With all the hype surrounding the new Xbox and Playstation launches, it made me wonder what games, machines and other stuff that the people here loved in the past.
My first computer was a used Commodore Plus/4 which was a gift from my cousins in Glasgow when I was 7. I never really got into using it as it didn't come with instructions and my parents were no help to me as they were even less knowledgeable about it than I was.
For Christmas 1989, I got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2A. It was a leading UK 8 bit computer (which I got because the stores had no NESs due to technical issues causing a lot of returns) and while it had pretty shabby graphics, it was a pretty quick little machine and had a huge library of great games and a fantastic scene around it with good magazines and a strong user base.
I worked my way through a variety of 8 and 16 bit machines including the SNES, which was a fantastic machine, although I actually only got it late on in the lifespan of the machine but that meant loads of cheap games were around.
I had wanted an Amiga for several years and although I did eventually get an Amiga 1200, it was only long after the boom period of the Amiga and it was pretty obsolete and only good as a retro gaming device. The Amiga was a fantastic computer, with a huge list of good games and was ahead of the PC in terms of abilities for a few years and it was only later that the Amiga was caught up on, especially as Commodore headed towards bankruptcy.
I did get a Playstation pretty early on, although I made the stupid blunder of thinking the N64 was going to be a far better machine and held off for that before changing my mind and getting the Playstation after all as I wasn't nearly as impressed by the N64 as I had hoped. The Playstation was a fantastic console that had a huge catalogue of titles and was the dominant format for quite some time.
I then moved on, via a brief period of having the Dreamcast as my main machine after getting one on a great offer, where they were being sold new for only ?50 in Game with a game, to the Xbox.
The Xbox was technically far superior to the Playstation 2 and there were huge shortages of that machine and with the fact that Xbox got off to a pretty slow start and was cut way down on price, it made sense to get one at Christmas 2002, the first Christmas of Xbox and it was a good decision. The Xbox was a real powerhouse of console gaming and was an impressive piece of kit. It also was a logical progression from Dreamcast, which Microsoft had had involvement in and several Sega titles appeared early in the life of Xbox, including two of the bundled games I got with my machine, Sega GT 2002 and Jet Set Radio Future.
I intially planned to move on to Playstation 3, letting Xbox 360 slip away initially before deciding to go with the 360 after all. I did eventually get the PS3 too though, although the 360 seems a slightly better experience for me to be honest. I had a PSP and now have a Vita too.
On the way through, I picked up a lot of other systems, many of them retro systems.
This is a catalogue of the systems I have or had...
Sega - Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive (Genesis), Saturn, Dreamcast
Nintendo - NES, SNES, N64
Commodore - Amiga 1200 (actually a later Escom made model), Plus /4 (swopped with sister for other stuff)
Amstrad - PCW 16
Atari - 2600
Microsoft - Xbox (gave to neighbour's son), Xbox 360
Sinclair - ZX Spectrum +2A and +2B (the same model with tiny technical differences but different to the first +2 as it was based on the +3 not the 12
Sony - Playstation 1 (x2) & 3 Super Slim, PSP (gave to neighbour's son) and PS Vita
As for games, I'm a huge fan of sports games and I've loved a lot of versions of FIFA (the most popular football (soccer) game around), Madden and various wrestling games. I also enjoy a lot of strategy titles and platform games, especially stuff like Rainbow Islands, a crazy platformer with very cute graphics where you jump around firing rainbows and collecting stuff. Very Marioesque. I love racing games too with the Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport games very high on my list of favourites.
I'm a huge fan of emulators and I play a hell of a lot of emulated games on PC, with Amiga and Spectrum titles amongst the ones I play the most.
One great thing about playing Amiga games is that I am familiar with most of the earlier games as they often were also released for the Spectrum, my own format at the time and I can easily adapt to playing the more colourful and faster Amiga versions pretty quickly. The one stinker is that Ocean (who produced LOADS of big name games at the time) often produced slightly poor Amiga versions of some games, while their Spectrum games were almost all classics. This leads to the odd situations of Spectrum versions of some games being better than the Amiga version despite it being similar to comparing an Gameboy to a SNES in terms of abilities.
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