Nintendo Entertainment System

Back in the good old days of the 8 bit console wars your choice of games console was limited to the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Sega Master System. There was of course the old atari 7800 knocking around in Argos and The Catalogue Shop (before it became Index and then before it became a section of the Littlewoods shop and before Littlewoods went tits up) but no fucker was gonna be fooled by an old piece of shit like that let alone face the mocking tones of every kid in school for having parents dumb enough to actually buy that joke of a machine.

As a kid of course i had the Master System and fun it was too. I did however get my fair share of play time on the NES as well.

Released in 1986 in europe the Nintendo Entertainment System (bollocks to this i'm typing NES from now on) came bundled with quite possibly the most iconic character in gaming history. O lets be fair after a while (and no matter how good it was) we all eventually got pissed off to the back teeth of super mario brothers). I never owned a NE initially and only really purchased one during the hey day of the 16 bit gaming revolution (when it was piss cheap) Most of my gaming experiences with this machine came straight from playing a friends version. One of the cool things about the system was no matter how much a game pissed you off or made you angry those controllers (that were usually the first to hit the wall of a bedroom) always seemed to withstand the attack of even the most annoyed gamer. (so points to nintendo there). And boy were there some annoyingly infuriating piece of shit games for the system. TNMT (work it out coz im not bloody writing it out) was one of the many games to annoy. For starters every kid that heard of it was hoping it was going to be a conversion of the turtles arcade game (see it was turtles) only to get it home and be disappointed by the infuriatingly difficult side scrolling platform beat em up with shitty top down sections that always saw you getting lost and levels with unfair pixel perfect jumping that would see the controller get another dent to go along with the ones sustained from marathons of ghouls and ghosts. Another launch title for the richer kids who could afford more than the basic bundle came in the shape of duck hunt. which provided ohhhhh minutes of entertainment until you realised you couldn't shoot that smug faced fucking dog.

On paper at least the SMS (ok sega master system) was superior having access to a greater colour palette and graphically superior to the NES with the promise of being able to play all those lovely cutting edge Sega arcade classics. So why (in my opinion at least) did Nintendo win hands down?

Nintendo wasn't under any illusion about exactly what the NES was it was a home console with a fraction of the power of any arcade machine that you could plonk 10p into and as a result they (Nintendo at least) created games specifically for their system alone. Step forward Super Mario Brothers 1 2 and 3 (ok not 2 that wasn't originally a Mario game but still good). When Nintendo got it right they got it damn near perfect and the former mentioned games are a testament of how good Nintendo could be as software developers Punch out and the money for old rope Mike Tysons Punch Out was another fun game to spend an afternoon on. The Kirby series equally a great platform game as well. And not forgetting the Zelda game that started it all (but not zelda 2 that was well shit). Unlike Sega Nintendo seemed to get the best software developers to create games for their system as well 3rd party was where it was at  and companies like Capcom and their Disney versions of games (Ducktails to this day remains a favourite) pushed Nintendo up the most wanted list far beyond Sega's grasp. Oh and lets not forget another Capcom legend Mega Man fantastic music from a machine that could (in lesser hands) do plinky plonky music. And then there was Konami TNMT aside they were responsible for the Castlevania series that also shifted NES's like hotcakes. Games for the nes became genre defining to this day you know that sooner or later another metroid game will be released for the latest system or another Contra (thanks Konami) Castlevania Mario and Zelda Not too recently another KId icarus game was released for the 3ds.

Where Sega eventually fall flat on its arse and disappeared from the console market Nintendo to this day is still going from strength to strength and it was and is all down to this first mainstream console The Nintendo Entertainment System.

I would get another if they weren't so fucking expensive now

Ohhhhhhhh To play any nes game right now (i just found a site) without the need to download any emulator or rom (coz that would be technically breaking the law) you can go to http://nesbox.com/game where you just have to click on the game you want' wait a while while the flash player loads the relevent game and emulator and then play that game using the arow keys (arent i nice to you).

