Games
Over the years I have allocated an inordinate amount of time to games. Mostly PC, but various console games, Atari 520ST, boardgames, cardgames, and table-top rpg's.
My first game ever was Pong, on this monster!
The Teleng Colourstars! I remember it blowing my mind for about an hour when I was 5!
Then this staggering wonderbox came along! The Atari 520ST. A thing of beauty!
The way its grey moulded plastic faded to beige over time still fills my heart with a nostalgic revelry I can barely contain! The 80s were beige - our corduroy trousers were beige, the nicotine stained walls were beige, our food was beige, the inside of our leaded-petrol infused lungs were beige! Beautiful beige, wonderous, wonderous beige!
Anyway... Some of the games on this thing fucking rocked; possibly the first immersive sim game ever made was released solely on this little beige-grey monkey - Dungeon Master by FTL..... Holy fiddlesticks Batman, what a game! I still play it from time to time
In '88 this was cutting edge, it put the shits up me as a kid! And it was fucking tough - the monsters, puzzles and pitfalls were the "easy" part, inventory and resource management was a must or you'd just starve to death before you left the first few levels! You'd find yourself hiding in safe areas, then pummeling the walls with fireballs till you levelled up your fighter (who needed to learn them spells or be dead weight!), creating strategic caches of food and water, making your own maps, marking were you'd been with your old boots and underwear! Realtime combat, respawning monsters haunting your every step - this game wanted you dead!
And these little green bastards - you can eat 'em, but they taste like shit!
And you will eat them, a shit-ton of them!
Initially I watched my old man play it, then plucked up courage to have a pop... I've still never beaten it!
Run Away!
I played loads of the classics on this baby; Speedball, the earlier Ultima games, Xenon 2 Megablast, Captive, Barbarian, BSS Jane Seymore, Midwinter, Megalomania, Sid Meiers Pirates, Onslaught, Robocop, Carrier Command, Monkey Island, Stunt Car Racer, International Karate+. Oh scores of games!
I also used it to do some sampling with TCB Tracker, a 4 track sampler, I remember using the ST they had in the music room at school to run some tunes through a guitar amp via midi out, we cranked it up and nearly blew the roof off! We kinda had carte-blanche to do what we liked with the music teacher, we locked ourselves in the storage room with all the synthesisers, amps and other gadgets and just went mental, a few of the girls joined us and we kinda had mini-raves. She had to call the Headmaster to get us out the one time, he was like "We can hear this on the other side of the school, I apprectiate your enthusiam for making music, but turn it the fuck down!" he didn't say "the fuck", but he nearly did!
PC "Master Race"
Then along came this honking contraption, an IBM 386!
The poor old Atari was shuffled into retirement, as playing Westwoods Dune 2 occupied all our gaming time. It was a bit of a shit computer, borderline obsolescent when we got it circa 1993. PC gaming was an awkward affair back then as they were work-horses, not games machines. Having to dick around setting up the audio to function correctly was one thing that springs to mind, IRQ channels or something - there was no plug and play in them days! I think my first foray onto the internet happened on this thing, I'm pretty sure there were no British internet providers, so it was a 28k modem connection to the States, most likely AOL. I think my folks canned the idea as it was catastrophically expensive!
Anyway... Let's go back to Dune II. An absolutely seminal game, so seminal I need new underpants. The RTS that got the whole Command and Conquer schtick on the road.
Countless hours spent (not wasted. Spent... Wisely) staring at these various screens, planning and plotting...
...With this obsequious little goblin; I mostly played house Ordos, the ambivalent, sneaky Faction
Although I did have a bit of a soft spot for twinkly blue eyed Fremen babe!
Don't Satanic Panic!
Here I will backstep a bit, because during my mid Atari era, circa '91, along came Gary Gygax, and these two beauties - my cup runneth over!
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons! The Forgotten Realms! All encompassed in the dank basement of one of my Dad's younger workmates, Steve! That basement rocked, it smelled like a fucking dungeon, it had an alchove with skulls, a big fucking sword on the wall, candles, a big map, and four older ne'er do wells who were all insane in their own very different ways; Paul, the butcher with the sinister eyebrows, Lee, who looked like a Vulcan and always played a thief, Big Jules, who looked like a young Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski (and acted like him!), and Dave, who looked like 80s Pete Burns (before the failed surgery!). Steve was the DM, the wrangler of all these disturbed young adults, and me and my buddy Mark, two schoolboys! Steve did a good job of keeping the darkness at bay, he was older, mid 20s, so he could crack the whip! But good lord those boys where wrong-uns! We had some cool adventures, mostly because they were wrong-uns!
You could tell they wanted to do evil shit in the game, I think that's why Steve got us in, so they'd have to tone it down (I think he'd got a bollocking of Jule's mum, he'd got a shrine to Myrkul or something in his bedroom, it freaked her out!). So they all "attempted" to keep it PG13, with varied success. My memories are vague unfortunately, but I remember that when we first started Mark was playing a hobbit thief, he screwed something up, drank a dodgy potion or something, and ended up 7 foot tall! Everyone had a good laugh at the idea of him slapping round trying to sneak with massive oversize hobbit feet like fucking sasquatch! Best days of my life, I've had a lot of fun doing other stuff, but Sundays at Steve's were the days you can never replicate.