Due to the overwhelming sense of contentment provided by my beloved Atari ST during the late eighties and early nineties, I arrived relatively late to the 16-bit console party. Another fabulous Christmas present, this time a lovely Super Nintendo, would break my console duck and provide some of the best gaming I’ve experienced to date. Back then the amount of buttons on the robust pad was a marvel in itself – just enough for a game of Street Fighter 2. [...]
After a brief (ahem – 12 month) hiatus I returned to, and completed, Braid.
It’s criminal that I was away from Braid’s hauntingly atmospheric world for so long, but it seems the break was exactly what I needed in order to tackle one of the game’s later, more devious puzzles. [...]
After many years of Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC gaming, I finally found my true love. The Atari ST, along with a carrier bag full of pirated game compilation disks (all individually wrapped, god bless you Mum) became mine one Christmas morning, and I have used one ever since. My Atari ST has been in the company of a multitude of systems throughout the hardware generations and never once played second fiddle. Until now, that is.
Last week I placed my Atari STE in the loft alongside its three STFM brethren in order to make room for the impending arrival of the fourth member of the Game & Write clan. What better way to mark this sad happening than with a look back at my favourite games for the system. [...]
Do you like big blocky pixels? Do you like garish colours? Do you like weak space-bars? If the answer to these three questions is yes, then boy do I have the microcomputer for you! Welcome dear friends to the wonder that is the Amstrad CPC 464.
While I was tapping away at my Acorn Electron’s oh-so-tactile keys, my uncle was beating the crap out of his Amstrad. He broke the space bar during one particularly infuriating game of Emlyn Hughes’ International Soccer – it still worked if you pushed it in the right way, but it didn’t sit right and couldn’t be relied on in a crisis. After a while, he moved on to pastures 16-bit, and he called me up and offered me his old Amstrad CPC. His offer was met with tears of joy (that’s right Speccy/C64 fans, TEARS OF JOY) and an emphatic yes. [...]
My first real experience of video gaming came early in my life when my dad treated us all to an Acorn Electron. My dad was always a sucker for a piece of new technology, and the beige beauty had caught his eye a few weeks before at a friend’s house. His motivation to buy one for the Johnson household was steeled upon the realisation that said friend had a vast library of games which we could purloin through the ingenious invention known as the tape-to-tape cassette recorder.
Thus began my journey through the world of video games. My father had chosen the path and I would stick to it diligently from that day forth. The mainstream wasn’t for me; Johnny Popular could keep his Spectrum, his Commodore 64, the Elk was for me. Further down the road I would shun the Amiga in favour of the Atari ST, turn my back on the Playstation and fling my arms wide open for Nintendo’s 64-bit beauty. Playstation 2? Pah! I’ll have a Dreamcast please!
My friends would always be looking down on me, but I was impervious to their jibes and taunts. Aside the occasional lapse (there were a few exclusives I would secretly covet, but they will wait for a future post), I was more than happy with my lot.
What follows is a potted tour through my gaming past. Each post will be a chronological record of systems owned and the games I most enjoyed on that platform. First up: the Acorn Electron. [...]
I picked up a second hand copy of Mirror’s Edge for just a fiver about a month ago. Boy, am I glad I didn’t pay full price for this. I came very close to doing just that after playing the downloadable demo on XBox Live back in 2008.
Mirror’s Edge should be brilliant. A game that enables us pie-eating chuggers to experience the exquisite freedom enjoyed by the perpetrators of parkour should be an absolute revelation. So where did Mirror’s Edge go wrong? [...]
Though it would take a lot of effort to stifle a sanctimonious scoff, I wouldn’t ridicule the uninitiated for mistaking Star Guard‘s screenshots for a ZX Spectrum game. Specifically, it reminds me of the Spectrum conversion of Lode Runner: a cracking platform game where you hot-foot it around a screen of platforms, digging holes and avoiding the clutches of your indefatigable nemeses. Star Guard has you somewhat less vulnerable, indeed you will be spending a lot more time fighting than flighting.
Star Guard‘s aesthetic simplicity is matched by its uncluttered play mechanic. Everything is paired back, resulting in a very efficient design: everything you see has purpose while nothing is superfluous. That isn’t to say that Star Guard‘s look is plain, functional. There are some really nice touches: the way the plot is written on the walls in the background as you play is lovely, and even though they are rendered in a very low resolution, the characters are imbued with lots of character. [...]