Sega Master System

When life knocks you down the accepted response (well to post on facebook to get likes) is to get back up when life gives you lemons then you take those lemons coz lets face it they were free and free shit is always good and in the late 80s when you wanted a NES like everyone else and you get a Sega Master System you whine like a little bitch.
Which in retrospect was probably a bit of an over reaction. When you consider that back then Sega pretty much single handedly ruled the arcade scene. With their graphical innovations in gaming technology getting all pissy over a system that was bound to get translations of their greatest arcade hits pretty much marked me as an ungrateful little shit. Nintendo of course had their machines in the arcades but these were usually the donkey kong,s super mario brother's or the nintendo 10 choice games that gave you exactly 20 minutes gameplay for exactly one of your great British pounds sterling.
Sega on the other hand had Space Harrier, Thunder Blade Out Run And Afterburner to name just a few ohhhh and Golden Axe ohhh and Shinobi, Hang On' G-LOC' Shadow Dancer ...you get my point.

So yaaaaay Sega Master System with 3 built in games being Hang On' Safari Hunt and a shitty little snail maze game that you only knew was there if you held up on the control pad when you started the machine. The box art for the majority of these games (and lets be fair) was a little uninspiring to say the least. To say the most they were fucking crappy little white pieces of god damn awful shit with just a hint of what the game inside the box was all about. The first real Game purchase (i don't count built in games as real games EVER) was the arcade classic and one of my all time favourite arcade games Shinobi. Fuck yeah was i excited i couldn't wait to get home open up that piece of shit box and and play an arcade perfect version of my fave game :)



:(

WHAT A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT THIS IS
It didn't sound the same it didn't look the same and it didn't even feel the same. Now bare in mind that there was a garage near where i used to live that sported its very own Shinobi arcade machine that I would play at every single available opportunity. You can only imagine my horror when the 8 bit version didn't quite match up with my expectations of how it should have been (well ok you cant imagine and you don't care i'm the nerd here not you) but trust me disappointment was an understatement.

It seemed as a general rule the latest arcade games of the day didn't quite convert the way i was hoping they would do on a system that was a fraction of the power. Space Harrier was a joke Thunder Blade a travesty and the less said about Afterburner and Out Run the better (so ill shush).
Fortunately the games that were developed specifically for the Master System did a lot better. Enter (what i considered to be) Sega's answer to Super Mario Bros ....Psycho Fox now there was a bright colourful bouncy game with great (for its time) graphics and sound and (psst don't tell anyone better than Super Mario Bros) bloody fun it was too. as was Alex Kid and the legend that every Master System fanboy to this day will still speak about in hushed tones Wonderboy 3. oh and while i'm reminiscing the master System version of Castle of Illusion was vastly superior in gameplay to its Megadrive (Genesis) counterpart. Later on in its life it even got itself some very well done versions of the Megadrive classic sonic games as well.

There was Certainly a lot of great gaming to be had on the Master System and many a childhood memory locked in my bedroom letting life pass me by I had with this tiny 8 bit goliath of gaming history (i might even see if i can get myself one again)

So was it better than its main rival the Nintendo Entertainment System?

FUCK NO

Game Cliches

From the arcade and the nes and master system consoles to the arse end of the 16 bit genre games pretty much fell in to a handful of categories and for the most part stayed there. These (in no particular order were) beat em ups' shoot em ups, platform games, puzzle games and role playing games and there was very little in way of crossover in genre until the advent of the 32bit era

Along with these categories came cliches that still rear their ugly heads today while at the time were all too obvious for anyone who was familiar with these early systems.

