The Games Ingredients - This is 2.0...

28 September 202312 October 2023

Couch gaming and food… The camaraderie in a crammed room!

Welcome to the Fantasy Zone…

I need some of you to use your imagination on this one, and the rest to really think back to a time before gaming was about watching some dopey blonde titty twitching Call of Duty or some crisp munching dude thinking he is some kind of Fortnite martial arts specialist – a time when the internet was in it’s infancy and gaming together was either lugging your bulky Pentium PC to the local youth club for a Quake showdown or piling around to your mates house/pub. Yes, two of my mates lived in a pub and breaking the speed limit with Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge on an aging Atari ST with its wired joysticks was a regular pastime, some millennial just read wired joystick and has closed this page to search Atari ST and wired joysticks. Continue reading “Couch gaming and food… The camaraderie in a crammed room!”

20 September 202327 October 2023

Single player games you go back to when you CBA with MP…

A man chooses, a slave obeys…

Over the years there has been some truly epic single player games, and to be honest I have not played a lot of what I wanted to play simply because of two things, money and time. Money firstly – because when new games first come out, as we all know there is day one price – yes I know I should wait and pick up secondhand a few months down the road, but then my memory fails me and I forget about the game I was interested in, it never helps walking into the local video game store and being confronted with so many choices, especially from the PS4/PS3 and Xbox 360 era. Continue reading “Single player games you go back to when you CBA with MP…”

4 September 202327 October 2023

Load “ZX Spectrum Next”…

Press play on tape…

My gaming life began on the ZX Spectrum 48K+ back when movies like Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid and Gremlins infused the life of a young person. Laura Branigan had Self Control and Madonna was Like a Virgin (if she was ever one)?

A lot of years have gone by and even though gaming has come a zillion miles with simple adventure games no longer programmed by kids in bedrooms or university grads trailblazing the next decade of 8 bit gaming and beyond, is there still room for nostalgia in hardware form, the plastic box? I’ve always like going back to the classics but really find emulation frustrating, so if the opportunity comes along to play such classics on hardware old and well-used or re-imagined as is the case with the ZX Spectrum Next, then that gets my attention. Continue reading “Load “ZX Spectrum Next”…”

5 July 202324 September 2023

The gaming magazines you read.

Floppy disc and CD Rom demo’s on the front cover.

So lets get down to it – Special Reserve, I guess anyone that’s old enough to have read a gaming magazine will remember the mail order company that advertised in all the major UK publications of the time. Buying the latest edition of your favorite magazine, (Amiga Format, ST Format, Computer and Videogames to name a few institutions). The monthly glossy adventures to consume on your break at work or on the bus on way home, whatever the magazine you geeked over, somewhere inside, between gawking at the upcoming Chaos Engine developed by the Bitmap Brothers and a transparent Competition Pro joystick that was about to be released, Special Reverse would always draw attention. Continue reading “The gaming magazines you read.”

24 June 202327 October 2023

The first computer or console you played – remembering yesteryear’s gaming.

10 print “ZX Spectrum was awesome!” 20 goto 10…

Time to go back a few years. Well four decades in fact, it was late December 1984, that time the man in the red suit and white fluffy beard appeared with toys of total epic (Optimus Prime) proportions. Band Aid, Wham! and Frankie Goes To Hollywood stacked up the UK music charts in place or another and ET and other unsold Atari game cartridges, computers and consoles, the aftershock of the video games crash had spent the first of a 30 years buried in a New Mexico landfill. Continue reading “The first computer or console you played – remembering yesteryear’s gaming.”