Happy New Year Everybody! As part of my New Year resolutions in 2018 I have decided to assault the internet from several new angles in order to further enhance my bid for world domination but I feel I must start this new blog with one essential caveat:
I am a man-child.
GREAT! Now that we have that established this I think it's time to fill you in on how exactly I have gotten to this point in my existence. I mean, c'mon... a thirty something who's only just been doing Youtube for the last couple of years? Where the fuck has this asshole been eh? And I'll tell you no lie, my origins story isn't a rags to riches tale full of drama, suspense or anything else that could make this original or particularly inspiring... but it's my story and it's all I got. And I've been told by this website I need to write something to actually class this as a "blog" so here goes:
(And before we start I have a quick **DISCLAIMER** for you which definitely applies to this blog post and I'm sure it's pretty safe to say will apply to about 90% of what will come out of this in the future. I will be using swear words and crude language at times and I'll probably touch on subjects which some people may find themselves to be a little oversensitive about. But remember this, opinions are like arseholes; everybody has one and at one time or another they're full of shit. That goes for everything I say on here... and that also goes for any thoughts that get conjured up by yourself while reading anything I write on here... you judgemental twat.)
That was a JOKE... just so you know what you've let yourself in for!
Where was I? Oh yeah... So where did this love of gaming begin? What is my origin story? Well, it all started off when I was 5 years old and my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I can't for the life of me remember the reasoning behind this, I don't think I was running around in my Bananaman pyjamas demanding the best selling personal computer of the time and my parents themselves are not computer savvy in the slightest, not even today! So my only reasoning behind it was the fact my mother had a friend who's husband and son, (who was a year older than me... the son, not the husband) were REALLY in to their computers, especially the Spectrum ZX and maybe Mumsy saw the potential of a having one of these new fangled and now reasonably priced home computers for her young son to be able to mess around on, maybe even do his HOMEWORK on in the future! (Yeah, right.) Maybe she foresaw the technological revolution that was about to dawn on the world and thought that she would give her baby the head start in being fluent with such a device before it became mandatory knowledge; knowing it is easier to adapt and excel at new skills from a younger age rather than having it forced upon him in the future at school where having any lesson which could help you in the real world once out of education would be met with more resistance. MAYBE, (and I fear it is this reason alone) she just wanted to shut up her little shit of a child because all he banged on about was how he enjoyed going round to her friend's house and playing on their computer with her friends son. Whatever the case on Christmas Day in 1988 I opened up a brand new Commodore 64 which came with the Hollywood Pack, (comprising of Rambo First Blood: Part 2, Miami Vice, Platoon, Top Gun and the Great Escape) and the TV Quiz Pack. (That had Trivial Pursuit, The Krypton Factor, Blockbusters, Bullseye and Every Second Counts - Classic 80's TV game shows!) And that was me set for a couple of months for the very least... Well, until I found using the keyboard to control most of the games was an absolute nightmare so I incessantly bugged my parents to buy me a joystick. One of several in fact. MAN, those early games LOVED the joystick waggle! A technical term for you there; It means to alternate pushing and pulling the joystick to the extremes of it's x axis until either the suckers holding the thing in place lost their grip and you smashed your hands on the desk OR the centre point of the joystick is so irretrievably damaged your player characters in every other game will forever be inching themselves in a certain direction... even when you didn't want them to. But now with joystick in hand, (always plugged in to port 2 for some reason!?) I had the world of gaming from home at my fingertips!