A few of them include

Good and Evil

Ask anyone who has experience of the real world and they will tell you that there is no such thing as purely good or evil instead of there being many differing grey areas. In video games (both arcade and home console) it was more clear cut Evil consisted of ugly bastards and monsters. You can bet your arse that if you were fighting an evil bad guy in a game they were not going to be the best looking person in existence. They could have a weight issue that marked them as different or a nice scared face (think of hawk the slayer movie or any from the era to get an idea) they could be a big monster/dragon/robot something that could be personified as not human or someone that looked less than the ideal of beauty got the bad guy treatment in games. Even cripples and the handicapped were marked as different (surprisingly a lot of bullying back in those days as well) as the final boss from the beat em up Final Fight saw him kicking your ass from the sitting position of a wheelchair. The good guys  on the other hand represented what we all aspired to in terms of looks and physical abilities so roll out the perfectly toned muscular chiseled jaw perfection of the main male protagonists. examples include Haggar' Cody and Guy (Final Fight) Rastan (Rastan Saga). equally the women as well who always seemed to be getting themselves kidnapped for our chiseled jaw hero to rescue were never less than the perfect ideal woman (ok games back then were aimed mostly at the young male audience) but could equally (as long as they showed more flesh of course) be just as easily another choice of player to use in games such as the valkyrie from Golden Axe the female ninja from Ninja Warriors or the multitude of skimpy clothed combattants from the many 1 on 1 beat en ups of the time. Games from the late 70s to late 90s sent a clear message if you're an ugly fucker or physically disabled in any way you are the bad guy.

Last Remaining Hope

Earth for some reason always seemed to struggle to mount any sort of tactical defense against invasions in the game world (especially from ugly aliens). Much preferring instead to send a lone warrior or 2 against an entire military war machine from another planet.  which to me at least seemed to have about as much chance of winning as I would using a spoon against the entire united states armed forces. This lone warrior bullshit was the mainstay of a lot of shoot em ups usually a lone spaceship that had technology more advanced than all the other ships in the fleet. Without the foresight to actually mass produce the fucker so as to stand any chance against an alien invasion. The lone warrior would also translate well to the more typical run and gun games such as Contra or Midnight resistance as well as the mystical heroes of role playing games at the time (just exchange new advanced tech for magical evil ugly dude destroying sword instead. One of the more annoying aspects of the game Rtype is that at the defeat of the final boss our lone hero is flying out of the enemy territory just having single handedly saved the entire human population only to be escorted home by exact replicas of the new advanced technology fighter he was flying (i don't know about you but if i was the pilot i would be more than a little pissed off by that revelation)

The Princess is in Another Castle

Lets not kid ourselves it wasn't just Princess Peach or Daisy or whatever pseudonym she was going under to avoid paying tax. Bitches in games of that era were getting themselves kidnapped with alarming regularity. One might have thought they might want to invest in a personal alarm or possibly a gun but noooooooooo thankfully they always had a musclebound chiseled jaw hero to rescue them (sisters were deffo not fucking doing it for themselves in games back then) from gods reanimating the corpses of dead soldiers to rescue their fucking daughters in Altered Beast to gangs of thugs gut punching Billy Joes woman in Double Dragon before carting her off or Mike Haggars daughter getting kidnapped coz daddy was tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime in Final Fight  even poor Mickey Mouse had to rescue his bitch of a girlfriend in Castle of Illusion. It seemed for a woman in video games there was only one sure fire way to avoid getting kidnapped and that was............

Bitches in Skimpy Outfits

As a woman in video game land you had 2 choices. Either get kidnapped or get your kit off and fight. Now exactly why the hell a womans fighting ability in a game was directly proportional to exactly how much flesh she had to bare was a mystery only to those programmers locked up for days on end creating games from lines of code in dark rooms in front of a computer (ohhhh ok i think i might have figured it out). It seemed the more revealing the outfit a woman had back then the better her chances of actually starring in the game. from the bikini wearing valkyrie of golden axe to the  characters in final fight 2 or streets of rage less was definitely more. The multitude of 1 on 1 fighting games such as street fighter 2 (the first had no women probably locked up somewhere by ugly dudes waiting to be rescued) samurai showdown, fatal fury or king of fighters the tits got bigger and the dresses got smaller. unlike the previous cliches that have almost (but not quite) faded into sexist misogynistic history. the female character in skimpy outfit just went from strength to strength with each new technological gaming breakthrough. thanks to new graphical innovations tits now have a nice bounce in fighting games as in the Dead or Alive series.

There are of course enough cliches in games of your to do a second write up on such as why it s socially acceptable in fighting games to get your food out of a dustbin .. But the above is just a few select examples i could be arsed to write with the time i had to write them with.

