My YouTube review of Dizzy on the Spectrum

Should people Restore old Games and Systems or not?

Ok so I want to start by saying that I am sure a lot of mainstream video game news sites have already coverd this and I bet there are even discusions on various forums but I wanted to stop and throw my 2cents in, I also knew I would say a lot so didnt want to just reply to someone else or post in comments section I really wanted to grab ahold of the topic and run with it.

So what is the subject I am going to be talking about? Well it is video game restoration. I am sure this has been touched on a few times over the years but  a recent YouTube video in which a guy relabells old vidoe game cartridges has kind of thrown the subject back under the spot light and got peoiple talking about it. The guys videos go in to the methods he has used to make and experiment with making new labels, they sort of almost serve as a how to guide to a degree, they are sort of intresting to watch but what is really intresting is that they have lit a fire under some people causing them to become very passionate in discusing if you should or should not do this sort of restoration work.

I want to start by sharing a few quotes from the guy responsible for these videos and then I breifly want to talk about them,“When I do these restoration videos, there’s always someone in the comments complaining that I should have left it the way it was,”, “Even when you look at classic cars, is it wrong to take an old rusty classic car from the 1950s and repaint it so it looks new?” ,“Ultimately what it comes down is that these are my cartridges and I can do whatever I want to with them,” he says. “I can roll them over with a steamroller if I want, and I have done that in a previous video.”. Ok so I would think that if he feels he needs to justify himself then at least some part of him thinks that he might be acting in error or he is concious of the fact that he is upseting people but the final comment about he could run over them with a steamroller just makes him come off as a complete and utter tosspot. I could if I really wanted to eat chocolate cake after chocolate cake and record it and then send the video to a starving family but I wouldnt do it, and the reason I wouldnt do it is because I fully realise that this would make me a total and utter git. There are only so many of these old retro games out there and in some cases demand greatly outstrips supply, to destroy something someone else would really appreciate just because you can really seems like the work of a troubled five year old, we live in a much too wasteful society as it is and this is just the height of crazyness so I cant support that kind of destruction at all, with that said I will get on to the topic of restoration.

I think its important here to outline the fact that I have sort of restored video game hardware and modified it as well myself but there are some things about this I would like to make clear, I for one would never modify a machine which was in good condition. I have painted various consoles but it has been when they are in need of such dire repairs that they simply could not be made to look like they originally did before hand. The first example of this would be a Super Nintendo I purchased from a carboot for 50pence years ago, for a start I had to go inside clean a few contacts and replace the internal pico fuse, but the plastic had become so brittle it had began to shatter exposing both jagged edges and the circuit board below. I tried to see if I could find or buy a broken SNES but at the time I couldnt, so I resorted to melting down plastic paracetomol pots in order to cover the holes as smoothly as possible, also hoping to cover and strengthen some of the existing plastic before it was further damaged. The result looked kind of messy and so I painted the machine with a flaming pattern which blended the damage in making it look intentional. Some may argue I was wrong in doing this but it  made an otherwise unsafe/unsuable console in to a working machine. This kind of restoration/modification I can get behind, I also wont complain about people installing extra switches or outputs on to a console providing it remains playable, some of these machines are getting a little older and they kind of need a little tender loving care here and there to keep them running and some of that might involve resolidering, replacing capacitors and fuses or even adding new ports so they will adequatly work on modern Television hardware. Where ever possible though I would like to see things remain as close to original as possible with old broken consoles being used for experimentation and art instead of working machines. Ok so I have kind of run off in to a tangent and talked about machines so next lets get back to talking about actual game carts.

It is true that its the owners carts and he can do what he wants with them, wether I or others like it or not, and I will say that when they are finished they do look good, in fact some of them look as if they have come straight off of the assembly line, but no matter how good these labels look its not a true restoration its a replacment, one which might fool a lot of people but its basically a lie, a lie which may in fact lower the value of these cartridges and might lead to people being ripped off in the future. Yes the guy who did the particular alterations has said he wont be selling his carts any time soon and if he did he might even be genuine and admit that the labels are fakes but that doesnt mean that a future seller will be or that someone might not use these videos as how to do this guides to try and mock up fake labels to try and pull a fast one on someone and make money from themdishnoestly by buying poor condition carts cheap making them look like new and selling them for a profit.

