Memoirs of a Gamer: Are you keeping up with Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!?

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!

Understanding Tech! Part 1: Hard drives!

OK, with my degree and self education, I have learnt a lot about Computers, Networks, Operating Systems and technology. so I just thought I should share my knowledge with the populous so that the typical layman can understand more about stuff that they use on a regular basis, but never thought to know what it does...

Today, Hard Drives!

Hard Drives, Hard Disk Drives, what ever you call it, it's an important part of any desktop or laptop computer. Firstly it holds the Computer's operating system, a User Interface that is required for people to operate their PC. There are things that people should know about Hard Drives, here are a few questions I get a lot at work.

• "Why does this External Hard Drive need to use a power supply, and this one just uses a USB cable?"
  
  Well, it depends on what kind of hard drive is inside. There's 3 major standard physical sizes for Hard Drives. 3.5 Inches, 2.5 Inches and 1.8 Inches. Now, if the drive inside is a 2.5 or 1.8 inch hard drive, it can run on 5 volts, the power that can travel down a USB cable. However if it's a 3.5 inch, because of it's larger physical size, it needs 12 volts, and since USB can only pass 5 volts, it'll require a 12 volt transformer/power supply to make it work. At the moment the largest size you can get on a 2.5 inch drive is one terrabyte, and the largest size on a 3.5 inch drive is 3 Terrabyte, though this is soon going to change to 18 terrabytes. When it comes to picking an external drive, you need to think of if you want portability over capacity.
  
  
  
  
  
• "I bought this Hard Drive at <some date> and it says 1 Terrabyte on the box! but I've only getting about 930 Gigabytes!"
  
  OK, this is more to do with, 1: A confusion in numbers and 2: Something that marketing has created and 3: Capacity used in formatting. Firstly, when it comes to numbers, people have a common perception that 1 terrabyte is 1000 Gigabytes. This is actually wrong, since inside a computer with binary mathematics, a terrabyte is actually 1024 Gigabytes. This is to do with the fact that in binary, you can't get 1000 in a whole binary number, the closest is 1024, so each step in memory, Kilo, Mega, Gigabyte, it's stepped up in 1024s, not 1000s. As for Marketing, You are getting a Terrabyte, but only in the decimal sense, You're actually getting 1000GB rather than the 1024GB. Your Computer sees this and says 930GB because it's calculating 1000GB(decimal) in binary. However, since 1TB in decimal is only 24GB less than 1TB in binary, how does the customer still have an even lower number? This is due to formatting, a hard drive needs a format in order for the computer's operating system to read and write to the disk, it's kinda like having a black board, but some has been nice to give you some chalk and a duster with it too, and that opportunity needs to use up space of the hard drive to work. For Example, remember 3.5 inch floppy disks? Well, a floppy holds 1.4 megabytes of data, but before the floppy is formatted it can hold 2 megabytes, but it need 0.6 megabytes for the formatting in order for the computer to know where the start, middle, and end of the drive is, plus details about how to put information onto the floppy, without it, a computer wouldn't be able to write to it. The same thing happens with Hard drives, it needs this formatting in order for the computer to read and write to the disk, and it WILL use memory to do that.
  
  
  
• "What's the difference between SATA and IDE?"
  
  Well, to start off, SATA and IDE are two different connecting cables for hard drives to attach it to the motherboard of the computer. IDE is an older connection, using a broad 40 pin ribbon cable. The highest speed you can get on an IDE cable is 133 Megabits per second; the word "Megabit" and "Gigabit" is used here because that's the measure of travelling data, not capacity, a megabit compared to a megabyte is an eighth of the size of a MegaByte. IDE sends it's data in parallel, think of this as in multiple lanes on a road.
  
  SATA on the other hand is the latest connection. It uses a cable that is a lot smaller than an IDE ribbon cable, and resembles a USB cable in certain ways. There are 3 SATA standards, SATA 1, 2, and 3. The difference between these are to do with speed: SATA 1 reaches speeds of 1.5 gigabits per second, SATA 2 reaches 3 gigabits per second, and SATA 3 reaches reaches 6 gigabits per second. A typical hard drive bought from a computer store will use SATA 2, SATA 1 isn't really used any more, you can find SATA 1 sockets on very cheap motherboards, SATA 2 can work on a SATA 1 socket, but can only reach half the speed due to the limitations of SATA 1. SATA 3 is often used for newer "SSD" drives, which I talk about in the next question. SATA sends data through a cable in "serial", meaning there's only one Input "lane", and one "Output" lane, this may sound like IDE would be faster, but SATA is faster than IDE because it's able to send data very, VERY fast down a single "lane", faster than IDE's multiple "lanes".
  