Rastan Saga

Back in the day (the 90s maybe 93 94ish certainly no later than 96 98 being well out) it was a short stroll from folkestone train station down the old high street past its tattoo shops and crappy ethnic art shop that sold all sorts of crap made by african con artists (from the shittyest material they could find and knock up in 2 mins flat  to rip of gormless tourists). And past the trophy shop where nutcases like me could stare in the window at all those lovely knives they used to sell. till you got to the bottom of the high street and on your left was the first arcade owned by entrepreneur and x man (well he did seem to have the power to make a lot of his arcades spontaneously combust especially when they seemed to not be doing so well) Jim Godden.

This is of course not a review of folkestone or in fact that arcade generally (so i should fucking get on with it really). nestled on the back wall of said arcade buried deep among the more popular (at their time) games machines stood the one and only saviour of poor gamers that at 10p a pop was surprisingly cheap. That machine in all its glory was Rastan Saga (which had nothing at all to do with the saga building of the same name)

A lot of kids like me at the time gravitated towards this particular machine for the same reasons. Having blown the majority of your cash in the main arcades along the sea front this arcade became the last gaming stop on the way back to the station with 50p still left in your pocket you knew you had a least five credits to extend your gaming time.

From putting your coin in you were greeted by a pretty decent orchestral score as you controlled a sword wielding barbarian (of which there were many games that you did) in a side scrolling platformer (of sorts). making your way from left to right (big fucking surprise there) it was your mission to hack your way across the levels killing as many mythical beasts as you could (the first time i knew of the mythological beast the harpy was from this game) in order to (big fcking supprise mark 2) rescue some kidnapped bitch from the evil clutches of whatever passed for evil in that game.

good and evil stereotypes were pretty basic in games back then. if the guy was a fucking ugly dude he was evil. good looking woman with huge tits was  kidnapped bitch (unless she had a skimpy bikini and sword then player 2 hero). or good looking guy muscles and scar = main  hero of game

of course Rastan the hero that bore the same name as the game (wow what a coincidence) was your stereotypical Conan inspired barbarian and he was of course big and tough enough to not need a big titted player 2 to keep him company  Lets face it you don't want to be rescuing a princess with a big titted bitch right by your side (you would never hear the end of it)

So on Rastan would go (unresponsively) swinging his big massive chopper at all and sundry (and yes innuendo intended) across level after level of  mythological creature including the harpys with their tits showing (oh yeah naked pixilated chicks in a game and only 10p) and meeting and dispatching end of level bosses that for some reason were so unforgettable i cant remember what they looked like (i think one was a big lion type thingy)

Hinting earlier about this games unresponsive controls wasn't an understatement. there seemed to be a big time frame between you pressing a button and your actions on screen registering that press. And before you assume that it might have just been the controls of that particular machine somehow gummed up (possibly due to the pixelated chick tits on offer at only 10p) I did play this game again prior to doing this write up via the illegal use of a mame emulator and arcade rom (google it lots of free shit online don't ya know) ad the lack of response was just the same.
  With my rose tinted specs well and truly removed Rastan saga doesn't look half as good a game as I remember. No parallax scroling (google it) backgrounds and pretty shit character animation as well. The only good memory that remains true is the first level music which is actually pretty bloody good.
Rastan also came out on the Sega master system as well which i bought a copy of hoping that it would be as good as the arcade version (i was as disappointed as when i bought shinobi on that system as well)

For a nostalgic blast you could do worse than steal this one online. there are however better retro arcade games worth stealing.

Bad Influence Vs Gamesmaster

During the early to mid 90s and unless you were a spoiled little rich bastard who only managed to get any friends because  of what you had rather than who you were. You only really had a choice of two TV shows about gaming to choose from.

They were in no particular order Gamesmaster and Bad Influence. Gamesmaster was a Channel 4 production hosted once a week by scottish twat Dominic o'Brian (later hosted by Dexter Fletcher) and co hosted by astronomer and xylophone player  Sir Patrick Moore as the Gamesmaster himself.

