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The article is subjective and expresses the personal opinion of the author.
At Christmas I remember playing records. Proper records. It was great. I even had my own record player.
It had a couple of very rudimentary controllers and looked nothing I’d ever seen before. Plugging it in, tuning the TV to the right frequency and getting any kind of decent picture was a big of an artform. But, after a bit of messing around, it would burst into life.
The console had other games on there too, but they were broadly similar to Pong. It would be called “Tennis” or “Squash” but they were all pretty much the same and involved two large “bats” (if you can even call them that) hitting a ball (which was square!) It was an Atari 2600 and was made out of wood. How many consoles are made out of wood now? Not many, I can tell you!
After that, I didn’t touch a console for many, many years. It took a while, but I eventually managed to get my hands on a Spectrum 48k. The games I remember the most from this time were Jet Set Willy, Horace Goes Skiing, Jet Pac and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. The latter actually cause the rubber keys to lose their letters because I was hammering them so much in the game.
If you’ve ever played Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, you will probably remember that you needed to press one key for one “foot” and then another key for the other “foot”. Thus, the faster you pressed these in sequence, the faster your player would run, but you ended up pushing so hard on the keys that you’d rub off the letters. I didn’t have a “Z” or an “X” for years, but it didn’t stop me from learning how to code in BASIC.
After a while, I jumped up to the Amiga A500 – a huge leap forward in power. It also gave me far more colours to play with, as there was only 8 on the Spectrum!
The Amiga used floppy disks instead of loading from cassette tapes, but I moved up to the A1200 after a bit and experienced the speedy loading enabled thanks to something called a “hard drive”.
Gods was a brilliant platformer, with really high-quality sound and graphics. It had a puzzle-solving element to it too.
I moved onto PC gaming but tended to get distracted by the more interesting things you could do with desktop computers, like being able to browse the internet etc. In fact, it was a few years later when – on my mobile phone at the time – I got hooked on the infamous Snake game. This popped up on other phones later, but Snake tended to be pre-installed on Nokia phones and it would have you hooked. Worldwide, at the time, some 350 million devices had Snake and you could even play two-player via the infrared port.
A couple of mates then had the N-Gage, but it was a long time before smartphones almost re-introduced gaming on a mobile phone, and I remember how mainstream makers like Sony Ericsson gave us the Xperia Play – this was an attempt to try and bring the Playstation experience and the phone together. In 2011 though, it didn’t do terrifically well. Perhaps it was a little far ahead of the curve. After all, it was powered by a single 1GHz CPU and had just 512GB of RAM. Try putting one of the more modern Android games on that now and, well, it wouldn’t work. The games back then were far, far behind what consoles could do.
TO BE CONTINIED
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