  
  
  
  
• "What are these Solid State Hard drives I hear about?"
  
  A Solid State Drive, or an "SSD", is a hard drive is doesn't use a spinning disk inside. Rather it uses a bank of high capacity, high speed chips that hold data the same way that an ordinary Hard drive would. But the advantage to a SSD over a HDD is that because there's nothing mechcanic inside, it's a lot faster, and uses a lot less power than a HDD. However a SSD do not have the same capacities you get on a HDD, a 256GB SSD can set you back over £280! They're not cheap! But they are reducing in price. The current Mac Book Air uses a 64GB SSD, the advantage in this is that since a SSD uses less power than a conventional HDD, you get a better battery time without the need of using a bigger, more expensive battery. As for me, I'm using an SSD in my desktop computer so that I can take advantage of it's blinding speed to load up Windows very quickly, but still use a conventional HDD for everything else such as my music, work and games.

Ok, think I've smeared my brain enough on this blog about hard drives, if you want to know anything else about hard drives, be it internal or external drives. Leave a comment below!

Phone rant...

Ok, just a quick blog, that and I haven't blogged in a while. But I've been having an ongoing battle with my phone when it comes to memory. The irony being is that the HTC Desire uses an internal memory and an SD card, sounds great, you buy a  bigger SD card, things go fine... Would be fine if software developers didn't lock down software so that it can ONLY run on the internal memory, what makes thing worse is the petty amount of internal memory you get on the HTC Desire. It's about 150 MEGABYTES! I did say that clear, "Megabytes!", what happens, everything that can only be used on the phone's internal memory gets updates that make the apps bigger and bigger in size, and I keep getting the dreaded "Running out of memory" icon on the notification bar on the top of the screen! Personally I wish I knew a bit more about this phone before I got, and original I was going to get a phone with a lesser specication, an HTC Wildfire, before the nice lady at the store showed me her HTC Desire and proved to me that was the pick. Well, I like the phone, I like how it integrates with Google and such, but what's with this TINY internal memory!

The Dreaded icon I see on a daily basis! D:

It turns out, according to someone that I work with, the internal flash memory in my phone is set up in a way where it's partitioned. One partition is used for the system's RAM, I was a bit "Huh?" when I heard about this, but yeah, HTC phones use Flash Memory as RAM! As the other partition is used for saving "Internal memory only Apps" onto. Problem is, they went in favour for RAM over internal memory size, which now makes me wish I sort of got myself an iPhone like everyone else! But hey, I'm about 7 months into my contract, and I like the phone generally. Apparently I can "Root" (Android term for jail breaking for you Apple people) my phone so that I can change these partition sizes of RAM and Internal memory size, I just don't want to screw around with the phone though. I also heard there's a way for me to hack into apps using the Android SDK, but I'm not a programmer, and even when the web sites made it look easy, I wishes the SDK I has actually worked, and wasn't mega hard to understand!

I just hope the next phone I get actually gives me iPhone like memory sizes in GIGABYTES! HEH! :P

Japanese Super Heroes rule! (Part 1)

OK, heh, I ran out of ideas of what to write, so what better than to admit a few guilty pleasures of mine...

In today honesty moment goes to Japanese Super Heroes! Named "Tokusatsu" in Japan.

OK yeah, some people reading this might think that I'm incredibly nerdy because of this, then again tell me something that I'm not aware of! LOL. As a kid I loved Power Rangers, remember seeing Beetle Borgs, Masked Rider and V.R. Troopers, though they weren't very good, the production was no where as good as Power Rangers were. I knew that there was some Japanese production in their, but is was back before the internet was big, plus by the time I got into secondary school, I stopped watch Power Rangers and the future seasons...

Now fast forward to 2006, I used to listen to a podcast called Otaku Generation, I used to listen to them to found out news on anime and manga. But one episode they started to talk about Kamen Rider Kabuto and started to compare it to the somewhat lack-luster Americanised Masked Rider. I thought to myself, "I remember Masked Rider, it wasn't that great...", but listening into the podcast's review of Kamen Rider Kabuto, something sparked me into wanting to watch it, thankfully, Veho was there, which is no longer around, had plenty of episodes on this Japanese "Kamen Rider Kabuto" to watch. Technically it's sort of illegal since I don't pay money for Japanese TV, but we don't need to talk about grey areas of broadcasting laws here, let's get into more of the fun stuff!

