Tuesday 12 April 2011

Carboot Sales, Retro Gaming, eBay, And My Childhood

While walking about a car boot sale on the seafront yesterday before work I found a stall, hardly surprising.. the place was full of them. But this stall was different, in between the large assortment of dolls, Thomas the tank engine trains, and the large amount of action figures that I recognised from my childhood, I found a box.

From the outside it looked like a pretty standard box, it was made of cardboard and looked pretty moth-eaten. Inside though.. inside was like looking back to my childhood.. again.. Mega Drive games, certainly not the big games most people will think of when you say “Mega Drive” to them though, not Sonic the Hedgehog, Altered Beast, or Streets of Rage (thinking about it, why has there not been a next generation update for Streets of Rage??). No this box had games that, If I think about it and look back, were mediocre at best.

Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf
Wrestle Wars
Bonanza Brothers
Cyborg Justice
Flashback

All games I have fond memories of...
Me and my dad sitting down and trying to play together... before he would get frustrated and start complaining that the game was broken and walk off, Me playing Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf and taking 100 shots to unlock that stupid side scrolling hidden game that looked like a TwinBee rip-off, and playing Wrestle Wars thinking that this was as realistic as games could possibly get.

Stupidly I didn’t buy any of them, I don’t carry money on me when I heading to work... if I'm working I'm not going to be popping to the shops at any point (well it makes sense to me), I am kicking myself for not grabbing them all, there must have been 15 games in that box all price at £1 each, you have to love parents who have cleared out a kids room and not realised exactly what they are selling.

But this has now kicked off something of an obsession for me, for the past 3 hours I have been crawling around eBay looking at, comparing and adding Mega Drive and Snes consoles to my watch list.
I want to recapture the good old days of gaming, back when the games were fun and simple, and multiplayer meant having your friends from school over and being sat next to you while you played.

If I am honest, I want to aim to get every game I had as a child, and the games I couldn’t get due to not having the £60 needed to buy them back then (Robocop Vs Terminator)

I'm aware that I could quite easily just download an emulator and start grabbing ROMS left, right and center... But to me that isn’t the same, I want to relive the weight of the control pad in my hands, the iconic “blowing into the cartridge” whenever the games decided to play up once in a while. The proper gaming experiences that just can't be gotten with playing on your PC/Laptop/hacked PSP, those are what I am craving right now.

Does anyone feel the same?

3 comments:

  1. so you want to do what i did 6 months ago, when i bought a SNES back. id suggest coming over and having a go on my snes before deciding properly. but as it stands its either me or you at work. never have any time off together like we used to. but yeah, i get you point my games are in great condition yet they sometimes crash or not work the first time... and then have to blow into them or wiggle the cartridge in the console.. played super metroid not long back and LOVED every second of it, remembering my childhood and the feel of a genuine console game. plus playing it on a 46 inch tv, was a nice difference to back then. but at the moment i have the PS1 games out and replaying Final Fantasy 7 right now :)

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  2. Wiggling and blowing the cartridges are part of the 8/16 bit era to me,
    same with the original gameboy and game gears.

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  3. Sold my SNES years ago. My Dad still goes on about how that version of Mario Kart was the definitive version.

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