Memoirs of a Gamer: The Genesis (No, not the Sega console...)

Ok, for those who may not (or even may) know, I'm a bit of a gaming fanatic... I now possess more than 1000 games, 13 TV consoles (from different generations of course), 10 portable consoles, a Gaming PC, an old Mac, a Commodore 64 and an Android phone. Here I'll be writing about how I came to love gaming and how I grew up with it...

So, how did I begin my love for video games? It all began in 1989 when my family and I went on what I remember as our first holiday (vacation to the American readers) in the UK. For those who haven't read the previous blogs, I lived in a few European countries as my Dad was in the American Navy. We went to Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk. as a young kid at five, I was really excited to be at the seaside, but unforntunity there were plenty of distractions at the Holiday park to make me not wanting to go to the Seaside!

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As my grandparents, went to the bingo hall, there's a hall before you enter it, and in that hall had a plethora of Arcade machines. There was a welcoming as I walked through the door, the lights, the sounds, and the colours, I was in a wonder land that I've seen before; bare in mind I wasn't ignorant, I knew they were video games, I knew about them before I walked through that door, I heard of games like Pac Man and Space Invaders, but I never played them before; and this was an opportunity not to miss!

Out of the games that I played, three stand out of my mine, Atari Star Wars, Karate Champ, and Sky Kid, I remember seeing a broken and glitchy racing game with a sit down cock pit and steering wheel, but I could never find it's name, nor could I remember it.

I would just love to own one of these machines one day!

Atari Star Wars was an obvious reason to scream in glee, being five and seeing a Star Wars video game where you pilot an X-Wing through the Death Star trenches was amazing, it's every Star Wars kids dream to be like Luke Skywalker and blow up the Death Star! The machine itself was a sit-down cockpit type where you feel like you're sitting inside an X-Wing, you had the Flight yoke in front of you, and the inside of the cockpit had faux control panel with coloured buttons and displays. The game itself was displayed on a vector display, similar to the ones you see on heart rate monitors, but unlike most vector monitors, that could only run on a single colour, this machine could display about 8 different colours, and was able to model three dimensional objects, something that conventional raster displays couldn't do yet. It was a machine quite ahead of it's time. To this day I find it hard that I played a 3D game before people started to use polygons!

How can you NOT love this when you're five!

Sky Kid is an interesting game, since it was a game as you play as a rookie pilot on a mission to drop a bomb on an enemy base. The game may have look simple, but for the five year old mind it was a little bit over my head. The game itself was a side scrolling shooting game, in similar vein to RType and Gradius, a game where you fly from one side of the screen, the screen scrolls, and you shoot on coming enemies that either try to shoot you down or try to crash into you. What made this different to other Side Scrolling shooters was that typically, the screen would scroll from left to right, but Sky Kid scrolled right to left, and had a method of avoiding bullet fire by performing a loop by moving the joystick in the circular motion very quickly. To be honest it's not a great game, nothing to fuss about, it's just that I remember me and my Dad taking turns to see who could get to level 2, and it didn't happen. :(

I don't think we even this far in the game! But yeah, you had to pick up a bomb, and drop it on an enemy base.

The game I played the most on my Holiday was Karate Champ! As a kid I loved the Karate Kid movies, so seeing a game where you spar with another person was a cool idea, and I had to play it! What was even cooler was the fact that they made more than one of these machines! Just not in the same place... One was in the Bingo Hallway, one was in the cafeteria in the swimming pool, and the other was in a shack next to a stall that served ice cream. Each time I saw these machines I begged my parents and grandparents to allow me to play the machine, and sometimes I won my way! :P I wasn't very good at it, after all being five you're not going to be that great at video games. But I love being able to punch and kick my opponent to the floor, but what was even better was getting to a level where you would fight someone, standing on a huge log that would stretch across a mountain. The whole idea in my head was amazing, and I just wanted to play it over and over again. What's amazing is that this is the game that started the fighting genre, many people disagree and believe it's a game called Yi Air Kung Fu, a game by Konami in 1985 , but AVJapan released Karate Champ in 1984, the earliest date for any fighting game, meaning that Karate Champ is the Grandfather of the Fighting game Genre, that would eventually bring about games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, Tekken and many more!

At five years old, this is something to live for! lol! :D

Amazingly, you can play Karate Champ on the iPhone/iPodTouch/iPad for an increbily low price of 69p! Now I wish I had an iPodTouch to play it!

Picture of the iPad version with 2 player gameplay!