Just after watching that AWESOME intro, I had to watch it! The plot to Kamen Rider Kabuto is set in a post apocalyptic Japan, where a meteor lands in Tokyo and a race of shape shifting aliens called "The Worm" mimic themselves as humans as they go around hunting and eating people. A Young man is waiting for "something" to happen in his future, a for told destiny that he keeps vague, but when he gets himself involved in a worm attack, he receives a beetle shaped object from a parallel universe called a Zector, and with a belt that he's had since the destruction of Tokyo, he can become Kamen Rider Kabuto!

Now I think I went a bit too ahead of myself there, "Kamen Rider"? "Belts"? "Zector"? To put things into perpective, the Japanese Word "Kamen" is mask, so just as I mentioned above, there was an American series called "Masked Rider" that didn't do too well in ratings. The belt? well that's a Kamen Rider's source of power, just like how the Green Lantern has his ring and Thor has his Hammer. A Kamen Rider get his power from a special belt that either summons a metal cybernetic armour, or turns the user into a robot.

"A Kamen Rider? There's more of them!?", yes, Kamen Rider has been a Super Hero series in Japan since the 70s, and even if it had a hiatus durring the early to mid 90s, Kamen Rider is one of the most popular super heroes in Japan. Next to Super Sentai (The Japanese Power Rangers) and Ultra Man.

Since 1971, Kamen Rider has changed a lot, but that's due to inventing a new "Kamen Rider" for each season of the show, unlike American Super Heroes, who are just the hero and nothing else, for example Clark Kent is always Super Man, there's a new person in each season who becomes a Kamen Rider with a different look and theme. There have been 26 different Kamen Riders, the latest Kamen Rider is Kamen Rider Fourze (Pronounced "Four-zay") who has a space rocket theme and gets new powers from plugging in switches into his belt. The show is based at a High School with teenagers rather than the young adults that they've used in previous seasons.

If you're interested in Watching Kamen Rider, you can find plenty of subtitled videos on the internet, but some subtitles are written in a way that expects you already know what certain words and terms mean. So I'll be nice to include them here...

• "Heshin": Japanese for "Transform", the iconic phrase that's used in Kamen Rider to summon their power.
• Rider Belt, Driver, Driver Belt: The belt that's used in order to transform into a Kamen Rider.
• Kaijin: Japanese for monster, in some seasons, the monsters in the show are refered to as kaijin(monsters) before their actual name in revealed.
• Forms: Kamen Riders have the ability to become even more powerful from transforming into a new "form". E.G. Kamen Rider Kuuga changes colour for different powers and weapons, whilst Kamen Rider Double and Kamen Rider OOO (pronounced "Oh-ze" like in "Cherrios") can switch and swap into multiple different forms and combinations made best for the fight that they're in.
• Showa and Heisei Riders: This is a common term used to describe when said rider was around. It's based on Japanese Emperors. The "Showa Era" was between 1945 and 1989, then the Emperor died, the new Emperor announced that the new era would be called "The Heisei Era", from 1989 to the current day. So Kamen Riders before 1989 are described as "Showa Riders", and Riders after 1989 are described as "Heisei Riders".

In 2009, Kamen Rider Ryuki was translated and localise for the American audience, renamed Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, it was aired on the CW Channel in the States, and from what I've seen it's fairly descent, a lot better than Masked Rider, even though they did change a lot of the plot and some of the character's personalities. It's been announced that Saban, the team that brought Power Rangers into the west, have filed a patent named "Power Rider". People are not too sure if this is Kamen Rider or not, after all they have the Masked Rider after all, which is a direct translation of the name. But it's believed that Saban is working on a localised version of the latest Kamen Rider Fourze for the American audience.

For more details in Japanese Super Heroes, go and listen to the Fwooshcast Podcast, they have a series called Tokusatsu 101 which is an introduction to all things Japanese Super heroes.

Freedom from XBox Live!

Just a quick one this time, mainly because I'm not quite in the "Right Blogging State of Mind", if that even exists... LOL! OK OK I'm lazy! Get over it!

