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 Turnip Jedi wrote:
I got a C64 plug and play and had almost the opposite reaction, nearly everything was terrible (bar Paradroid which is awesome)

Absolutely zero quality assurance on c64 games - definitely a machine where you need to know what games to play amongst the vast sea of crap, even assuming the requisite tolerance of early 80s gameplay.

A.T. wrote:

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
I got a C64 plug and play and had almost the opposite reaction, nearly everything was terrible (bar Paradroid which is awesome)

Absolutely zero quality assurance on c64 games - definitely a machine where you need to know what games to play amongst the vast sea of crap, even assuming the requisite tolerance of early 80s gameplay.

I think a big part of it was the 30 year gap between having a c64 and not knowing any better and having Amigas, PS1, PCs and xboxs in between, there were a few gems but like you say a lot of plop


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SamusDrake wrote:

 Turnip Jedi wrote:


I recall it took me about 6 months of saving up from my terrible training job to afford mine but so worth it

Wasn't it something like £400 back in the day? That was a serious chunk of change back then.

about that, I was on about £40pw, £10 to parents, £10 or so on stuff so that seems about right for the six months

I was lucky I grew up just a little ways away from Silicon Valley, so computers and computer games came across my plate very early and often.

The first game I remember was an uncle's Sears game system, with some 34 variations of pong/handball, with two big knobs on it. Loved going over to his house to play it.

First arcade game I ran across was Space Invaders in 1980, in the lobby of a hotel where we were staying at for our Disneyland trip. It had a left/right button and fire button and I hated it because I was bad at it.

Things escalated from there and I remember the local Aladdin's Castle quite well. I think the penultimate era for that was when Dragon's Lair showed up; the arcade had big monitors above the game so everyone else could watch it without crowding those playing. The line on quarters on the panel for those waiting to play was around 15 long (people would line quarters up on the bottom of the screen as a "I'm reserving this to play next" sort of thing).

About 1982, my dad bought our first computer - a silver TRS-80 computer with a chicklet keyboard and 4K of RAM. Cost about $800 as I remember. It was supposed to be for my mom, but I ended up using it, along with the replacements in the coming years - 16K then 64K - "all the memory you'll ever need!".

A year later, our school got in a handful of Apple ][ (2) computers. It was then I started to learn to program Zork-likes. I still have the book I learned from ("Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer" by Tim Hartnell), and a dot-matrix printout (about 24 pages long) of one of the adventure games I made at the time "Danger in Halbard Forest".

Console-wide, it was about that time we got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. It came with Pac-Man, and my brother and I played the hell out of it. We got a lot of cartridges for it, which surprisingly looking back, cost about the same as video games these days. I think my favorite is still Yar's Revenge.

Eventually, we got a Colecovision, for - you guessed it - Donkey Kong. And Zaxxon. That's the only two games I remember having for that system.

We did get an Atari 5200, but it didn't live very long. I do remember some hilarious games of Decathalon doing the 1000m run. You had to waggle the joystick back and forth as fast as you could to run, and after what felt like 5-10 minutes of constant work, you'd swear your arm was going to fall off. The real laugh came from one of our friends who found a twisted position, arms pretzeled in a convoluted position with the joystick between his legs - well, us 14-year-old found it hilarious and he'd often just win because we were falling over laughing.

When the 5200 died, so did a lot of our home console gaming. We got in late on the NES craze, getting a package that included a heap of games - Zelda, Adventures of Link, Metroid and a bunch more, along with a Nintendo Power magazine that had playthroughs most of the games (Thank God for the Metroid playthrough, I doubt I would have solved that one myself). I think my favorite game from that era was Ninja Gaiden.

Of course, with the rise of fighting games like Street Fighter 2, I eventually picked up a SNES, but console games were becoming less appealing and arcades were well on their way to vanishing by that time.

On the home computer front, I bought my first IBM computer myself in 1990 to finally replace my parent's aging (white) TRS-80. It was a Tandy 1000 RLX, with an amazing 10MB Hard Drive (which I later upgraded to a whopping 20MB to load X-Wing) and a 80286 processor running at 10Mgh. As you can guess, I started getting into flight simulators - though I did pick up Space Hulk!

I think the end of my young gaming life started to be heralded at arcades when the lights were being kept on, and the variety of games were slowly diminishing to replaced with driving or fighting games. And the last console I bought for quite a while was the N64, missing the PS1 and only barely catching the Xbox. In fact, the last console I bought was an Xbox 360.

Those joystick wrecking sports games became much easier after my mates Dad showed us how to take the old Atari joysticks to bits and just smoosh the contacts

I like this thread. It makes me feel young

Well, younger.

I really do miss my gaming mags. I’m not sure why, but I never quite transitioned over to online news and reviews.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I like this thread. It makes me feel young

Well, younger.

I really do miss my gaming mags. I’m not sure why, but I never quite transitioned over to online news and reviews.

The best way to make sure I never see your review of a game (or whatever)? Do it as a video.

For me, it’s do it as a video with a curiously irritating lilt to your voice.

I know people can’t help how they sound, so it’s not a universally fair criticism. But some just sound artificial, like they’re putting on a Hype Voice or something.

I like down to earth, and I like genuine enthusiasm. But anything clearly carefully rehearsed like those (in my opinion) “reaction” vids needs to get in a bin then get in the sea.