Bad Influence on the other hand was a CITV production that was co hosted by ex BBC broom cupboard childrens presenter Andy Crane' (some bitch you ain't never heard of) Violet Berlin and some tosspot called Nam Rood . Both shows for their time were enjoyable enough and had both news' reviews and gaming tips and cheats. Whereas Bad Influence focused on upcoming games and hardware as well as reviews of the latest games Gamesmaster held contests which would put the games playing public (usually kids) against each other for the chance to win the much coveted (for its time) golden joystick. At the time i preferred Bad Influence with its news and reviews that always kept things light hearted and informative as opposed to the sarky bastard remarks and thinly veiled innuendo and double entendre of dominic's presenting style. The best word of presenting advice to take away from both shows at the time however is to never let the kids themselves review the games (or indeed speak at all) the amount of gormless monotoned kids with their blank expressionless faces trying to think of something funny or witty to say on camera was cringeworthy  to say the least. looking back on both these shows (and i have) its plain to see that none of the kids on either show had the slightest fucking clue what they were going on about. At times it seemed (at least for Bad Influence) that neither did any of the presenters. Both Andy and Violet seemed to be reading what gaming experts wrote for them on cue cards. I later learned that dominic was an avid gamer himself and as i got older learned to appreciate his sarky bastard comments that were directed mainly at sad little fanboys like me.

The challengers in the Gamesmaster competitions really did take the whole thing way too seriously for them to come across with even the slightest shred of dignity upon losing or winning and were far to excited over what was essentially a shitty ten quid joystick that some low payed gimp sprayed gold and later in the series mounted  in a plexiglass shield to protect its shimmering magnificence from the harsh environment of a teenagers shitty bedroom.

From time to time Gamesmaster would have celebrity matches from the likes of John Fashanu or celebrity boxers would compete on punching games like Sonic Blastman completely humiliating self proclaimed arcade champions who considering were adults should really have known better than to come on a show specifically aimed at kids (tossers)

Looking back on both series i've gained a great deal more respect for Gamesmaster than i did as a kid (mainly due to actually getting dominics sarcasm) but still prefer Bad Influence even today not as much so as a kid but back then as i was unlikely to get the epic stiffy watching Patrick Moore or Domanic present as i was watching Violet  review games with her obvious dyke hairdo (if only there were dance mat games back then).

I rarely post links here but if you would like to see either Gamesmaster or Bad Influence then check out dynamiteheddy's channel on youtube. The guy has been systematically uploading every episode of both series as well as having episodes of Knightmare and the Crystal Maze.

Nintendo Gameboy A look Back (sort of)

When i was a kid on my 14th or 15th birthday (i can't remember which) I wa faced with a difficult choice on which games console to get. I had already decided at that point that i wanted a handheld but wasn't exactly sure which one. I had 120 squidoodles burning a hole in my pocket and a handful of shops in the town center with which to drag my lucky siblings and father around in while i decided to make up my mind Ummmmming and Arrrrring in each shop not yet ready to part with all my lovely lolly.

One  reason for my immense mental turmoil at the time hinged on an important factor being that  i  really had my heart set on a Sega Game Gear. I knew the pros and cons and was well aware (thanks to the informative kids gaming TV show Bad Influence) just how bad the battery life of the Game Gear was and exactly how many batteries it chewed through in a less than 2 hour playing time. But fuck it not only did it have a colour backlit screen you could play perfect versions of all the master system classics that i had grown up on and loved as well as eventually being able to con my parents into forking over another ninety quid for a TV adapter which i'm sure they would have eventually. Of course i wasn't ready to write off the breezeblock of pseudo portable gaming that was the atari lynx either.

The main reason for my dragging everyone round the shops such as Dixons' Boots (yep Boots did at one point have a healthy games section upstairs long given way to crappy gift packs of smellies and kitchen equipment) as well as the limited number of games shops.back then there were no real chain store game retailers it was small independents (and a fuck sight better of for it as well) is that i could have my proverbial cake (which weighed in at exactly the right amount of cash i had) after which point i would put it on a shelf and have to wait a bloody age to  afford six double A batteries for two hours of gameplay or an adapter to make a portable gaming system not so fucking portable. And if that wasn't bad enough wait so I could actually afford a game to bloody play on it. (pffft first world problems huh? i bet those  Ethiopians are glad they only had the problem of starvation to worry about now)

As it turned out there was an option that not only allowed me to get a portable games console but to also kit it out with batteries and have myself 2 games with which to play. Yeah so ok it wasn't a colour screen or backlit but Fuck it i bought me a Gameboy and very glad i did too.

the cool thing about the Gameboy (and lets be honest it wasn't or its looks) was that for four double a batteries you got six hours of gameplay out o a machine that pretty much in every way apart from colour emulated the nintendo games console (which was nice). the two games i came away with was of course Tetris that came boxed with it (but put to one side coz it was free therefore probably shit) and with the remaining wonga Spiderman (well ok The Amazing Spiderman).

