My old Atari ST, damn you all.
Besides a short stint on a spectrum when much younger and a couple goes on an 800XL, its the puter i cut my teeth on for five glorious years. Still trying to resurrect it (there's monitors etc on and off of ebay from time to time). So many, many classic games that I wasted my time (and my brother's) on. F19, Civ, Megalomania, Elite, Frontier, Simcity, Vroom, No Second Prize, Night Shift, Gauntlet 2 (five hour sessions with three mates, til the PSU overheats..), Xenon, Speedball, International Karate Plus, Supercars, Flightsim 2, Proflight, Dungeon Master, Stunt Car Racer, Indy Jones, Viz, Bomberman, a million and one platformers, various things off at least sixty ST Format cover discs (including anything Jeff Minter ever did), the mighty STOS Basic and SEUCK DIY games prog, so on and so forth. Not just a kids or games machine though - the whole family used it as a full and proper computer for almost anything you could do with a PC these days ('cept we never got a video/audio digitiser, and our attempts to venture online, into the big world of BBS and Compuserve with borrowed modems, never got anywhere). WP, Graphics (even 3D!), spreadsheets, tunes, blah and foo
(Ysee why I wanna resurrect it?... not just for the oh so nostalgic squarewave chip music! )
(long list, but any time i moved to 'submit', i remembered another classic and forgot 2 more)
Then the Game Gear (because of: backlight, big colour screen, nice sound, and some corking games. got through a lot of batteries and two AC adaptors before the light went. Eventually buckled and got a 2nd hand one, £15. Thanks to 2100mAh rechargables you can now get all the way to the end of Sonic 2 without having to plug in
). I've had and got a lot of use out of a Gameboy Pocket, but even with Tetris, Bombjack, Zelda, and Waverace (all mighty decent games) it's just not the same.
I suppose the Master System should also go there as it's roughly similar. A lot flakier though and the games harder to play because of the godawful pads.
Playstation... (it's old enough now surely) because merely of Gran Turismo 2 and Tony Hawks 3. The only games I really bother to play on it
Acorn Archimedes systems. The great white forgotten nobodies. Damn good machines but could you get good software, could you heck - the OS was about the best thing you could run (lots of good bundled stuff tho). The occasional decent game, found running on school puters, was like gold dust (or image editor, MIDI sound recorder, CD interactive thing...)
Then the PC
...... ultimate power (even in a slow one... you can still 0wn with an 850mhz if you rack the gfx down a touch and only the most l33t will notice), some solid yesteryear games of its own, and of course...... EMULATION!
Via emulation I also say:
SNES - Mario Kart. There is no contest, multiplayer-wise. Running this emulated on a couple of machines blagged into the 6th form common room was enough to start fights - not over the result, but over who was next. Also FF6, its cliched, but it was just so good to play 2 or 3 times through before consigning to the closet of "ah, that rocked enough that i can never play it again without spoiling it". A raft of other good titles as well of course...
Gameboy Advance - emulate it. Plug your TV-out into your tv set. Hook up a lookalike PC pad. Pretend you're playing a SNES but with the latest games and a couple of graphical tweaks. The gfx on the thing really are that good (with the essential chunky oldskool stylin's) and it's got the guts and gameplay to match. If only the sound was up to scratch :-/
Spectrum - even though I was put into program-typing service at the tender age of 4 and could save and load my own programs, on a borrowed speccy, most of my memorable experience is through emulators, usually digging out games I half-recall playing at some point. Death Chase, Lotus Esprit, Trapdoor, etc... the graphics and sound were diabolical but the games addictive. There's one in the cupboard (a +2!!) that a mate "gave" to me (lent, then refused to take back!) but it was knackered when I got it and got worse since.
Non-runners:
Megadrive.... hrrrmm... theres a few good games. Mostly comprised of Sonic and Micro Machines titles though. Never really got into that system despite half my mates having one (why should I... I had an ST and a game gear
). Plus put side to side with the SNES the graphics are poo and for some reason having extra colours on tap compared to the mastersystem meant the artists always went for rather nasty spreads of shades instead of the pretty, bold primaries.
NES - please, make the hurting stop. It's supposedly such a big classic but I just can't dig it. The graphics, sound, and most of the games combine to make all three of my eyes, ears and brain bleed. Doing-their-best-but-still-inferior versions of Mario and Kirby are pretty much it's saving graces (even final fantasies 1-3 are pants). Megaman too, but there's just that little fact of the programmers making it so god-damn hard to disguise how short it was.
BBC Micro - face it, they sucked, even in the face of Speccies. They were neat in school labs to do a bit of data logging and then reset into basic for a bit of fooling around, but you wouldn't want to use one for more than a half hour.
Amiga. I really wish *now* I'd had an amiga to play with, but of course, back in the day.... commodore and atari owners were'nt best pals
What an awesome machine. You could make a handheld out of it now and it would still be able to comfortably hold it's own, especially if you converted all the old disc games to carts (or minidisc, memory card?).
To date I've only played 2 amiga games and had a play around with workbench for about a half hour. One game of Pushover (on a real A600) and one of Test Drive (on emulator - also the desktop). And seen a couple of demos..... via Scene.TV on the winamp streaming list!
Would have liked a C64 too... they were to 8bit as Amiga was to 16...
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