The inception of the addict (or how to live a virtual life).

For a university assignment i have to write a 28 day blog to experience online journalism. With the greatest of intentions i'm going to attempt to post daily about my greatest passion which is videogames and the playing of them. Mostly it will be a review of sorts, my own opinion of a game that has been released or possibly a game that i hold dear to my heart.
Comments are more than welcome and i expect copious amounts of flak from fanboys and obsessives the world over. As a reminder these are just my personal opinions about games, gaming culture and on a subject which i hold very close to my heart.

Ever since i can remember i've played videogames, i'd probably go so far as to say that they've been an integral part of my life since i was 4 years old. I recall with a Disney-like charm the day that my dad came home carrying a monstrous contraption that was soon to replace the unhealthy fixation i had with watching "The Littlest Hobo" and "The Incredible Hulk" on television.
For anyone not in the know the Littlest Hobo was a dog (possibly a husky?) that roamed around helping people (usually children) and then moving on to the next town. Think Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter but a furrier version with four legs and less guns. If you don't know what The Incredible Hulk is then you should stop reading this and go and find out - ask your mum, she probably knows, or type into Google, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when i'm angry.", and that should garner positive results. Actually i think the guy who used to be painted green to become the Hulk now appears in the King of Queens, you could check that too - i think he's called Lou Ferreno.


They've now released a DVD of The Littlest Hobos exploits. I've yet to see it but i hope that included on the extras is The Littlest Hobo performing various tricks, jumping through flaming hoops etc and a biography of all the Littlest Hobos that featured on the show because i refuse to believe that it was only the one.


Anyway, the bulky bundle of joy that my dad was lugging into the front room turned out to be a Phillips G7000 with a few games thrown in and i remember the love that i instantly felt for this inanimate new best friend that i'd acquired.
Initially me and my brother couldn't actually believe what we were seeing, we could actually become cowboys or spaceships or intergalactic warriors brandishing lances and riding ostriches. This truly was the stuff of dreams although i'm fairly sure Joust was never on the G7000 and came later.


The G7000 in all its glory. The boxart is almost exactly what our family looked like after the introduction of the G7000. Out went the piano and the hum drum of parlour games and we enjoyed an unparalled and new-found sense of comraderie.

Obviously back then (26 years ago) one had to conjure things with the imagination. Now you have perfectly rendered characters on screen displayed in crystal clear clarity at 1080i (preferably 720p according to experts) and 7.1 speakers that calculate spacial awareness and make you feel like you're actually hearing those things.

Back then we didn't compare graphics, my brother and i wouldn't sit down and turn our noses up at a game because the graphics weren't up to scratch as that simply wasn't an option. This was predominantly because the graphics were all the same and usually made up of a few pixels. Want a cowboy? A spaceship? A Mad Max-esque car? Stick some white pixels together.
It mattered not to us though. We'd spend hours, days even, moving our characters up and down the screen firing pixel bullets at each other and f'ing loving it to boot.

With the amount of wear it got the G7000 broke a year or two later and i vaguely remember dad and me in the car driving out to some random house in the sticks to procure another that by chance had been advertised in the local paper. In retrospect it seems like a morbid, dark affair; a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre farmhouse in a remote part of Cornwall where the denizens feasted on weak girls who fall over and scream alot but after all that butchery and violence there's nothing they enjoyed more than to relax in front of the good ol' G7000 and while away the winter evenings by playing Pac-Man. God knows why they sold the G7000 because it was in mint condition and likely their only source of leisure apart from eviscerating bodies - i like to think that maybe one of them had come of age and they needed the money to purchase a new chainsaw.


The man we bought the G7000 from.

So yeah, that's my overly complex inception into the cult of gamers. After that i think i owned every machine except a Spectrum 28K. My brother still owns nearly the full gamut of consoles even now, from Master Systems to GameBoy Advances to a dishevelled, world worn Atari Lynx. It never saw much action and now resides in a corner gathering dust, the weight of rejection weighing heavily on its shoulders, embittered at a world who never loved it like a jaded whore.