So me with a brand new up and running portable games console sitting in the pub playing spiderman my father barely had to buy me any cokes that day (i still wanted my inside out cheeseburger and chips though) and i was thoroughly pleased with my purchase. Lets face it i now owned a gameboy so the other handhelds (in my opinion) were shit mainly due to me not wanting to admit to getting the wrong one since i could no longer afford to change my mind. thankfully i needn't have worried. the lack of a colour screen was somewhat disappointing but the amount of quality games available for the system kept me very happy for years to come  (and tetris was actually pretty fucking good as well)

As the years passed and i enjoyed some classics on my nintendo system adverts in the local papers and games mags couldn't give away the rivals fast enough (at one point the Atari Lynx was going for £20) by which point i couldn't give 2 shits 20 quid to me was 1 Gameboy game or 2 if i went second hand. To this day i still own a gameboy colour and a few select gameboy original games (yep including tetris).

the fact that both sega and atari have now bitten the dust and that nintendo still trades is mainly testament to the Gameboy (that at one point in history was Nintendo's biggest selling console) and deserves a place in any retro collectors ....errrrm collection

Gryzor in the Youth Wing

Back in the day (which is my equivalent of once upon a time) there was precious little to do on a shagged out council estate. You had a few choices steal a car and motorbike and take it to the school field at night to tear up the grass till there was just enough petrol left to torch the thing to hide the evidence. Or there was the youth wing.

Since i was a good well raised kid who never got into trouble or smoked weed (honest) i spent a few of my after school autumn nights at the youth wing that was run by a guy we called Jim (as long as he wasnt teaching us history then we had to call him Mr Whateverthefuckhissecondnameicantrememberforthelieofmewas).

Standing in the middle of the main hall still in my school uniform (coz i couldnt be arsed to change out of it) there was only a couple of reasons i visited this place. It wasn't for the newly built disco (yep we still called it disco despite oldschool prodigy blaring out from it) which from my memory i never actually remembered being used for the purposes its name suggested it be used for (Massive was always better or so i heard never actually having went to that either). Neither was i there for the badminton squash basketball or five aside footy played with what seemed at the time to be the heaviest densest fucking football known to exist with the one exception of a collapsed white dwarf star.

Unsurprisingly enough for a lanky twat in his school uniform with a monstrous afro (they called me Jackson 5 you get the idea) and huge clown feet (which later on i would come to realize wasn't  such a bad thing after all ;) it wasn't for the girls either (not even the ones who were clearly well developed for their time).

Nope there were exactly 2 reasons i was there one was for the so called computer club which Jim had kindly kitted out with rows of Nintendo's and a few Megadrive,s (Genesis's) that were forever playing the launch titles that came bundled with them from point of sale (by this time we were all sick to the back teeth of Super Mario Brothers and Altered Beast).

The reason i was here today though wasn't for any of those things even if my uncontrollable teen (damn that bitch is stacked Boinnnng) boner was telling me otherwise. What i had came here for stood between the bar (yeah right) where you could order yourself a nice panda pop and a packet of not to be sold individually cheese and onion crisps and the swinging doors leading to the disco hall that would batter anyone who happened to be playing that 10p a pop Gryzor arcade machine that stood there.

