’t strictly the first game I ever played, it was MY first game, and I remember it mostly for that. I’m sure the test of time would not be favourable, so I’ve vowed to never emulate it, just to look at it from afar wearing my rose-tinted glasses.
Now, before you read this, bear in mind that Super Street Fighter II had only just been released. I’d never played it, and I’d never even attempted doing TWO quarter circle forward motions and then hitting ALL THREE kick buttons at once. One day we went to Lazer Quest in Ocean Village in Southampton as they were having a free-play evening (although, did having to pay £5 to get in negate all the machines being on free-play?). Imagine my surprise when I spotted a Super Street Fighter II machine on free-play. Having spent so long on the regular Street Fighter II, and having read up on Super Street Fighter II for so long, I was dying to have a go.
I’d only ever read about “Super moves”. I’d never seen one in motion. I’d only ever seen the blue shadows behind the characters and the sunburst when it KO’s someone in screenshots. The only Super move I could remember was Cammy’s. Quarter circle forward, quarter circle forward, all three kicks. Shoryukens and Hadokens were one thing, but rolling the stick twice and hitting three buttons sounded so difficult, and I was used to the d-pads of the console versions, not a proper, real arcade stick. Bout one – I defeated the CPU opponent with too much ease – the super bar didn’t even fill. The screen darkens. There’s a sparkle on Cammy’s fist. She rolls into a Cannon Drill, then launches herself upwards into a Thrust Kick, blue silhouettes trailing behind her. I didn’t really care that it whiffed – Guile was pretty much at full screen distance away, I was just happy I was able to perform such a complex input. “I did it! I did it!”, I scream, turning to see if any of my friends were still watching (they weren’t), as Guile rushed in and did his trademark upside down kick. “K.O.” “You Lose.”
After leaving school, it must’ve been 1994 or thereabouts, I went on holiday to Burnham-on-Sea with my best friend and his Mum and Dad. They had a pretty good arcade there, the highlight being a big sit-in version of Ridge Racer. At first I was awful, I couldn’t even finish the race because I kept running out of time. Every day I played it for at least an hour, pumping 50p after 50p into the slot, gradually getting better. The day before we left I had one final go. I shot past every rival until I was bumper to bumper with the yellow car, that damn car that always seemed so far out in front, that damn car that always had a bit more speed, that damn car that always finished in front of me. For half a lap we battled, the pressure getting to me slightly as I fumbled around corners that I had mastered earlier in the week. In the last part of the race I decisively passed him, putting some distance between us, praying my nerve would hold until the chequered flag. It held, and I came first. The soundtrack I always insisted on selecting? Rotterdam Nation. In any normal situation, listening to this tune would make you sick or have a seizure, but it just felt right having this going while you were racing the ridges. Whilst researching for this piece, I came across this video of the tune ported to Namco’s drumming game Taiko: Drum Master. It gets a little messy, be warned. You can’t really hear how bad it is with all the extra percussion going on in that video – for an assault on your ears, try this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHFnjM00b7w
It was at Eurogamer in 2009 where I fulfilled a life-long (read: minutes-long) ambition to perform music on stage in front of an audience of thousands (read: tens, if that). The Beatles Rock Band was the medium, a cavern like hall the venue, “Here Comes the Sun” the tune. Notable was the complete inability of my companions at the event to take to the stage. Not naming any names particularly, but really you’d think that such plastic instrument luminaries would have eaten the situation up. Oh well, I guess life is full of disappointments. Performing to Rock Band on stage is not one of them.  It's not exactly Glastonbury... But dammit, an ambition is an ambition Thanks Stu!
 The original Lemmings walk-cycle animations from Mike Dailly (left) and Gary Timmons' improved version on the right. The animation was done using an 8x8 pixel space, with Timmons' version showing a less stiff walk cycle. I hit upon an idea, and scoured my collection of Amiga Format for clear screenshots from the game Lemmings. Once I had identified the 8 or so different frames of animation for their walking cycle and translated them to the screen, I arranged them into the correct order, and voila! I had a Lemming walking along on my screen. Exciting times. You can guess what happened next. What are Lemmings good for? Dying, that’s right! I made some scenery (out of a selection of smaller blocks of green grass and brown dirt I had created, similar to sprite-sheets you see nowadays), devised some traps (flame throwers, bear-traps, typical Lemmings-inspired stuff), even drew the little door that they flow out of (animating that was tricky, I recall), then sent them on their merry way! Some exploded, some fell to their doom, some got splattered, some learned to fly and tried to escape, but they all died in the end. Over and over again, because I made sure the animation looped. Deluxe Paint was so easy to work with, and I’ve tried a few animation programs since then, but they seem to have lost sight of how to keep things simple and I found them too complex. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the animations any more, as I wiped the discs before we moved house, then sold the Amiga and everything related to it when we had moved house. Credit to Wikipedia for the walk-cycle gif and blurb. In Coventry, no less. Who would’ve thought such a thing was possible? This is a long post, so you may want to go and make a cup of tea before you settle down to read it! It all started on Friday, with a trip to Cosham on the bus. We were sat behind this obnoxious group of girls who were randomly phoning their friends and leaving “funny” messages on their answer-phones if they didn’t answer. Hilarious stuff, especially if you’re 12. Then it was the train to Southampton – excitement levels slowly rising. We stopped off for a baguette and a coffee in Southampton Central while we were waiting for the train to Coventry and I stabbed a bit of hard baguette into the roof of my mouth. Like all the other times we’ve went up to Coventry for RF ‘Fests, the train was packed. Luckily, we had reserved seats! Apart from discovering the game-breaking “Air Vent” on Scribblenauts for the DS, and Jane nearly choking to death on a sweet, it was an uneventful train journey.  Nice room  Loads of space The room itself was nice – it was a bit bigger than we’re used to in the Ibis. It had an open wardrobe type thing, but the shelf under the hanging department was too high, Jane’s dress couldn’t hang properly with it there so we improvised and strung her dress on the coat hooks. There was a desk and chair, as well as a nice comfy tub chair, and the air conditioning actually worked and was pretty quiet. The bed was quite comfy (although Jane got on with it better than I did), and it had large sofa-like cushions so you could sit comfortably on it while watching TV. The bathroom had a bath and a shower, and the view from the window was… interesting, to say the least. On the train home I spotted an ideal “http://happychairishappy.com/” photo opportunity. I call it “Angry bag does not like being squashed”.  Angry green bag is angry. Angry green bag no like being squashed. Our first home-made LOL! Let’s see if we can get it up on to http://happychairishappy.com/! |
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