We also owned quite a few computers which seems odd now as all i actually used them for was playing games. It was, of course, easier to convince my parents to buy the computers as opposed to the consoles as i could veil the purpose of the computer under the guise of a school aid. At 11 years old i implored my mum, "How on Earth am I to compete with the other children at school if i have no computer?! There i am with my archaic 2B pencil and a scrap of A4 and Tom Osborne has a computer to type up his work! I've failed before i've even begun!!"
Looking back i'm not sure what educational advantage it would grant if one could type up their work as opposed to write it but as it turns out Tom Osborne is infinitely more successful than i am now, something which i contribute solely to the fact that at the time he probably had a better computer than i did.
I'm not bitter though as that particular blag netted me an Amiga with which i enjoyed many hours playing Eye of the Beholder.


Despite knowing their capabilites i think i had a passionate, almost romantic view of computers back then, when one PC still occupied an entire room of an office block and still consisted of tape reels and LED's.
Not that they could (and still can't today) but i believed that my computer allowed me to pretty much do whatever i liked. Literally nothing was impossible when i sat in front of my Amiga and, although i only really used it to play Heimdall, it allowed me the capacity to do so much more if i wanted to. It screamed potential. I recall a time when i spent an entire day using Paint (i'm not sure if that's the name) - crafting, what i believed, to be works of master art. Works that people would look back on in years to come and think, "Jesus. That was a wasted talent. Who is this artist who evokes such emotions using a simple paint program?" If Michelangelo had an Amiga and a copy of Paint he no doubt would have used it to design the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.


I'm not over-exaggerating when i say i created an almost exact copy of this using an Amiga and a copy of Paint. The only difference was mine didn't take so long.

I can't remember what the utility was, Speak possibly, but when i first made my Amiga talk i almost wept. Like Dr Frankenstein i had created sentient life and it would change my life forever.
It didn't of course, ultimately i found the scope of it quite limited and reality came lumbering along life a greasy fat person punching me squarely in the face. That didn't stop me from brifely feeling like Michael Knight with an albeit stationary and far less bourgois Kit however.

Moving swiftly on i took up a part-time job when i was 14 (i think), washing dishes and looking the other way when the chef dropped food on the floor and then put it back on the plate - it was all worth it though as my 2 years of toil resulted in my purchase of a Sega Megadrive with a copy of Altered Beast. I actually couldn't believe it when i got it home.
It was the first time i'd seen one up and running and the very concept that a man could turn into a myriad of beats (a dragon?!) to save the one he loved appealed to me. It was a blatant rip-off of Manimal but it worked well and my motivation for playing was to see which creature the protaginist would turn into next.
Also used in Altered Beast was my first encounter with barely recognisable digitised speech. When i first turned the game on and Zeus procalimed "Rise from your grave!!" i thought it was witch-craft. Actually, my first reaction was to turn the game off and on again so i could make out what he was actually saying, the first time i could make out the word grave and then after 2 further listens i realised he wanted me to rise from it. Which i did. Happily.

Wow. That was a long introduction and i apologise, suffice to say i've owned pretty much every console or computer released in the last 30 years and played nearly every game except for sports simulations. For some reason they've always been the Devils work in my eyes. I just find no enjoyment in them at all with the exception of Mutant League on the Mega Drive and California Games, predominantly because of the Hackee Sacking.
(If anyone's still reading this was it just me or was surfing on California Games pretty much impossible? Oh, and was it possible to hit a seagull with the Hackee Sack if you timed it correctly?)

From this point onwards i'll be striving to look at games and the politics and culture around them but with my own slant on it. There's things i feel passionately about and things that probably alot of people reading this will not agree with but i'm always up for friendly banter.
So begins 28 days of a videogame addict - i apologise to my girlfriend in advance as i may well use this as an excuse to play more games than i normally would.....which is an obscene amount.
Join me tomorrow biatches.