I feel blessed knowing that I grew up in the infancy of home computing at an affordable level and I don't just mean from a hardware perspective. I understand that as far as PC gaming is concerned these days the main shop front for all tastes is Steam and from here you can find pretty much whatever niche you are looking for; be it AAA games or an unknown indie gem just waiting to be plucked from the ever growing gloop of available software whenever you want it. And, (if you have the patience.. another topic for another day) for the price you are willing to pay but back when I started you could walk to your local corner shop and there, wedged in the corner by the magazine racks sat a cardboard stand with all sorts of games for as little as £1.99. It just seemed so exotic and new! This made going to the shops with me in tow a nightmare for my parents as I couldn't understand why they would't buy me that latest game I clocked eyes on when they were so cheap. (Taking in to consideration that £1.99 in today's prices would equate to around £5/$6/0.000406 Bitcoins) In retrospect I see now that they were trying to teach me the value of material items by limiting my access to new shiny things, be it a new C64 game or a level axis joystick but when new games came out on a weekly basis there was always something else I had to have. Now, this may all seem trivial by today's standards where several dozen games can be released per day but back then it just seemed like the constant flow of new and innovative games would never end and I, (as an aspiring gamer always looking at expanding his gaming pallet and recreational library) just had to be at the forefront... or at least what I thought was the forefront. In reality that little cardboard stand never even scratched the surface of what was available for the Commodore 64 by the time I got my sticky little fingers on it in 88'. Unbeknown to me at the time was the fact that that little stand in the local newsagents were games of and from the homebrew community; little games that "bedroom coders" were creating/ripping off and generally selling from the back pages of popular computing magazines of the day which had built up a reputation for the polish or mechanics and put out on a larger publisher's budget range. Don't get me wrong, even back then there were your AAA publishers putting out bigger budget games with the latest TV or movie licences to instantly pique your interest and get you to part ways with five times the amount of cash in your pocket compared to those "lesser" titles but generally that meant the smaller companies and sole coders had to be more innovative, more experimental, and I guess that's why even today I'd rather try out some interesting obscure game from an unproven developer over these safe bet "AAA" indistinguishable games that soul sucking publishers with a conglomerate of developers under their ever watchful, ever judging gaze like to shit out on a yearly basis... but hey, that's business I guess. RANT OVER... back to the games.
AND OH THE GAMES! None of them were really sophisticated compared to today's standards I confess but I guess that would be unfair to contemplate anyway. It was a different time. A different era even! It's like comparing a new Ford Mondeo to a Model T, but I digress... Games back when I was a youngster had such a wide variety thematically so it seemed like there was always something new to attempt. Note I say attempt and not complete; the majority of games were quite short when broken down in to parts so most developers ramped up the difficulty or sometimes even made their games impossible to complete, (or put on an infinite loop) just so you as the end user could get the maximum "value" out of their product. This is still a common practice today albeit cultivated in a different way - see most "AAA" open world games for proof of that. One of my most played games on the Commodore 64 was victim to this but that made it no less playable as far as I was concerned, (namely due to the fact I didn't know it couldn't be completed at the time!) and that was a game called Werewolves of London by Viz Design. I just loved the fact you could run around the streets of London killing innocent people and policemen alike while also very occasionally getting the opportunity to slaughter a family member who cursed you in the first place! The music was also excellent in my humble opinion, partly an original song and partly, (mostly) a rip off of the song Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon. Another favourite of mine which was a little more mainstream but still with a horror theme was the original Ghostbusters game by David Crane and is what I believe to be the most authentic Ghostbusters experience to date. It had a karaoke section at the title screen if you wanted to sing along with the theme tune damn it!! A very refined game back in it's day too, you could deck out your car (a choice of 4) with whatever equipment you wanted/needed, go and try save the city and when the game was over you had a special code given to you at the end which represented your bank account number and would result in you having more start up money for your next playthrough so you could buy even MORE equipment! As long as you make a profit that is. It even curtailed the frustration of waiting for the game to load off the cassette by running a very basic version of Space Invaders called Invade-A-Load! Another game I have a soft spot for but to this day I find ridiculously hard to get past the first level of is The Flintstones by Teque Software. I'm told it comprised of four levels but I only ever got to see two of them as they were the only ones available in practice mode; the first comprising of level 1 where you as Fred have to paint the front room of your home before Wilma gets back but with the dodgy controls, your paintbrush/bird walking off and Pebbles being a little shit escaping from her pen and drawing on the walls this was nigh on impossible! The second level was actually level 3 where you had a game of 10 pin bowling with Barney after finishing the painting of the room, (level 1) and changing a tyre on your car. (level 2) Level 4 comprised of you and Barney going off to find Pebbles and BamBam after they run away together... supposedly. As I said, I've never had the pleasure of playing them! One of the few games I did manage to complete was Postman Pat 2 (by Enigma Variations Ltd) based on a children's program still airing to this day! The premise was simple; you, Postman Pat has had his van broken down on the hottest day of the year and you need to deliver your letters on foot while staying hydrated by doing favours for the local villagers who would reward you with cups of tea. This would keep your "tea meter" from running out and therefore stave of dehydration. (It's always bothered me that he didn't just have glasses of squash instead... much more refreshing!) You could bung lifts of a couple of locals to help you around the village if you ever crossed paths with them but it was possible to complete the game without their help. The big baddie in this game were a roving band of feral chickens who would steal your post and run across several screens before dumping their quarry and pegging it before you have the chance to catch up with them thus making you more dehydrated from the chase! (The little buggers!) I have been classically trained too by the way. The likes of Rampage, Blue Max, Buggy Boy, Paperboy, Outrun, Afterburner, Batman, Wrestlemania, NARC, Robocop and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles donned my gaming shelf to name but a few and I have many a fond memory of rushing home after school and loading up a game to play before tea then having to turn it off just when I was making progress in a game due to my dad wanting to watch the news... sometimes life is cruel.
