I don’t read the tabloids, also about ten years ago today when I moved out from my parents place, I decided to never watch TV again and disconnected the aerial. Sure, I miss some entertainment, friends often talk about these new shows. Talent contests are all the rage now and they tell me how well a young person sang an old persons song in front of judges and cried. Or American series like ‘Twilight’ from which all I know is that it sounds like Dawson’s Creek with teeth?
Just reading a little more on IMDB now, I learned some interesting trivia about the series;
“Taylor Lautner had to wear a wig for his role as Jacob Black.”
As brilliant as watching a man with false teeth in a wig, wooing a lady sounds, TV will have to do better than that to pull me away from playing Forza Motorsport 4 on Xbox live with two of my best friends.
In my friends initiation into the club we’ve created, we asked him to choose a Ford shit box, whilst we chased him in two heavily modified Range Rovers dressed in full ‘Thames Valley Police’ colours. We pretend he’s a runner and set him off with a five second head start, on the famous Nurburgring in Germany. His confusion and panic was understandable, we could have informed him it was an initiation and that we had modified our 4×4’s but watching his Ford Escort swerve left and right, billowing out smoke from our relentless attempts at putting him into a hedge, was simply too much fun to spoil the surprise.
I browse the internet sometimes to seek out technology news and pictures of cats but sometimes I see stories that are just too hard to miss. One that caught my eye today was about the man who set himself on fire amidst the court proceedings for the oxygen stealer, Anders Breivik. I read previously that Breivik had stated that he used computer games, specifically Call of Duty, to simulate the kind of situation he’d hope to be in when he shot and killed 69 innocent people.
Sure, there has again been uproar about this kind of game as they say it may affect young people in similar ways, although as you already know, I like to think of it as games make people killers like spoons make you fat.
I mean what kind of game was the chap playing that set himself on fire outside court, Burned on Duty 4? A simple game which only involves one level, whereby you take a walk to a petrol station, fill up a petrol can, go to the desired location, douse yourself in fuel and strike a match. No, you have to be a sick kind of mental to think shooting children on an island is worth anything, even more deranged to become a human torch.
Sadly, unlike Call of Duty where you die quite often in a short space of time, Anders Breivik is still alive…and if that’s taught anyone anything that is, unlike computer games, if you massacre people in cold blood, you’ll be kept alive so we can hear all the interesting anecdotes about bad times in your life and how many people you had hoped to kill. I’m not an advocate of real violence, it’s too tiring, in Breiviks case however, I think if I was one of the armed officers who approached him, id make out I tripped over a log and accidentally let off twenty-five rounds which all happened to hit Anders in his legs and the only way to help him out was to try to keep him conscious by repeatedly hitting in the face with the butt of my rifle.
Anyway, I’m moving off topic, I was meant to be explaining how I stepped out of the 16bit generation of games machines and entered the 32bit realm of enjoyment.
Although the Megadrive still had some life in it, there was a lot of temptation on the horizon and I wanted in. The new breed of consoles were emerging and with it, some new innovations in games. A lot of the heavyweights in Sega’s reign had their run of sequels and it’s fair share of turkeys.
One game that stands out as a ‘Mega failure’ was Rise Of The Robots. During the build up to its release everything looked promising. The characters were to be CGI sprites instead of the pixellated art from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, the inspirations looked to be from robots seen in Hollywood films too. Rumour had it that Brian May from Queen was to produce a full soundtrack for the game and all of this came on the usual 16BIT cartridge.
After some delays, the game was released, without May’s soundtrack and with all the excitement of a ham sandwich. Playability wasn’t an issue really, it was easy to play but this was probably due to the fact each character had around five or six moves. Even at eleven years old, me and my best friend exchanged looks of horror and astonishment at what had been such an eagerly awaited title. The characters moved like two wheel chair bound people attacking each other with brooms, it was laughably clumsy and so it soon became clear that this was a classic case of ‘all the gear and no idea’.
If you had the money at this time, you would have had either the Sega MegaDrive or SNES and if you were feeling really flush, you would go all out and have the in-house arcade feel of the Neo-Geo.
For me, I had to make do with the Mega Drive alone because at twelve years old I didn’t have around £600 to spank on something that would mean I saw even less of the outside world. The Neo-Geo was the all out king of 2D gaming straight from the arcades, mainly focused around Japanese fighting games. The machine and the games had premium prices, titles in the US started at around $200, so only a niche market was hit. Even so, the console has outlived the MegaDrive and all other 2D competitors due to its hardware compatibility, it was released in 1990 and had its final official title released in 2004, ‘Samurai Showdown V Special’. It has been said that since the introduction of the Internet, SNK, the makers of this wonder box, decided to call it a day with the explosion of the piracy of games that are cartridge based.
In 1995 my attention was drawn to the stirrings from Sony and their talk of a CD based games machine, boasting massive power combined with a huge following of games developers, to give it the largest games library yet. At the time I had some brief playing time on the Atari Jaguar and the eagerly awaited following up console, the Sega Saturn. The Saturn did indeed look the part, it was quite mind blowing to see full polygonal games flowing at smooth frame rates but with the European prices, making the right choice of console was important.
I haven’t got much to say about the Jaguar, from what I remember, being twelve at the time, was wondering into Comet (an electrical store) and being offered to play on it. I don’t remember the game specifically but I remember being overwhelmed by the size of the controller and the fact it had more buttons on it than the cockpit of a Boeing 747. I wasn’t overly impressed with the machine, some of the titles looked promising but the word on the street was, Sony had all of this and more.
A quote from Wikipedia;
“PlayStation was the brainchild of Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who had just come out of his hardware engineering division at that time and would later be dubbed as “The Father of the PlayStation”
The console’s origins date back to 1988 where it was originally a joint project between Nintendo and Sony to create a CD-ROM for the Super Nintendo.
The PlayStation made its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991 when Sony revealed its console, a Super Famicom/SNES with a built-in CD-ROM drive (that incorporated Green Book technology or CDi). However, a day after the announcement at CES, Nintendo announced that it would be breaking its partnership with Sony, opting to go with Philips instead but using the same technology.
The deal was broken by Nintendo after they were unable to come to an agreement on how revenue would be split between the two companies. The breaking of the partnership infuriated Sony President Norio Ohga, who responded by appointing Kutaragi with the responsibility of developing of the PlayStation project to rival Nintendo.”
I decided after studying the news on each console, the options were the Saturn or the PlayStation. With SEGA’s unconventional hardware and programming engine, developers were losing patience with Sega early on and this was apparent at release in the summer of 1995, as there were only six titles to chose from here in the UK. Although the quadrilateral rendering of the Saturn was in some ways better looking than that of the PlayStations industry standard triangular form of rendering (See Lara Crofts triangular tits in the first Tomb Raider), for the majority of developers the Saturn was hard to play with. In the early days the PlayStation did suffer with some polygonal distortion but overall, the performance of these games outshone the efforts of developers for SEGA.
After some shit flinging in the American market and some more grumbles from developers worldwide, SEGA were going to have to pull out all the stops. In September 1995 the PlayStation was released and it’s launch weekend Sony flogged 100,000 units, more than 20,000 than the total sales of the Saturn which was released six weeks before.
The choice was obvious. I clubbed together anything I had begged, borrowed and stolen, combined with the bank of mum and dad. I chose my bundle and setup my PlayStation and switched it on to hear this unforgettable sound…