Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

Inspired by Games Radar’s article The greatest game on every platform I decided to put together my own list choosing a class of hardware at a time. In today’s installment I’ve chosen the consoles from the 2nd and 3rd Generation (according to Wikipedia)…

Nintendo Entertainment System

Despite being a ‘classic’ system when I try to think back I’m not swamped in lists of awesome games to choose from, many of the games were passable but this was clearly an era where consoles were trying to find their place and I’m not convinced that the NES had the best to offer from it’s generation. That said, there are a handful of games that stand out as historic monuments as well as being superb games, the first and most obvious being Super Mario Brothers.

I loved the original Super Mario Bros and I still think it’s worth a play even now, the general public opinion seems to rate the third installation in the series as being the better but for me the honour will always go with the original. Clearly, SMB3 was superior in terms of graphics and audio quality but I found the controls to be a mite irritating and the game generally obsessed with a little too much ‘cleverness’ and not enough focus on classic platform action.

Of course I can’t talk about the NES without mentioning Duck Hunt, arguably the first console First Person Shooter and whilst it wasn’t a technical first I think it’s pretty likely to be the first light-gun game many people played. Quite simply you had a gun and your aim was to shoot the ducks flying onto the screen, it sounds very simple but the novelty and fun-factor meant that I spent quite some time playing the game both on my own and with friends.

One other honourable mention for the NES has to be Arkanoid, a breakout clone and probably the only version of breakout that most people can ever remember by name. Personally I always loved the breakout version that came on the ZX Spectrum intro tape and the excellent Moraff’s Blast but Arkanoid still brings back fond memories of a bygone genre in gaming.

Sega Master System

For me, there was always something special about the Master System, I didn’t own one myself at the time but played on a friend’s console relatively often and even borrowed it one time when he was on holiday (I barely got off the thing). It’s hard not to be partisan on some level but where I believe Sega managed to gain the edge of Nintendo was in the cartoon-like feeling the games had. The first crop of NES games I played all suffered from the blocky, pixellated look of the early console games but somehow Sega’s hardware managed to capture a bright and vivid cartoon world that you could actually control, it might not have been a ‘first’ but it sure felt like it at the time.

I can’t possibly name it as the best Master System game and whilst Sega’s original flagship platformer Alex Kidd in Miracle World was no where near as good as the Mario games it had a real charm to it and despite the sometimes intensely frustrating gameplay I must have spent hours and hours playing through the levels trying to beat them faster than before, trying not to die or just for the hell of it.

As I think through this post I’m not convinced I’ll ever be able to pick a favourite game on the Master System but of all the games I enjoyed, I probably enjoyed Power Strike the most and for the longest period of time. I don’t think this would’ve been the first vertical scrolling shooter I ever played but something grabbed me about it, the difficulty and availability of power-ups are finely tuned to make the game challenging but not frustratingly difficult, a hard line to set in the shoot-’em-up world where you can never please both hardcore players and casual gamers.

Other honourable mentions in the Master System world are Double Dragon (my favourite version), the absurdly psychedelic Fantasy Zone and the brilliant (yet simultaneously rubbish) Pro Wrestling.

Atari 2600

My brother had a 2600, specifically the “Jr.” pictured here as opposed to the wood-grain standard 2600. I didn’t play on it a great deal (he was bigger than me) but it was one of my first experiences of gaming and literally my first experience of gaming at home (this inspired me to ask my parents for a ZX Spectrum). There were so many classic games released on the 2600 that it was unreal and I’m not convinced I can directly attribute them to the 2600 as many were arcade ports, I’m talking about games like Centipede, Space Invaders, Frogger and Q*bert among many others that you MUST have played at some point in your life.

Despite all that though, the one game I just couldn’t stop playing whenever I got my hands on the 2600 was Jungle Hunt. I have never seen Jungle Hunt since on any other platform and even though I know that there were other ports I will forever associate it with the 2600.

written by thirtyfootscrew

I’ve just been on the phone with PayPal trying to resolve a refund issue, apparently if I don’t have funds already in my account I’m not allowed to refund someone’s transaction (even though I have a valid credit card) unless I wait 7-10 days to setup bank funding. In the mean time my eBay customer will get fed up of waiting and leave me bad feedback – all because PayPal seem to be selective about when they choose to take credit cards.

So, to try and see if there’s a way around this I phoned up and verbally wrestle with their ridiculously complex speech recognition system until I got fed up and started saying “Agent” for every answer. After fighting my way through the machine world I eventually got to speak with one of their off-shored customer service reps whose language skills were so poor he had to ask me to speak slowly (I don’t have a strong accent at all) and he told me the reason it’s not possible is because the policy said that it’s not possible – the only useful suggestion he had was for me to find someone willing to give me £5.70 as a personal gift and I can refund from that.

On the guy’s 3rd of 4th repetition of the same policy script I told him that I’m looking to find a way around the problem and that I don’t want to get bad feedback because of their stupid policy. All of a sudden the line goes silent and the guy says “there’s no need to use profanity”, I re-stated what I said assuming he’d misheard me and he said “you’re not allowed to use that word”, I asked “what word? – ’stupid’?” and the guy says “yes” – it’s considered as profanity in PayPal’s world. I do want to stress that I was not aggressive towards the guy and I did not make any personal remarks about him – just their policy.

This just brought me to a climax of annoyance so I just asked to speak to a supervisor, I held for five minutes before the call was dropped and had to redial the customer services line, fight with their machine again and then hold for 15 minutes before getting to a supervisor. The supervisor was American so I didn’t have any language issues and but he kept running round the same argument which is roughly:

me: I want to issue a refund for a transaction.
him: You can’t do that because your account balance is zero.
me: But can’t you take the money from my credit card?
him: No, because you’d then be using borrowed money.
me: But when I make a payment for a purchase you let me use ‘borrowed money’.
him: That’s different because this is a refund.
me: But why is that different, I’m still taking money from a source and sending it on aren’t I?
him: Yes but in this case you’re paying borrowed money into your account.
me: But with a purchase the money still goes into (and then out of) my account.
him: Yes but this is different.
me: Why?
him: Because it’s a refund.

