Kids Do Retro

8 July 1995 saw the Saturn launch in PAL territories, including the UK. Happy birthday to one of my favourite consoles. The Saturn though for me was a little like John Carpenter’s The Thing, unappreciated at the time but in hindsight great. It launched ahead of the Playstation but a price that’s the equivalent of over £700 in today’s money. Eat that Xbox One X!

I’m now on my second Saturn and don’t have my original any more- I gave it to a charity youth club in the late 90’s. Altruistic but a mistake and I remedied it by buying a white Japanese Saturn a few years later.

Time has been kind to the Saturn. Kinder in a sense than it has been to the Playstation because the Saturn had pretty awesome 2D chops and the games that reflected it, while the Playstation was all about the fancy 3D and transparency effects. I had a Playstation some months before a Saturn and was able to trade a stack of already second hand PS games to get a second hand Saturn in early 1996. I wasn’t about to pay the £399 launch price!  Continue reading →

Fortunately, given that he turned out to be the paedophile from hell, I never wrote in to Jim’ll Fix It for him to make my dreams come true. It’s probably for the best really. I did think it was funny when it was announced BBC Television Centre was going to be converted into luxury flats:

Model of how the flats will look

Especially considering the starting price was £700,000. I could imagine the estate agent showing some young couple who nobody could rightly work out had that sort of money round while saying something like, “Right where your kitchen table is, Jimmy nonced a 13 year old back in 1978.”

Bonkers.

Anyway, if you’ve read any or much of this blog, you will probably get the idea that I do a lot of writing. A conservative estimate across all the blogs I write puts me at over three quarters of a million words thus far, and if I factor in my still unfinished book (21 years in the writing so far), it’s creeping ever higher. Continue reading →

There are still a few video game magazines that shift some issues in print, Edge and Retrogamer are the two that immediately spring to mind to me, but by and large it’s now mostly online sites. It makes sense of course, the immediacy of publication of news, and the ability to put streaming video in, have all contributed to the demise of the magazine. Comment sections and forums have too, although whether this is a good thing or not depends on your point of view. Personally I think the comment section of the vast majority of gaming sites are toxic hazards that should be avoided at all costs but that’s another story. Continue reading →

From reading our game play throughs, you would be forgiven in thinking I spent every single waking hour I wasn’t at school sat in front of a computer in the 80’s.

That wasn’t really the case though, mostly because the paucity of childrens TV meant we actually had a lot of spare time. Kids telly back then ran from about 3:15 until 5:35, starting with stuff for the little kids, and ending up with something like Blue Peter or right at the end of the decade, Rolf’s Cartoon Club and then Neighbours. I was forever missing Rolf’s Cartoon Club because that was invariably when my mum used to dish up dinner and we had to sit at the dining room table and eat. The torture. Continue reading →