That was my gaming life set for the next half a decade until at 10 years old on one cold Christmas morning I unwrapped a Super Nintendo. And so started the next chapter of my life I dub "The Console Years" but that's for another time. (And another blog entry!) And even though gaming as a hobby and my taste in games in general have evolved well beyond the likes of Fantasy World Dizzy, (my favourite Dizzy game by the way) I will always have a soft spot for my Commodore 64, which incidentally I still have in a drawer under the guest bed along with all my games and, (what I still believe to be) a working joystick.
Now I understand that if you've made it this far there is a good probability that you have fond memories of the Commodore 64 also and maybe even some of the games I've mentioned here but if you are curious in looking deeper in to any of the above versions I've done my best to find a relative link to each game for your further perusal and, (I hope!) a bit of a nostalgia trip. If you are unlucky enough to have not experienced any of these gems the first time around most can be found in emulated form on the interwebs. I implore you to go out there are try them out!
Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully I'll see you next time!
Scott.
Check Out My Youtube Channel: www.YouTube.com/PalicoPadge
I feel blessed knowing that I grew up in the infancy of home computing at an affordable level and I don't just mean from a hardware perspective. I understand that as far as PC gaming is concerned these days the main shop front for all tastes is Steam and from here you can find pretty much whatever niche you are looking for; be it AAA games or an unknown indie gem just waiting to be plucked from the ever growing gloop of available software whenever you want it. And, (if you have the patience.. another topic for another day) for the price you are willing to pay but back when I started you could walk to your local corner shop and there, wedged in the corner by the magazine racks sat a cardboard stand with all sorts of games for as little as £1.99. It just seemed so exotic and new! This made going to the shops with me in tow a nightmare for my parents as I couldn't understand why they would't buy me that latest game I clocked eyes on when they were so cheap. (Taking in to consideration that £1.99 in today's prices would equate to around £5/$6/0.000406 Bitcoins) In retrospect I see now that they were trying to teach me the value of material items by limiting my access to new shiny things, be it a new C64 game or a level axis joystick but when new games came out on a weekly basis there was always something else I had to have. Now, this may all seem trivial by today's standards where several dozen games can be released per day but back then it just seemed like the constant flow of new and innovative games would never end and I, (as an aspiring gamer always looking at expanding his gaming pallet and recreational library) just had to be at the forefront... or at least what I thought was the forefront. In reality that little cardboard stand never even scratched the surface of what was available for the Commodore 64 by the time I got my sticky little fingers on it in 88'. Unbeknown to me at the time was the fact that that little stand in the local newsagents were games of and from the homebrew community; little games that "bedroom coders" were creating/ripping off and generally selling from the back pages of popular computing magazines of the day which had built up a reputation for the polish or mechanics and put out on a larger publisher's budget range. Don't get me wrong, even back then there were your AAA publishers putting out bigger budget games with the latest TV or movie licences to instantly pique your interest and get you to part ways with five times the amount of cash in your pocket compared to those "lesser" titles but generally that meant the smaller companies and sole coders had to be more innovative, more experimental, and I guess that's why even today I'd rather try out some interesting obscure game from an unproven developer over these safe bet "AAA" indistinguishable games that soul sucking publishers with a conglomerate of developers under their ever watchful, ever judging gaze like to shit out on a yearly basis... but hey, that's business I guess. RANT OVER... back to the games.