Repeat four or five times and that was pretty-much the conversation, he did apologise for the fact that I was hung-up on and at no point did he seem upset or offended when I called their policy stupid – maybe it’s a regional thing, or maybe he doesn’t hold ‘the policy’ as close to his heart as the other guy.

P.S. Does anyone feel like giving me £5.70 as a personal gift?

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Annoying, Customer Services, PayPal, Speech Recognition

Inspired by Games Radar’s article The greatest game on every platform I decided to put together my own list choosing a class of hardware at a time. In today’s installment I’ve chosen the ‘Micro Computers’ which I take to mean those systems that were definitely not PCs (or Apples) but definitely were not consoles either…

ZX Spectrum My first ever gaming machine was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and I loved it, at the age of eight years old being given a system so flexible that you write your own games was amazing and largely responsible for my entire IT career. Despite writing my own (very basic) games from time to time I also had a load of games and among the many tapes I had there were a few that really stand out for me.

Fantasy World Dizzy was a basic platformer released by the Oliver Twins and published by the (then) much respected and admired Codemasters, it was years ahead of its time and literally wowed me with it’s cartoon-style graphics (sounds ridiculous now I know). Operation Wolf, one of the handful of games that supported the ZX Spectrum light gun and probably the only truly decent one (come on, Bullseye was crap in comparison). It was also possibly the first pseudo-FPS game I ever played and definitely gave me the thrills and excitement that would later come from games like Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty 4. The other game I feel compelled to mention is Alchemist, I’m not aware that it was ever especially popular but it’s blend of platformer and adventure puzzle game had me playing for hours and hours – perhaps the earliest game that I was completely immersed in.

BBC Micro

The BBC Micro was the first computer I ever used at school (and possibly the first real computer I ever used), at the time my Primary School was relatively advanced for the area in technology terms and although we only had the one computer we did have an hour-long ‘lesson’ with it every couple of weeks in small groups. Brilliantly (and probably because the teacher didn’t know what she was doing) we ended up playing games in these lessons and the main game we played was Granny’s Garden.

Granny’s Garden was a educational adventure games (think Oregon Trail crossed with Wizard of Oz) which was essentially a text-adventure with the odd graphical screen here and there. This really introduced myself and a generation of kids to the idea of computer games and that you had the freedom to explore a world inside the computer. Other than the handful of (again, basic) games I wrote for the BBC whilst in Secondary School I didn’t really play that many other games but one piece of software that was pioneering at the time and for many years later was the Domesday Project published in 1986.

The Domesday Project was a very early version of Google’s Streetview and came on a couple of giant laserdiscs (like a CD but SO much bigger), I only saw this in the early nineties and even then it was revolutionary. It allowed you to browse a map of the UK and view photos that had been selected as representative of that area, nothing like the coverage that Google Maps or Streetview has but still it allowed you to explore the country in a way that had never been previously possible.

Commodore 64

At this point I have to admit that sadly I never had much exposure to the Commodore 64, a friend of mine had one and I remember playing International Karate+ and Commando.

Commodore Amiga+ Atari ST

It doesn’t seem fair to combine these two platforms as they both had unique and distinct selling points but their similarity (and the comparatively poorer sales of the ST) resulted in so many games being released on both platforms and being practically identical. By the time these platforms had gained popularity I had migrated to the PC as a gaming (and general mucking about) platform so I only experienced them via friends but I never really found anything to make me favour one platform over the other.

Their place in the history of gaming is nothing short of a landmark, this was probably the first time that many people used a mouse and perhaps the first time they’d used a fully-featured GUI and desktop environment. I believe that this extra level of usability, relatively low price point and availability of games brought computing into a lot of households and expanded their use (the ST became a popular tool of choice for early music creators. Because of my limited exposure to the platform it’s hard for me to choose specific games that in my eyes ‘belong’ to these systems but of those I played I did really enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the magnificent Sensible Soccer.

In my eyes Sensible Soccer was more of a PC game but was vastly popular on both the Amiga and the ST, one of my all time favourite sports games – all three versions benefited enormously from having keyboard controls as well as having the keyboard to make editing teams much easier. The game had an inherent humour about it anyway as you made your ineffective little men scurry around in up to 8 directions missing the ball on every other tackle attempt but the humour really came out in the team editing. My friends and I would spend almost as much time making up themed teams (Monty Python characters, rude words, friends names, etc.) as playing the game but it was absolutely worthwhile when you got to play a full World Cup of custom teams.

written by thirtyfootscrew

I just saw a BBC News story (seen here on the Times Online) stating that Turner Prize winning artist Mark Wallinger is to build a gigantic white horse to mark the building of a new Eurostar station. The massive horse is going to cost a total of £3million ($4.4 million) and according to The Time will have testicles that have “the volume of a people carrier” each! Now this seems crazy, but I love it for two main reasons…

Firstly, it’s absolutely stark raving mad but in a very British way – the fact that out of all of the potential subjects for an enormous status (bigger than the Statue of Liberty) it’s the most quintessentially British of animals – a white thoroughbred horse. Secondly I love it because its quite rare these days for people to build enormous and essentially pointless structures (Millennium Dome excepted).

I honestly can’t wait for this “Angel of the South”, it’s given me one of those rare moments where I’m glad to be British and when it opens (perhaps even before) I’ll be one of the first down there to have a look.

written by thirtyfootscrew