Personally I am against relabelling carts because I see the conditon of a game part of its greater story, every game goes through a journey before it finds its way to a collector and sometimes you find traces of this and I think they can be as intresting as the games themselves, I love it when you find recepits in your second hand games letting you know when and where they were purchased and I think the label is part of this. Now dont get me wrong I am not saying not to whipe the dust and any surface grime off of a cartridge or case after all I like things to be as clean as possible but softly cleaning something is very diffrent from replacing parts of it, after all you wouldnt consider a classic car no longer a complete classic car if you washed it, but if you provided a new fake door or wing mirror that would be very diffrent. I think if your a real game collector one who is intrested in the history and cultural relevance of retro video games then you an argument could be made that you should feel that you have an obligation to safeguard the authenticity of the games.

The above picture is a photo of a tape I own, it is my main and only copy of Fernandez must die for the spectrum, it wasnt a full price retail copy it was a copy of the game given away on the front of a magazine with other games and programmes on the tape but if you look at it there is a deep story there, you can clearly see the phrase on it in a very childish scribble ''My best tape'', I had written this on it because of how much I loved this game and its a love that has not died which can be seen from the fact it was one of the games I listed as one of my personal Top Ten Spectrum games. If you were to cover this up with a replacment label then you would kill my story, you would kill this cassettes history, it might still hold the game but it wouldnt be the same tape anymore would it?

Now if a game has tottally lost its label or its case or cover then I cant see any problem with replacing these but personally I dont think I would try to reproduce the original art I think I would use it as a chance to be a little artistic, if for example you have followed this blog for any length of time you will have seen examples of when I try to intergrate the Japanese art on Megadrive games with the European case style/format 

Look I am not trying to preach to anyone or trying to tell people what they should or should not do, I just want to make people stop and think about what they have and how they look at it. Every game we ever touch, we ever buy, sell or trade in tells a story, a story we are and will always be a part of.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Skool Daze & Gauntlet

Ok so its time to give the last two names on my list of Top Ten Spectrum games so without further ado here we go.

Skool Daze

So Skool Daze was a game which believe it or not saw you play the role of a kid attending school. Ok so a game about school might not sound that great of the bat but the game was commercially and critically successful, as well as being praised for the originality of its concept. It is often also thought to be one of the pioneers of the whole sandbox video game genre, so I guess its starting to sound a little more impressive right? Skool daze was simply brilliant if I was to try and describe it to a modern gamer then I would basically say that it was the great Grand-Daddy of the game Bully.

So in Skool Daze you play as a schoolboy named Eric, with the basic story of the game being your quest to steal your own report card from out of the staff room safe. The game features a lot of none player characters including the headmaster Mr Wacker, various other teachers and other pupils including Angelface the bully and Einstein the swot (as well as other unamed sort of blank/undiscript pupils) You have the option of renaming the characters before the game starts which is great as well you can rename characters giving them names personal to you and your own days at school. So to win you need to get your report, and to loose well you need to get expelled, you will get expelled if you get 10,000 or more lines, you get given lines for being caught out of class or well just missbeahving in general. Other kids will get you in trouble though by pushing you out of your chair or by firing projectiles at teachers when your close to a teacher and therfore get blamed despite it not being your fault. The whole thing is just so fun and diffrent that you cant help but love it. It was one of the games that I stupidly sold when younger but thanks to my wonderful girlfriend buying it me for Christmas I once again have it in my possession and shall not be letting it go anytime soon.

Gauntlet

So home computers back in the day had loads and loads of arcade conversions, with the vast majority of them being either very poor or at the least incredibly simplified but the conversion of Gauntlet was both incredably good and was also a game that I spent a great deal of time on both alone and with a good friend (I also used to play the C64 version at his house and that was excellent as well).