Gryzor for those non nerds out there who have a life and call others like me sad for knowing the smallest details of the history of Nintendo (you just wait till a question in a pub quiz comes up ill shine then)  was the UK name for Contra and this machine was the genesis of the whole franchise created by Konami back in the day (nerd alert)

So yeah over i walk with my 10p in hand and school shirt untucked (we invented that to cover up or boners btw) to the only slot that would willingly accept an Afro freak nerd with humongous feet (not that i have an issue with the feet now;)

10p in (and yeah it was good for me too) and straight into a run and gun game where you played a character running right to left (strangely never the other way round why i have no idea) shooting seven shades of shit out of anything that moved. There were multiple routes you could take throughout the level (well as long as you progressed left to right) either run across the exploding bridge or drop into the water and approach from beneath. At certain points throughout the game you could shoot winged shields (don't ask why) out of the sky that would drop upgrades to your standard firearm including but not limited to spread shot and flamethrower. the first end of level boss (yep there were always end of level bosses back in the day) was a big fort with cannons and an obvious weak point that screamed SHOOT HERE TO WIN (i think the bad guys in this game must have contracted the architects of the death star). so yeah a few blasts and still on my 10p and the fortress crumbled before my mighty onslaught.

Stage 2 was a bit different from the first where as before you were running left to right on this one you had limited movement. Your guy had to move left to right (and right to left yaaaaaay) in order to shoot up the screen and take out bad guys from behind an electric force field while at the same time shooting obvious weak points on the wall ahead to take down the field and move on. a dozen screens of this same pointless shit (these stages were crap) and it was another fort type thing with another SHOOT RIGHT HERE TO PROGRESS weak point that saw you complete the stage and get to level 3. Which consisted of some water and guys shooting you from it and i haven't a clue i died here and already wasted the rest of my money on crisps and panda pop.

So there it was my 10p experience with Gryzor coming to an end at the 3rd level. And with the exception of the computer club (which i may or may not do a write up on that was pretty much also my experience of the youth wing right up to to the point that someone burned it down (council estates kids are like that ohhhhhhhh fire purdy)

Atari 800XL

"10 print I am the most awesomely awesome person of up most awesomeness"
"20 print goto 10"
run

And that was pretty much the extent of my programming abilities at the time which that line of code upon hitting enter on an atari 800XL computer would see it repeated down the screen infinite times or at least till you decided it was actually pretty shit and chose to play a game instead.

the aforementioned computer was pretty much the first piece of gaming tech i owned (well ok it was for all of us but its mine dammit all mine). Where as most of the more spoiled richer bastards with their rich bastard parents either owned a Commodore 64 or a ZX Spectrum we made do with the atari which bore more similarities to the C64 than the Spectrum. It came with a tape player to load your games during which time you could write a whole thesis on exactly why cartridges were cooler while at the same time listening what sounded like a cat being held underwater as it loaded. upon loading of the game (lets say we were playing the Lone Raider) you would see a screen that said BOOT ERROR reminding you that you forgot to wind the tape head on via use of a pencil or pen and have to rewind' wind on tape head' and start the fucking procedure all over again (20 mins now wasted and no closer to playing the game)

FINALLY the game was loaded after hearing flight of the bumble bees played with really shitty electronic synth for the second time. There weren't many games that did this it was usually BRRRRRRRZZZZZZZ SCRRRRRREEEAAAAACCCCHHHHH BUUUUUZZZZZZZ WAAAANNNNKKKEEEEERRRR well ok maybe not the last one but anyone familiar with dial up internet (basically any third worlder £2 a month types with net access) will know what that sounds like.

And so on it went ten - twenty minutes to load a game that had the entertainment value of 5 mins. There were of course notable exceptions Feud was a good 20 mins from start to finish as was The Ninja not to mention seasonal games such as Santa's Special Delivery.

Ok who are we kidding nostalgia set aside your specs had to be seriously rose tinted to look back and say that there were anything other than a handful of games worth a wank on this system. Which is a shame when you consider that on paper at least it had similar specs to the C64 but precious software support and to be fair the only games i could afford were in the 2 - 3 quid bracket. The cartridges came in at a pocket money busting tenner a pop and were little more than perfect versions of the games you could find on the earlier Atari 2600 games console (in its whole life the cartridge slot was only violated once with defender and felt dirty for it)

If it wasn't for the fact that we actually had an imagination back then i probably would have thrown in the gaming towel thinking there couldn't be anything in it from my atari experience.

 It was a half decent system at a half decent price that less then half a fraction of the UK population ever owned and those that did wouldn't own up to it.