Re-living the dream

Affable Idiot John Davies gets back to grips with old-school gaming

The green creature that forward rolled and somersaulted into his opponents was my choice of character in Street Fighter 2, which I played on the super Famicom that my step-brother had bought mail order from China. It was the only game that I would play by myself. To me gaming was all about standing up in a café feeding ten pence pieces into a big machine. It was all about the company of the other kids crowding around a small screen to see if you could find the right portal or kill the end boss while drinking blue slush puppies through a straw.

So when I agreed to try and re-create these moments of beauty in my own home on my PC, by using something called an emulator, I didn’t expect it to be the most frustrating thing I have attempted since trying to catheterize a 74-year-old lady for the fifth time in a morning.

On the first attempt of loading up this emulator I managed to briefly play Joust; a game circa 1982 from the spectrum. In Joust, I am a knight on an ostrich and I have to kill other knights who are on giant buzzards. I love the imagination of the creators of old arcade games – pass me their narcotics please. It’s a static screen game and the only features are five platforms that just hang in the air. You can move left or right or try and flap your bird’s wings by hitting a button rapidly until you take off. The problem I had with Joust on this occasion was that I couldn’t find which key on my PC enabled this action, and I got killed very quickly by the baddies, without progressing to any further levels.

The next game I attempted to play was Bart’s Nightmare. I got very, very excited that I needed to wee when the Simpson’s clouds popped up on my screen. In Bart’s Nightmare, you walk along a street avoiding grannies that kiss you, flying letterboxes, Jebadiah Simpson rotating heads, Lisa, and Otto in the school bus. You can spit at baddies, blow bubbles at them, move up, down, left right and you can jump, drawing comparisons to Pacland. This game got very boring very quickly and became as repetitive as the background. I died quickly and didn’t achieve a higher grade than an F.

Finally Bubble Bobble made me happy. I always remember that the home versions were never as good as the arcade and there was always little glitches in the gaming. The game is named after the two dragons that you can take control of, Bub and Bob, but you only get to play Bob on the two-player mode.

In Bubble Bobble, you fire bubbles at enemy badies, and then burst them with your spikes before they escape. Each level is on one screen which changes after completion in the time period set. There are a 100 levels, but I only managed to get into double figures once this time. I remember my record in the rendevouz café was around level 40. I don’t know anyone who actually completed Bubble Bobble and got to rescue the dragon’s girlfriends. There was a myth that a boy from the year above had reached level 98 before the café owner told him to clear of as he’d spent to much time in there without spending any money, and pulled the plug.

Bubble Bobble spawned a legacy of games including the beautiful Rainbow island in 1987. In this game, the screen was slowly sinking into the sea and the only escape was to climb the platforms by shooting little rainbows.

Enough now. Go out and get these emulators and rediscover games you loved, for they paved the way for your Wiis and Xboxes. Tomorrow I will be searching for my little Kiwi friend in New Zealand story and getting even with Segat, by forward rolling into him with Blanka.