Gauntlet could best be described as a fantasy-themed hack and slash multiplayer dungeon crawler which came out in the arcades in 1985 apparently its creator Atari sold a heck of a lot of arcade cabinets of it and made a lot of money out of it so its no suprise that Gauntlet was ported to lots of home systems including but not limited to. the Apple II, the MSX, the NES, the Sega Master System, ,the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC and of course the ZX Spectrum. It doesnt end there though still to this very dare Gauntlet is showing up on various retro compilations on all manner of systems and there is a reason for this and if you ask me a large part of this is that its a great game. Part of what makes it a great game is that you can play it co-operativly with a buddy.

You start the game by selecting from four playable characters they are the Warrior, theWizard, the Valkyrie, and the Elf. Each of the characters has his or her own unique strength and weaknesses. The Warrior is strongest in direct combat, where as the Wizard has the most powerful magic, the Valkyrie is the best armored and the Elf is the quickest, this is great as it lets you pick the character who best matches your own personal play style.

The game is very easy to pick up and play, as soon as you pick your character you are dropped into the first in a series of top-down third person perspective mazes where you need to find the exit in order to finish the level and move on to the next. Its not a case of just walking around looking for a way out though no you collect loot, and you collect keys and you collect food  and magic potions all of which serves a purpose but you also fight against hordes of various different enemies.

The enemies are an assortment of fantasy monsters, including ghosts, demons, sorcerers and all manner of other creatures, each of which comes out of a specific monster generator, generators which can be destroyed to prevent them from spewing more monsters into the maze. The ultimate villain you will meet is death who quickly drains your life force and who is absolutely solid to kill, so most often you will run from him most likely screaming at your friend to haul butt and get the monkey fudge out of there.  At first the game is easy but as it progresses it soon gets tougher, the further you get the more skill is needed and trust me if your playing with a buddy you better learn to talk, to share and to generally co-operate if you want to keep going through the levels.

Gauntlet is on this list because as far as I am concerned its the ultimate game to play with a buddy if you want some frantic co-operative fun. I think that this is where so many games today started take something like the Diablo series and you can see that at its core there is a little bit of Gauntlet and the reason for this is that Gauntlet was quiet simply a wonderful game and it still is.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Treasure Island Dizzy & Ghostbusters

So I am back once again to talk about my Top Ten Spectrum games, so far I have coverd 6 games already so that will make the games I am going to cover today game 7 and game 8, they are not in order though as well I just find it too hard to do that, so without further ado lets get going.

Treasure Island Dizzy
 
Now for those not in the Know Treasure Island Dizzy is the second game in a series of games featuring a hero called Dizzy and often his friends and family who are referd to as the Yolkfolk. The main series consists of Dizzy, Treasure Island Dizzy, Fantasy World Dizzy, Magicland Dizzy, Spellbound Dizzy, Dizzy, Prince of the YolkFolk, Crystal Kingdom Dizzy with several spin off games as well including Fast Food, Kwik Snax and Dizzy Down the Rapids. As a Spectrum owner you got so used to seeing Dizzy and playing Dizzy games that he kind of felt like a mascot, he might have started out on the spectrum though but he was also ported to the Amstrad, Commodore 64, NES, Amiga, Atari ST and other platforms.

The story for the game is pretty brief Dizzy is on an island and has to find a way to get back home, its as simple as that, but the Island is a large and fantastic place for a spectrum game, and Dizzy himself just feels like a brilliant character to be playing with. Yes he is simple but he is kind of simple and iconic in the same way a character like Mario is, there might not be much to him but what there is is instantly appealing and recognisable. The game is pretty much a puzzle platformer sort of adventure game, basically you go around from screen to screen as Dizzy you have no energy bar and only one life so you need to avoid anything that might kill you but you also have to pick up items you see laying around and then take them to other places to use them to solve a puzzle that will let you progress. Yes it is harsh when you die as everything you have done is lost and you have to start again but you just know that with each time you play it the knowledge you have gained will see you get just that little bit further.

