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)