The depths of the deep blue sea is a dark and dangerous place - take the plunge if your brave enough!
Posted by boyo on Apr 27, 2010 21:55 (Apr 27, 2010 21:55)
The naivety of youth is something that you lose, as you grow older, thankfully.
In my teens back home in West Wales I felt protected. My family were around me to cushion me from the outside world and all the stuff that was bad in the world seemed to happen a long way away in other countries.
At the tender age of 13 I received my ZX Spectrum for Christmas along with the games Manic Miner and Lunar Jetman. These two games were recommended to me by a school colleague as he had been given a Spectrum 6 months before for his birthday and boy were they good. Both games were played continually over the holiday period with Manic Miner becoming one of my all time favourite Sinclair games.
I managed to get to the later stages of Manic Miner and with Lunar Jetman, if I’m totally honest, I never really understood what the overall objective of the game was until I was a little older, yet at the time it was still fun flying around shooting blocks of colour on the screen!
After weeks of playing these games it was time for a change.
The family used to go shopping every weekend in the local shopping town of Carmarthen some 13 miles. Tesco was the shop of choice for my parents, for me it was WH Smiths and Woolworths and a little Newsagent at the top of town where I used to buy my weekly can of orange Fanta.
My Speccy had been purchased at WH Smiths some weeks previous in the run-up to Christmas and it was here I went to look for my next gaming purchase.
In the far end corner of the store, next to the chart records and LP’s, was the computer section. Here I found a rack from the floor to the ceiling with row upon row of empty cassette cases adjourned with colourful inlays. On the inlay front was found the name of the game in a big bold letters, the system the game would run on and underneath the text, a graphical portrayal of the game. Towards the back could be found a textual description of the adventure you would be taken on if you were brave enough to buy the game and load it on your system of choice.
Now lets remember that at this time I had only had the pleasure of seeing and playing two games on my Spectrum and both games were incredibly good. On looking and reading the inlay descriptions of the games before me I had no doubt that every single game I was presented with was of equal quality and value for money as the two I already owned. Why should I not think differently! Surely the producers of these games would not lie to me with their claims of “Game of the Year!” and “Shockingly realistic!” So in my mind back then it was a matter of choosing what kind of game I would like to play – the quality and game play were furthest from my mind as they were an assumed part of the package.
I spent a good while choosing the game I wanted to play, very reminiscent of the way I walk around and around Blockbuster these days when choosing a movie.
I think every speccy owner has had an experience like this, even down the the "returned games" being tested in public at WHSmiths (they certainly did this to me once in my local Merthyr Tydfil branch) and the impatient queue of music customers trying to get their hands on that week's Number 1 single...
Apr 29, 2010 10:09:00 (
Apr 29, 2010 10:09
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