I think that if you want to take on the best the Spectrum has to offer then you need to look at the Dizzy series, now some may find my choice of series entry an issue as its an early and a hard one in relation to the others but I also find it incredably rewarding, stick with it and just jump right in to the world of Dizzy and get your grey cells working figuring out what to use where and trust me when you start to get things right you will feel like your on top of the world

Ghost Busters

Who You Gonna Call? Ok I know its a movie license but its a movie license I enjoyed so very much, you see to me the perfect movie licensed game should make you feel like your in the universe thats presented in the film, this doesnt mean every single thing that happens in the film needs to be turned into a level in the game no it just needs to understand the universe of the film and represent this. Ghost Busters on the spectrum starts in a wonderful way it tells you what the ghostbusters are and then tells you that if youd like to start a franchise you have to input your name, from there you get a bank loan which you use to buy a car and relevent ghost busting gear. You drive to diffrent locations, and use your proton beams to push ghosts where you need them to be  and then you activate the trap and try to catch them.  Yes the graphics are basic with people pretty much being stick men and ghosts being little floating blobs but the music although being a simple loop and the general presentation really pull you in. I spent absolutly hours and hours playing this as a kid it hooked me in and in honesty it worked as the perfect game license, id watch the film and want to play the game and then play the game and want to watch the film the two fed my need for the franchise in general. I also think that this game goes to show what the spectrum had going for it overall and thats the fact that with a little bit of effort despite all of the machines limitations and lack of power you could still get a cracking good experiance out of it.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Elite & Atic Atac

So once again lets go back to my Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games list and look at another two from the list, so without further ado here we go.

Elite

So the first ever time I saw Elite it was on the BBC Micro which my older brother owned, I adored it from the first moment and forgive the pun but I thought the game was light years ahead of its time. Now the spectrum had so many games on it that its even harder to pick a top ten for it than it would be for most systems but the reason this one makes the list is that when you consider the hardware its running on and when it was made you simply didnt get games like this back then, the game was  and still is a joy to play and the main reason for this is that its a game which you play however you want to play it.

The graphics the wire-framed ships were just unthinkably brilliant back then they might have aged now but what hasnt aged is the sense of freedom you see in Elite you jump in your space ship the  Cobra Mk III and you explore a large and wonderful universe, you can trade cargo, fight pirates or maybe you want to be a pirate yourself and attack other ships so that when youve destroyed them you can take there cargo for yourself using your tractor beam to steal it.Yes we have all kinds of open world games now days but back then this was pretty much one of a kind. I could talk about this game till the cows come home but I think it is much better to simply say you need to play this game

An intresting and kind of annoying point to note is that Elite was the first game to ever utilise an anti piracy method called the LensLock. The LensLock is basically a special Lens that came with the game, now you look at coloured squares on the screen through this in order to read a code which you need to play the game.

Atic Atac

When I used to play this game back in the day I never knew that it was something I would keep coming back to for my entire life, the very last time I set up my spectrum it was to play this very game and a select few others and now thanks to the Compilation Disc Rare Replay, I can very easily find myself playing this any time I want in seconds. So yeah Basically the name on the box here Ultimate Play The Game is the name Rare went by before they became Rare.

Atic Atac is what would proberbly be described as an Isometric arcade adventure game it was released for the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro. The thing is a lot of people think that Rare and there long stretch of impresive games all started with the NES, well the truth is far from that in fact Ultimate had already been making games on the 16k model of Spectrum but Atic Atac was there second game which required 48K of memory and its an absolute belter of a game, for those that dont know how big a deal Ulitmate was as a developer this game was Ultimate's third consecutive number one in the UK Spectrum sales chart.

