My Retrotastic Other Life

I’ve fallen in love. In the space of an hour, confined in bed with my laptop and a mug of Lemsip, I’ve fallen head over heels in love for this website, and with it for an engaging geek and his informed yet pithy game reviews, written in a delightfully colloquial style (“Pretty weird game, this. Can anyone explain this to me?” “I think this one is smashing, and has lots of great puzzles.”) I’ve called him Paul, and his strengths are enough for me to forgive his persistent use of an apostrophe in “80’s”. Endearingly shy without being too socially awkward, intelligent without being arrogant, gently witty and on the admirable rather than the creepy side of geeky, Paul is from some much-maligned town – from Rotherham, maybe, or Preston – and is bashfully proud of his impressive video game-based oeuvre without being obsessive. Nowadays he probably dabbles in a world of Wiis and DSes without feeling he’s sold out, but his passion still lies on the retro side of things. We day trip over to Bradford in the Micra with “Best of the 80s" playing on the stereo and spend far too long in the Media Museum’s games exhibition before proper fish and chips and then, on the back seat overlooking Baildon Moor...Oops, sorry, got a bit carried away there.
National Media Museum, Bradford

I know deep down that he probably isn’t Paul at all, but more likely a collective of single, embittered, midlife-crisissing civil servants from Purley with hygiene issues who spend their evenings and weekends clad in sweaty, unwashed global hypercolour t-shirts ,eating ready meals directly from the carton and tetchily deriding one another’s opinions on the relative merits of the various Repton sequels with “The First Cut is the Deepest” playing on repeat in the background.

I was more than a little obsessed with BBC computer games as a child. My mum was a teacher and used to “borrow” a computer and a stash of games every holiday in the hope that I would then leave her alone for the duration, which I invariably did. I must have spent literally weeks of my childhood hunched in front of those computers doggedly perfecting my Chuckie Egg score whilst everyone else did sensible things, like shopping. Hours and hours spent staring fixedly at implausible birds climbing improbable ladders probably explains my now-poor eyesight. Over time I perfected routes through the various platform-based games, learned which direction all the unlikely causes of death went so I could go the other way (games being more predictable and limited in those days that they are now.) Before I even got to secondary school I could effortlessly breeze my way to level 8 on Chuckie Egg and smash the high score of anyone foolish enough to challenge me on any of the many takes on Space Invaders, though I never did find those Flowers of Crystal. Looking back, it probably amounted to an addiction. Then, at the age of ten and a full year after some of my wealthier, trendier contemporaries, I eventually got a Game Boy, and this fickle, disloyal child traded Dare Devil Denis for Balloon Kid. Where the wart on the end of a witch’s nose in Granny’s Garden once epitomised for me the height of cutting-edge graphics, I now wanted walking mushrooms and jumping fish corpses (huh?!) I can still complete Super Mario Land and still have eighteen lives to spare, and of this I am (I think justifiably) proud.

Recently though someone sent me a web version of Chuckie Egg, and, to my dismay, I can’t even get past level 6. Once so adept at arrow key-based manoeuvres, I now find myself giving up and making a cup of tea after a mere hour or so. You can get Repton on the same site, and I can only marvel at the patience I must have had as a child to doggedly play such a grindingly irritating game, with its gratingly chirpy Scott Joplin soundtrack and its smug-looking lead character which is to all intents and purposes some sort of upright reptile in a jump-suit. As for Flowers of Crystal, I don’t believe it even had an end, and you certainly wouldn’t get away with a game that involved typing “yes” and “no” to a series of inane questions (“Would you like to use a spell?”) nowadays.

But Paul, as ever, is a little more balanced on these matters. So here are a few of the games I used to play, along with Paul’s descriptions (*sigh*).

Arcadians: “One of my favourite games, it is really just a Galaxians clone, but it is especially well done. It has two minor gripes, the ship is a bit out of proportion to the invaders, and they tend to get you into a corner all the time. Cool things include the neat explosion sequence.” (The ship is out of proportion? Wow. That's proper analysis for you.)

BMX on the Moon: “The original game of riding along in a moon buggy, dodgin the ships overhead, shooting them, and jumping over craters on the moon. You have to be very two minded in this game, I suppose if you were good at rubbing your tummy whilst patting your head then you would be good at this! It has a nice sound when you shoot the aliens, sort of a coughing sound!”

Chuckie Egg: “The ORIGINAL platform game on the Beeb. This was a great game, I hope you have it in your collection! The aim was simple, collect the eggs and bird seed, whilst dodging the ostriches! Also, you had to negotiate gaps, holes, ladders and lifts (very awkward to use). If you got far enough, I seem to remember the ostriches being replaced by a giant bird which roamed around the screen. A true classic.” (Your memory serves you correctly, Paul. Level 9 goes back to level one, except with a giant bird that seems to be magnetically attracted to you. I wonder what they were taking when they designed it?)

Firebug: Paul says: “A really original game, this one puts you in the character of a Fireman, putting out little fires on the different platforms, whilst dodging the baddies. Highly original gameplay and great for a quick burst everyday. One of my favourites, although I can't seem to find it anymore!” (Quick! Someone find it for me now! I’ll send it to Paul, win his heart and we will drive off into the sunset in his Micra in a sort of 80s version of a fairytale...)

Repton: “Probably THE most famous game ever done by Superior, it was the Super Mario of the BBC world, this is an all-time classic. You play the part of Repton, the humanised reptile, with a zest for life, and probably (by now) one hell of a diamond collection. The idea is simple, collect all the diamonds, avoiding the rocks, and dodging the evil monsters which hatch from eggs. One of my all-time favourites.” (Ahhh, Paul, you and I will have to just differ on this one.)

Wallaby: “I think this is a cute little game, you are in control of mummy wallaby, whose baby has just been kidnapped by monkeys. You have to go through the level, punching all the monkeys (somehow the wallaby is a boxer!) and collecting the fruit, climbing ladders and trees. It is great fun, and the boxing part is great, it is a little repetitive though.”

It really is a fabulous website. Do look at it, and pine for those days when not only did we have floppy discs, but they were genuinely floppy. Meanwhile, it’s been so long since I went in the Wii Fit that I think it thinks my Mii has died.