No longer taking money from me! HAH! :P

Anyway! Hurrah! I'm finally not a gold member any more, and good riddance! The more I look into it, I wonder why on earth I gave Microsoft free money for something that I didn't use! I thought the whole idea with XBox Live was to be a way to play games online with mates and have a good time, to discover that my mates weren't playing that same games I did, they weren't online at the same time I was, and that I was playing way more single player games than online multiplayer games. Then comes to the whole fact that I built myself a gaming PC, discovering that I can play games that look even better than my XBox 360, and I didn't have to pay for online play! Winner Winner Chicken Dinner...  All this made me decide that XBox Live is simply not worth it at all, after all why do Wii, PS3 and PC users get free online play? Well...  People playing MMOs like World of Warcraft have to pay a subscription to play that game, it's not a subscription to play any game on PC.

Microsoft throws out a bunch of marketing stuff like "You can chat to your friends whilst playing games!", this where things do "Pete Tong...", for those out there who have never played an XBox Live game online before there's usually 2 things that may happen if you throw yourself into a random game with people who you don't know.

1. They're either obnoxious morons who spit out profanity, rasict and homophobic remarks to you...
   
2. ...or everyone is scared of what might happen to what happens above that no one has their headset plugged in...

Pretty much it does rely on you to really play with friends who you know in the real world in order to enjoy it, but as I said above, if you/they can't get the time to play, it's almost not worth it...

What this turned out, was that Microsoft made a nice bit of free money from me, and I was a fool to do this for almost 4 years, not taking disadvantage of the service, and not finding the time to play online. People could say this is my fault, and I could take partial credit for that, but there are issues in Microsoft's marketing that needs to be ironed out.

First up, are the features that they lock out when you become a silver member, There's a Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm app that you can use on the Xbox 360 whilst you're on your couch. Thing is, stuff like Facebook and Twitter are a little silly to have on a games console, Last.fm on the other hand is a better idea! Now when the original Xbox was released in 2002, it introduced the ability to play MP3s in the back of your games, this of course was brought forward to the XBox 360, now yo'd think they'd incorporate Last.fm into the same feature...   NOPE! you can only listen to music on Last.fm in the app only and not in the back of my games, suddenly these features that Microsoft promote, not only are they free to you on a PC, but totally useless on the XBox 360! So what's the point of having it there, and why only give access to this for paying subscribers!? Who's going to prevent me from bringing my netbook down to the living room and playing Last.fm on that as I play games on my Xbox 360? These so called "Key features" from Microsoft suddenly become a bit lame... Not to mention things like online chatting, which I can do with skype, and now with a better gaming PC, I can play games online for free, as long as I don't play World of Warcraft.

Microsoft needs a good long hard think about what they;re doing with this whole XBox Live thing, OK maintaining servers isn't cheap, but geez... They increased the price just after they removed the online play of Original Xbox games, such as Halo 2, you'd think removing that would cut down the amount of maintenance, they could have made the service cheaper! Maybe not...  Still, I'm not upset about being a free silver member, I'm not going to throw away my money for something I'm not going to use, and to be honest, unless Microsoft offers a lot more band for my buck, then maybe...  They should consider these ideas...

1. Hire long term players to be "Buddies" that can play with you when your friend's are not around
   
2. Remove server space for games that are clearly not going to be played, like previous year versions of sports games, Madan, FIFA, etc...
   
3. Provide free-to-play on limited grounds services, such as have the ability to play the older original XBox live games online for free, but only with the people on your friends list.

So yeah, listen to me Microsoft, if you want my money, make the bucks worth it, otherwise there's no point!

The Subject of Religion...

Ok, before I throw myself in a the internal pit of internet flame wars and begrudging. I am a liberal agnostic, what this means is that even though I do not find religions, Gods and Deities the solution to everything in my life, I respect other people's religious ways and needs. What does this mean? Well, I have friends and family that are parts of religions, the American side of my family are mostly Lutheran, friends a part of the Church of England, and friends that are Muslim, or a part of the Muslim culture. And even through our differences, we respect each other because we're friends as social humans, nothing more, nothing less...