Atic Atac plays in a  top-down perspective and is set inside a castle, a castle in which you the player are trapped. You need to find 3 pieces of a golden key in order to escape, something that makes this game all the more intresting is that you have a choice of three diffrent characters a Knight a Wizared or a Serf. There are a number of items which are all around the castle for you to find, some of them are always in the same place others are randomly generated, you can carry 3 of them at a time.
You have diffrent coloured keys which will open doors which are the same colour, then theres items which will kill or repel enemies. All of the enemies essentially attack the player on sight, contact with them drains your life bar. So what makes this a top ten game? It is a great game to just jump in to, the randomness really helps with repeat replays but its mostly just because its so darn playable, wether you play this game on an original spectrum, a modern spectrum recreation or on rare replay I just advice you to give it a crack and see what you think.

My Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games: Yie Ar Kung Fu and Kickstart 2

 So its back to my list of Top Ten Sinclair Spectrum games again, so here is another two games from my top 10. So without further ado here we go.

3: Yie Ar Kung Fu

Yie Ar Kung Fu was a pretty well known arcade gamebut I think it was possibly even more popular as a computer game the original arcade game was by a Japanese gaming company I am sure you will have heard of Konami, and it needs to be said that Imagine did a great job adapting the game to the humble spectrum. I need to admit that there is one thing that really made me keep coming back to this game and its something that people really wouldnt think of nowdays and thats loading time. Some spectrum games could take what seemed like hours to load and could feel like they just were not worth it, Yie Ar Kung Fu not only was great to play it also loaded fast as anything which back in those days was important.

The scenario of the game is a simple one. You take control of a young kung fu fighter called Oolong who wants to follow in the his fathers footsteps honouring his family name by becoming a Kung Fu Grand Master. To do this Oolong must fight and defeat a large mix of diffrent fighters with diffrent styles and in some cases weapons. The story might be simple but it just feels so well so much like a proper Kung Fu film turned into a game, the characters you face all seem to fit in the moulds of characters you would see in one of those old dubbed kung fu movies and well it just makes it feel great, youd think that with just one attack button and one stick your moves would be rather limited but when playing the game it doesnt feel this way at all. You have a roundhouse kick, a leg sweep, a body punch and leaping punches all of which you use to strike your opponent and deplete there energy bar before they can get you. You had 5 lives to try and defeat all of your opponents with and beating each one of them seemed to very much be a case of learning the way they moved and learning stratergies to cope with them. Its a very enjoyable game as you always seem to get a little bit better, the more you play the more you learn and the further you get.

Modern players might find this game a little basic in a post Street Fighter 2 world with combo's and special moves and a large choice of player characters but dont let these things put you off trying the game, it has a great character to it and it a great feel, I would love to see a modern sequel that takes the same sort of characters and feeling as Yie Ar Kung Fu but throws in all of the modern trimmings of the one on one fighter that we have gotten so used to, the combos and special moves

4: KickStart 2

Kickstart 2 is a motorcycle  racing game, it is obviously the sequel to Kikstart but this is where I have to admit that I have never actually seen or played the original Kickstart so I cant say if its a big improvment over the original or not, what I can say is that I really like this game but then I guess thats obvious with this being on this list. The game is very basic you control your bikes braking and acceleration, you also hop and pull wheelies and you do all of this in order  to navigate across a course of various obstacles including ramps, tyres, gates and telephone boxes. You have to learn how to make the best time on courses by knowing how your supposed to deal with diffrent types of obsticals, for example you need to travel slowly across wooden beams, but if you go too slowly over the tyes then you will be thrown off your bike so you need to go over those quickly. I guess this game has two things in common with the above Yie Ar Kung Fu one of them is the fact that you have to learn how to handle things be they opponents or situations and that the more you learn the better you get at the game and the other is that KickStart 2 is a very quick loading game, I used to be putting this game on all of the time because it was good and it took a fraction of the time to load that most of my games did.

