Computers, consoles and games

Computers and that have come on a hell of a lot over the years.  I know that those younger than I don't see it quite the same way, and whenever I talk about things I seem to just advertise my age, without even trying.  When I was about nine I think, a friend had one of those classic Atari games consoles with Asteroids and that on.  It was so unreal to me.  I though when we got Electronic Battleships that it was like a wow moment.  Some may think that it's weird saying that, but I'm sure that that's because everyone born after say 1982 has had technology always there.

When I was at Broughton House School, they got a BBC Microcomputer, which were the height of computing back then.  The competition to them were the tiny Sinclair ZX81 and the Commodore Vic 20.  I've played on the former, but not the latter one.

 At Broughton House School, David Cooper had Astro Wars as a present, which was the height of handheld gaming back then - the DS Lite of it's day.  They also had the Space Invaders arcade machine at school as well, which was awesome - wasted so many hours on that.  To this day I still think it would be so cool to have my very own Space Invaders arcade machine.

I wasted one hell of a lot of time on arcade machines as a kid.  In Mansfield, there was an amusement arcade where Wilkinson is now, and that was a fantastic place with absolutely loads of great games in.  There are so many arcade games I've played such as the aforementioned Space Invaders, Pacman, Afterburner, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the list just goes on and on.

We got a Commodore 64 at home eventually, and it was amazing.  Even now I look back happily at games such as Summer Games, Ghostbusters, Bubble Bobble, International Karate +, The Last Ninja, Way Of The Exploding Fist, 720, and oh god the list goes on.  You could so easily get addicted to winning Impossible Mission ("Destroy him my robots!") - mint game.

I think, like everybody, we had so many games that we played.  This was most definitely the start of the whole friends coming to yours to play games.

My stepdad (John) learnt programming on the Commodore 64.  That grew to him eventually being a programmer.  He worked on Suse Linux.  Again that is a story that I will no doubt come back to.  His first foray into programming was a mouse walking across the screen, which was really good, except the sound was like horse hooves.  Me and mum so laughed at that.  I feel bad now, because he had worked right through the night on that as well.  He obviously did get so very much better at it though.

The only game we had on the BBC at Broughton House seemed to be one called Granny's Garden.  There were a lot of games like that back then.  Basically a very blocky and pixellated background picture, with text in a sort of early role playing thing - "You open the gate and there is a fox eating chickens. What do you do?" Quite mind numbing after playing fighting games at the arcades.

Oh the hours wasted on these games.  So many hours wasted.  My brother Mark and my stepdad frequently played through the night to complete The Hobbit game on the Commodore 64 computer.  Much the same as years later when me and mum would stay up for hours to beat Bubble Bobble, trying not to die throughout so that we would get the bonus loot rooms - woohoo!  That was an amazing game to play.

At Castle Hill School they had the Sinclair QL, which I didn't think was too bad, but not really all there.  The little microtape things were fiddly and always came unwound.  I still sort of liked it though, mainly because of how different it was maybe.

Eventually at home came the Atari ST, as opposed to the Commodore Amiga.  Both bloody good, but the ST won out for me.  Again I ended up with so many games for that bloody decent computer.

My stepdad got a PC.  A bit weird to start with in my opinion.  They had an Indiana Jones game, but again it was text based, which I found boring back then.

My brother James got some great games consoles - SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive, all the way up to Wii, Xbox 360, Playstation 3.  Some fantastic games on these.  Louise remembers being downstairs at my mum's watching that Roger Moore film where there are two of him, and he's watching the other living his life, while I was upstairs playing a Sonic The Hedgehog game with James.  Sorry darling. xxx

I did get a PC eventually, and a laptop.  I'd play Unreal Tournament against my brother Mark, who'd whupp my ass as per every game - he's so competitive, just like when we played Monopoly and all those board games as kids.

I feel awful closing off now, because I may have left something out of the blog that I should have mentioned.  Oh well, best had or I'll be in trouble for having too long a break at Mansfield Woodhouse.


Thank you for reading, I hope it wasn't too boring.

Marv - 13th February 2011 (40 years, 2 months, and 18 days old)