AND OH THE GAMES! None of them were really sophisticated compared to today's standards I confess but I guess that would be unfair to contemplate anyway. It was a different time. A different era even! It's like comparing a new Ford Mondeo to a Model T, but I digress... Games back when I was a youngster had such a wide variety thematically so it seemed like there was always something new to attempt. Note I say attempt and not complete; the majority of games were quite short when broken down in to parts so most developers ramped up the difficulty or sometimes even made their games impossible to complete, (or put on an infinite loop) just so you as the end user could get the maximum "value" out of their product. This is still a common practice today albeit cultivated in a different way - see most "AAA" open world games for proof of that. One of my most played games on the Commodore 64 was victim to this but that made it no less playable as far as I was concerned, (namely due to the fact I didn't know it couldn't be completed at the time!) and that was a game called Werewolves of London by Viz Design. I just loved the fact you could run around the streets of London killing innocent people and policemen alike while also very occasionally getting the opportunity to slaughter a family member who cursed you in the first place! The music was also excellent in my humble opinion, partly an original song and partly, (mostly) a rip off of the song Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon. Another favourite of mine which was a little more mainstream but still with a horror theme was the original Ghostbusters game by David Crane and is what I believe to be the most authentic Ghostbusters experience to date. It had a karaoke section at the title screen if you wanted to sing along with the theme tune damn it!! A very refined game back in it's day too, you could deck out your car (a choice of 4) with whatever equipment you wanted/needed, go and try save the city and when the game was over you had a special code given to you at the end which represented your bank account number and would result in you having more start up money for your next playthrough so you could buy even MORE equipment! As long as you make a profit that is. It even curtailed the frustration of waiting for the game to load off the cassette by running a very basic version of Space Invaders called Invade-A-Load! Another game I have a soft spot for but to this day I find ridiculously hard to get past the first level of is The Flintstones by Teque Software. I'm told it comprised of four levels but I only ever got to see two of them as they were the only ones available in practice mode; the first comprising of level 1 where you as Fred have to paint the front room of your home before Wilma gets back but with the dodgy controls, your paintbrush/bird walking off and Pebbles being a little shit escaping from her pen and drawing on the walls this was nigh on impossible! The second level was actually level 3 where you had a game of 10 pin bowling with Barney after finishing the painting of the room, (level 1) and changing a tyre on your car. (level 2) Level 4 comprised of you and Barney going off to find Pebbles and BamBam after they run away together... supposedly. As I said, I've never had the pleasure of playing them! One of the few games I did manage to complete was Postman Pat 2 (by Enigma Variations Ltd) based on a children's program still airing to this day! The premise was simple; you, Postman Pat has had his van broken down on the hottest day of the year and you need to deliver your letters on foot while staying hydrated by doing favours for the local villagers who would reward you with cups of tea. This would keep your "tea meter" from running out and therefore stave of dehydration. (It's always bothered me that he didn't just have glasses of squash instead... much more refreshing!) You could bung lifts of a couple of locals to help you around the village if you ever crossed paths with them but it was possible to complete the game without their help. The big baddie in this game were a roving band of feral chickens who would steal your post and run across several screens before dumping their quarry and pegging it before you have the chance to catch up with them thus making you more dehydrated from the chase! (The little buggers!) I have been classically trained too by the way. The likes of Rampage, Blue Max, Buggy Boy, Paperboy, Outrun, Afterburner, Batman, Wrestlemania, NARC, Robocop and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles donned my gaming shelf to name but a few and I have many a fond memory of rushing home after school and loading up a game to play before tea then having to turn it off just when I was making progress in a game due to my dad wanting to watch the news... sometimes life is cruel.
That was my gaming life set for the next half a decade until at 10 years old on one cold Christmas morning I unwrapped a Super Nintendo. And so started the next chapter of my life I dub "The Console Years" but that's for another time. (And another blog entry!) And even though gaming as a hobby and my taste in games in general have evolved well beyond the likes of Fantasy World Dizzy, (my favourite Dizzy game by the way) I will always have a soft spot for my Commodore 64, which incidentally I still have in a drawer under the guest bed along with all my games and, (what I still believe to be) a working joystick.
Now I understand that if you've made it this far there is a good probability that you have fond memories of the Commodore 64 also and maybe even some of the games I've mentioned here but if you are curious in looking deeper in to any of the above versions I've done my best to find a relative link to each game for your further perusal and, (I hope!) a bit of a nostalgia trip. If you are unlucky enough to have not experienced any of these gems the first time around most can be found in emulated form on the interwebs. I implore you to go out there are try them out!
Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully I'll see you next time!
Scott.
Check Out My Youtube Channel: www.YouTube.com/PalicoPadge
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