If I was to try and explain to a more modern gamer what KickStart 2 is like I would say imagine an older more primative version of Trials HD, you can actually see how simmilar they are Trials is just sort of the same idea taken to its natural point of progression.What can I say though I love Trials now and I loved KickStart back then, and heck for all of the time that has passed I still think the gamkes not too shabby.

what it was like to be a gamer in the 80's

So when you talk about retro gaming lots of people will get an idea in there heads a picture of what you mean and usually they are going to think about old cartridge based console systems like the NES, the SNES, the MegaDrive/Genesis or maybe even slightly newer CD based systems such as the playstation the GameCube etcetera but there is so much more out there. The importance and the popularity of the NES back in its day in the United Kingdom is often overstated, people try to make out that the machine was highly supported over here, the truth was that not many people had them, if you walked in the average british house you were far more likly to be met with the sight of a micro computer a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commadore 64, an Amstrad or some other such type of machine. The truth is that if you were to see a console it would more than likly be a Master System in fact proberbly a Master System 2. The NES as a system is far more popular now in the UK as a retro console than it ever was as a current machine. Most video game fans my age will have grown up with a draw full of microcomputer tapes not NES cartridges and yet hardly anyone seems to celebrate or collect these in anyway close to the same way.

This is not the first time I have talked about this, if you have been a long time reader of this blog then you might remember me writing an article saying that the first school yard arguments were not about if you were pro MegaDrive or pro SNES they were in fact over which microcomputer you had chosen to support. When you talk to most people now though they tend to make out that they were really into Nintendo, that they owned a NES that all of there friends owned Nintendo Entertainment Systems and that they were massive in the UK, in fact you could argue that the whole history of the video game market back then steams to have been painted over it seems to have been washed away and replaced with this false spin doctored image of what things used to be like, an image that makes us appear well more American. Why is this are we as a group ashamed of our own Video Game heritage, do we feel silly and think that we backed the wrong horse? If you look at the figures for how many households in the UK actually had a NES the highest estimates put the machine in 12% of UK houses.

I think it needs to be rememberd that the humble Micro actually had some advantages over the NES, no I am not going to push how it had a keyboard and you could do programming or any of its uses as a computer why? Well thats simple its because other than a little bit of messing around with programming here and there thats just not how I or any of my friends or aquantances used there Microcomputers. Nes carts were very very expensive, when I saw them new I remember them being about £50 which now as an adult does not sound that much as we all pay sums around that level for brand new games on modern consoles but remember £50 in 1986 money (The year of the NES's UK release) is technically speaking a lot more money than £50 in current cash, they also were not anywhere near as wildly available as Micro games. I owned a Spectrum as a kid, at first it was a old hand me down 48k spectrum but then one Christmas this was changed to a brand new 128k +2 model, and where did I get my games from? I got my games from darn near everywhere. You could get games in Boots the Chemist, you could get them in Game stores, deparment stores, and newsagents, you could get them pretty much everywhere. It wasnt just the availability though it was also the price sure some real big deluxe Spectrum games in big boxes with stuff thrown in could go for as much as £14.99 but they were absolutly piles and piles of games for as little as £1.99.

People might argue that the NES games were bigger or more technical than home computer games and I guess some of them were but were they always better? The honest answer is not really, there were plenty of great games on microcomputers, I would list some here but just trust me, I am holding that back for a future top 10 Micro Computer Games post. I am not here to slag of the NES or anything but I just think its about time people stop and admit that the NES wasnt the champion here that it was in the United States, it was a minor note in the sidelines of our video game history, but I dont think we really lost out, most people were busy playing other things and thanks to things such as Mario All Stars and then things like the Zelda gamecube Collectors disc and various virtual console releases and the NES mini most people who didnt experiance these nintendo games back then have now gotten to see the classics that our American friends grew up with.

The console wars were not the first great geek civil war.

People talk about the great Console Wars Nintendo Versus Sega, Super Nintendo versus Megadrive (Genesis) but here in the UK there was a great nerd Civil war before most of us had really even woken up to the idea of cartridge based gaming, what was was this you ask? It was Spectrum versus Commodore. Wits, statistics and even fists were some times thrown trying to defend ones side, it was like politics before we were old enough to understand who Labour and the conservatives were, and if you carry on the analogy then that would mean that the BBC was the home computer version of the liberal democrats, third place without much of a chance or many people giving a toss really.