But the reason for why I bring this up a few things that happened today, nothing major, nothing terrible, just a few things that sparked me to write this blog post. First off was a pair of Mormons that tried to talk to me as I was trying to get home, I didn't want to look mean to them, I really wanted to go home, but it was a bit pointless that they'd pick me just because I wouldn't pick a religion just because they had a chat with me. It's fine that they're Mormon, even though I think the way that Mormonism was created is a little concluded with the whole "I'm going to read things out of a hat through a looking glass that came from God and Jesus!" thing. As I got home there was an article of Destructoid about a Religious American TV Channel called Watchman Broadcasts  as they describe how Pokemon are "Oriental Daemons", and yes, I did spell "Demons" "Daemon", I just think it looks cooler, and is how "Demons" was spelt a very long time ago, that and it's in my spell check as being right, so HAH! lol :P. Still, the man on this show, named Henry Lewis, describes how Pokemon is evil because of how when Pokemon evolve, they become more daemonic, and have been named after daemons. Issue is, this guy looks like he's in his late 50s, early 60s, and isn't really the kind of person who'd be interested in Pokemon, or playing games in general, but the man clearly haven't got a clue. Now, back in 2000 when the first Pokemon craze was going on, I was playing the game. And yes maybe the Pokemon when they evolve look a bit more sinister and gruesome, but named after daemons!? Sure...  "Blastoise" is some tortoise biblical daemon that shot water at high pressure at people...  See where this becomes flawed? Plus not all Pokemon have the ability the evolve, and some evolutions don't even look menacing, some keep the cute look of it's previous form. Pikachu for example, evolves into a creature called Raichu, a taller, yet stouter version of the Pikachu, and is mostly coloured orange rather than it's iconic yellow, but it still possesses a cute face that's no where near sinister. Again, what this man said is flawed, and proves that he has only glanced at what Pokemon is, rather than see it in detail, if he was 40 years younger and actually played the game, he'd have a better idea.

But before I turn this into yet another blog about video games, I need to show out my own opinions towards how religion is right, and when religion is wrong, I'm not saying that people of a religion are right and wrong, but there are slight flaws in each religion that should be addressed, and as long as we can admit that maybe that it is wrong, the better we understand about each other rather than the whole "I'm in this religion, and you're not, so I'm better than you, because you're going to hell!".

Firstly, what I find hypocritical in Christianity, is how in the old testament celebrate slavery, and seriously, it is in there, I can't tell you what book and chapter, but it describes something on the lines that's slavery is fine as long as you don't buy slaves from the town you live in, or from the town you were born in. Again, I can't remember huge amounts of details about the whole, but considering that the United States of America are all about freedom and such, since it's been in the Thirteenth Amendment that Slavery is abolished in America, I find it funny how people still praise the bible as if it's their complete way of life, when it has something in the old Testament that's against the Thirteenth Amendment of the country. I don't want to sound mean and horrible, but I'm just pointing this out since the pride of the country is all about it's freedom, when the bible itself says it fine to enslave people.

As for Islam, the whole Sharai Law is a little misrepresented, and changes a lot between different countries, yet at the same time people use Sharai Law as the law of Allah himself, even though the Sharai Law changes between different Islamic states. Thing is, I thought the whole Sharai law was primarily based on the 5 Islamic pillars of life, Prayer, Charity, Pilgrimage, Fasting and pleading allegianceto Mohammed and Allah. Thing is over the course to time they added things such as misogynistic behaviour, beating woman for simply talking to another man is simply outrageous. A lot of Muslims have "modernised" themselves and accept western laws and cultures, yet haven't been differed from their religion, this is the kind of thing that I wish the middle east can see, the better Muslims are the ones that adapt with other cultures rather than object them. OK there are middle eastern countries that are already doing it such as parts of India and the United Arab Emirates. But there's still quite a way to go, I just wish some middle eastern countries would get out of the Dark ages and come into the 21st century!

I could go into more stuff like the Phelps family, but I've written too much at this point, heh. In general, I believe that it doesn't matter if we believe, or not believe in religion, that we can respect our differences and get on with our lives happily. As long we don't allow our differences become the problem, or try to prove that a person's way of living is better than others, we can live in a better place. Fundamental Religious types, regardless of the religion, need to go and see the world for themselves, and see why the world is different, and see how people work, live and play, and accept the fact not absolutely everyone around you needs to believe in every belief you have. After all, as Humans, we have flaws, and so do religions too, people arn't perfect, same with religion, as long as we can except that and allow ourselves to go our own ways and depict our own destinies, the become man itself becomes.

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!

View Larger Map

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!