I am very fortunate to be born as a "Generation Y", purely because by the time I started school in the early 80s, there was a government scheme put in place to put computers into schools. The Computer of choice was the BBC Acorn Micro. Which was made for more for Educational purposes and number crunching for banks and offices. Thing was the BBC Acorn Micro, despite it's discount for schools, was a lot for expensive for retail customers, the only person that I knew that had a BBC Acorn was a friend of mine who had a pretty wealthy family and could afford a BBC Acorn.
My experiences with the Acorn Micro was pretty much at school, gaming in the sense of what I'd call gaming was "limited". There were quite a few different educational games that my school made, one was Color-Copter, a game that makes you stack coloured blocks and organise them together by lifting and dropping the blocks with a helicopter. It was pretty dull. But one game we did get a kick with was a language game called "PODD"
The reason being to why we loved this was simple, type "pop" or "bang" and you see the silly tomato with a face explode on screen! Something our 5 year old minds thought was hilarious! With access to computers at school, my father noticed that I was getting into computers a lot, and one night he arrived home from work with a bin bag and an old 12" black and white TV. This was the start of my computer fix at home, and what I would thought of video games only to be something that I could play when I go to Caister-on-Sea again, I was amazed with what I got that night! I got myself a Commodore 64, a tape drive, and a huge amount of tapes with games on them! And yes, I said tapes, as in audio cassette!
One of the first games that I tried on my Commodore 64 was P.O.D. Proof of Destruction, a high speed crazy take on space invaders that introduced game play mechanics such as chained explosions and a grid that you moved across one, but explosions would damage it, meaning you had to move around the broken part of the grid.
A game that I played a lot was Pac Mania! The version of Pac Man that was on an isometric view and you could jump over ghosts!
Another game I used to love was Advanced Pinball Simulator, which I thought was called Pinball Wizard, heh. Notice on the Youtube video how the ball would move like the ball in Pong rather than a pinball, not very advanced huh? lol. Still I got a few hours of entertainment from this one!
The funny thing about my Commodore 64, was that I had many, MANY games for it, my Dad was sold all the games that the original owner had for it. But... I never got to playing all of them. And there was a good reason for that too, as I mentioned above, they were on tape cassette, meaning it could take anything up to 30 minutes to load one game! And being from "Generation Y", I didn't have time to wait, this lead me to only playing the games that I knew about and the ones above, but to even this day I haven't played EVERY game that my Dad got me almost 22 years a go.
However... nothing was lost, and a return to Commodore 64 gaming returned to me when in 2008 Nintendo introduced Commodore 64 games on the Wii's Virtual console to download from the Internet. When they introduced this I bought Uridium, a Side Scrolling shooter in a simerlar vein to Defender, but you shoot down parts of a mothership, wait for clearance, and plant a bomb inside it to blow it up. And International Karate +, a game that reassembles Karate Champ, so much so that the developers of International Karate + got sued by AVJapan, but was still able to make sequels and ports to other Micro Computers.
Maybe one of these days I'll actually get the good ol' C64 from the Attic and dedicate some time to playing the games I had for it, delve into some I never booted up! So keep an eye on my blog if that ever happens!
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