The BBC's biggest disadvantage as an item of coolness was the fact that it was in our classrooms. I can remember classes of thirty children all sat on some god awful itchy carpet our heads almost touching as we all leaned left and right to get a view of the screen. In truth I don't know why we bothered, most of the time all that was on the screen was a bunch of words that our teacher would proceed to read out to us anyway. It would always be something like this ''You are in a large dark cave, the air smells, the ground beneath your feet feels slimy, the witch is coming for you, what do you want to do.'' We would all then shout out stuff to the teacher who would tend to do what the majority said which would be something like ''go north'' and you would be met with either ''you can not go north'' ''you have gone north what now'' or every now and then someone would get the bright idea to shout something along the lines of ''turn around and fuck her to death''. The whole class would laugh even though only a certain percentage of us even had any idea what that meant, the bright spark would be sent out of the room along with anyone who couldn't stop themselves from laughing and the BBC would be turned of and we would go back to book learning. thinking back on it I really should have done that kind of thing less often. Even though the BBC had its own killer title that most of us would have pulled our own teeth out to play (Elite) most of us in my day and age didn't know about that as it wasn't the kind of thing schools would get in. I was lucky as my brother who is about 10 years older than me decided to buy a BBC and Elite and I got to play it, but the BBC was never my machine. Consequently as most of us had only seen text based titles in a school environment the BBC Micro had a real image problem as the sort of grey boring middle class home computer aimed at intellectuals and people who wanted to learn and what we really wanted to do was have lots of fun.

In nearly all my friends either bedrooms or backroom's there was  a Commodore 64 or  a 48k Spectrum. So was I team Commodore or team Clive Sinclair? I was Team Spectrum and you know why? Basically because at the age of two or so I was slapped in front of my brothers with bright characters flashing, encouraged to slap on the buttons. Was this because my parents were awful terrible people looking to have some form of computerised overlord babysit for them? No. The reason was much more mundane and well nice than this. My parents basically figured that the way things were going with technology one day if you couldn't use a computer you would basically be unemployable. They figured if I grew up with computers being an every day thing I had seen and touched more or less from the very moment my memories started then I would be ahead of the pack in some way. They wanted the best for me, they didn't slap me in front of my brothers games and let me shoot things just to keep me quiet no they went out of there way and spent a healthy amount on educational software the one I remember the most stared the Mr Men, it tried to teach you basic things like how to count and how to recognise colours. Eventually when my brothers who were both older than me moved on to other things the spectrum became mine and it was my primary games machine. I also through basically being the biggest gamer in the family also inherited the family Atari 2600 my first cart based machine. While the Atari might have been instant though the spectrum had much more advanced games, they were also much easier to find and cheaper to buy. I was basically lovingly indoctrinated in to the family of the Sinclair Spectrum. I liked it because it was made by a British man who seemed like a bit of a cool mad scientist, I liked it because not only did I get all my brothers games but our local news agent and even our local boots the chemist sold games very cheaply for it, there was also the fact that my very very closest friend had one and this tied us even deeper together as friends with a common cause but the main reason I liked it was because it was all I had, all I could afford and I just plain did not want to believe that something out there I couldn't have was or could be better than what was sat in my bedroom on my glorious black and white 8 inch TV.

I was very young when I had the spectrum, I didn't have the skills at that point and time to sit back and look at the big picture or even to have a rational argument, my fist arguments about the machine were in infant school age 5 after all, an infant school in a small mining town where the language was as dark as the pits. So when a 5 year old boy would tell me that I was scum because I had a Spectrum which was rubbish compared to his Commodore my only real recourse of action was to call him a poof or a spastic with no knowledge of what these words meant only knowing I had heard older people say them and that they were in some way offensive.The playground was often a battlefield with a Spectrum lad kicking a commodore lover and then the resulting retaliation, this was long before comprehensive and the thankfully far more peaceful console wars, back in those days hearts were broken and lunch boxes shattered over kids heads and all in the name of one computer or another which is now painfully underpowered compared to the most basic of phones now days and yet in amongst all of the violence and the arguments there was always a bleeping screaming cassette tape playing computer to go home to.