[Closed] Video game machines and games of your childhood/youth

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Although there were many, ranging from the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC 64K through to the Dreamcast up to the PS3 I have to say the main one for me was the megadrive. My cousin got one seemingly the very day and hour they were released - I had to wait until Christmas. I remember playing Golden Axe till 5am and my thumbs hurting for a week afterwards 😆

I completed Altered Beast in one sitting (not hard) but also remember what seems like hundreds of hours trying to complete Ghouls & Ghosts. Bloody giant swarm of wasps monster.

Chuckie Egg (BBC)
Oh Mummy (Sinclair ZX Spectrum with integral cassette deck)
Winter Olympics (can't recall)

My Dad was mint, always bought us the latest games - Atari when that came out (space invaders, and then the football game which had like 100 options, all of them very very similar versions of option number 1!). We then moved on to a Spectrum 16k, Horace goes skiing taking 20 minutes to load on the cassette then crashing at the end...through to 48k Spectrum and Atic Atack, Manic Minor etc...then up to a C64, but cannot remember any games for that strangely.
Most favourite game though was easily the original football manager 🙂

20 minutes to load on the cassette then crashing at the end...

Ah the good old days. Blow on it and it'll be grand the second time around.

Uridium, C64.

Ooo. You flush folk with the Commodore 64s. Anyone remember these wonders for the Vic 20?

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a Spectrum 16k, Horace goes skiing taking 20 minutes to load on the cassette

Never happened. A 48K game took five minutes tops.

I backed this on Kickstarter:
https://www.specnext.com/about/

Pong. My brother soldered 20 odd chips onto a PCB to build it from a kit.

cranberry - Member

Parachute was awesome.

Uridium, C64.

Another Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robhwson/hyper-sentinel-a-retro-inspired-arcade-shoot-em-up

Cougar - Moderator

a Spectrum 16k, Horace goes skiing taking 20 minutes to load on the cassette

Never happened. A 48K game took five minutes tops.

Five minutes easily felt like 20 minutes when you're under 10.

Hypersports (Spectrum), Prince of Persia (Mac LCII), Abe's Oddysee and Metal Gear Solid (Playstation). I wish I'd never given away my ps1. I found the Abe's Oddysee playable demo disk when I was tidying up at Christmas.
Way back in the day, I used to love the asteroids machine at the Brize Norton Astra Bowl.

C64 Mayhem In Monsterland. I think this game came out too near the end of the C64's popularity for many to remember it. It might have been the best game on the C64 and probably squeezed more out of the machines capabilities than any other.

The first game I remember becoming absorbed in was on a school computer was Fantastic voyage but I can't remember the platform

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Joust on the Atari

C16 was my first pooter, it had a keyboard so my folks thought it would be more educational than an Atari so much for that.

Then NES, SNES, N64, PS 1, 2, 3 and now and Xbox One.

I don’t get to play much now, pretty much handed the baton onto my Son now - he’s more of a PC Gamer, minecraft and Sims mostly.

I had Spectrum 128k and with it came a music player programme, on tape.. Yes you would load up this programme from a perfectly good audio type tape only to be assaulted with inferior sounding music to what could have been recorded onto said tape off Atlantic 252, with a period Binatone tape deck.

Rainbow Islands was tops though.

Phat gameboy and tetris 30min non stop. Atari st / amiga 512k. Would have loved a neo geo but the carts were a small fortune. Super nintendo (snes) was another I missed out on.
Spent many hours on MGS on ps1. Left it on for 8 hrs whilst at lectures as I didnt have a save game cart .

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Neo Geo Pocket Color. Some great games, I liked Metal Slug and Sonic.It was better than a Game Boy, though no-one had heard of it.

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My first games. console.

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Also spent far too much time/money on this machine in.the local Chinese take away. Threre used to be quite a fight for the high score.

Bomber on the Zx81
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and Star Trek on the Apple II
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Zaxxon on the C64 for me, thought it was great how rather than just being a top down shooter you had to alter your altitude as well. Many childhood hours lost...

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this.followed by..

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and eventually this..

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best fighting game ever...

Earliest was probably playing Pong on my brothers Grandstand console.

Ahem, you ‘may’ be able to mod the SNES Classic Mini to play Game Boy/Color/Advance, NES, SNES, N64, Game Gear, Master System, Mega Drive, PC Engine and Atari 2600...

Over the years I've worked my way through these:
Pong
Atari 2600
ColecoVision
ZX Spectrum
Commodore 64
Commodore Amiga 500
Nintendo Gameboy
Sega MegaDrive
Sony Playstation
Xbox
Sony PS3
Sony PS4

Arcade machines were also a major draw especially once we learnt how to zap them for free credits. Heathrow airport used to have loads of arcade games dotted around the terminals and had the perfect carpets for building up enough static to get free credits. We got escorted out of the airport quite a few times.

Fave 2nd gen? arcade game was probably robotron, it got stupidly hard stupidly quickly.

I was pretty good at pac-man and reckon I could still give most people a decent game of Tetris.

C64 Mayhem In Monsterland. I think this game came out too near the end of the C64's popularity for many to remember it. It might have been the best game on the C64 and probably squeezed more out of the machines capabilities than any other.

Speaking as a Spectrum boy, that looks brilliant.

Elite on the C64.

Bought it on holiday in Cornwall from the Newquay WH Smith.

Then had 2 weeks to wait before going home and playing it.... Plenty of time to read the great little novella...which made me practically foam at the mouth in anticipation!

Loved that game. The future really had arrived and I was piloting my own star ship. 🙂

For one loooong summer I got to feel like a real starship commander:

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Got Rebelstar 2 on a cover tape, basically taught ourselves how to play it from scratch as it had no manual, took about 5 playthroughs before we learned how to equip a weapon... what a game though

Mine was a Master System II, the garden variety one with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built in. I loved it but nothing really compared to the holy duo of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles on the Megadrive. Or Toejam & Earl. Or MK3. Or the J-cart version of Micro Machines with the built in extra controller ports.

All your base are belong to us.

Catch Him.

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That was the first, various pong plus a light gun.
Then came a Texas Instruments Ti-99. Cartridge loading, so no waiting. There was a minesweeper type game called Hunt the Wumpus and I loved the sound fx when the wumpus got you.
Bloody hell, there's youtube vids of it:

Also liked watching my Dad play sideways scroller Parsec on it (It was too difficult for me at that age). Had a speech synthesizer hardware add-on for it too which was awesome to a kid.
Then when Ti computers went bust we ended up with an Amstrad CPC6128 with the disk drive.
Had a mouse for it and did some really good artwork on it but my fondest memories will always be the hours spent playing Gauntlet with the Daddy. 8)

Treasure island dizzy on Spectrum

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Chase HQ arcade game at the Littledown Centre in Bournemouth

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Xenon 2 on Atari st 1040 with Bomb the Bass doing the music

I was heavily into Japanese/US consoles and games in the early to mid 90s, here are a few with my favourite games:

Sega Megadrive - Strider, Super Shinobi, Steel Empire, Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion, Bare Knuckle, Marvel Land, Golden Axe, Monaco GP.
PC Engine + PC Engine GT- PC Kid 1+2, Splatterhouse, Rainbow Islands, Devils Crush, Chase HQ, New Zealand Story.
Super Famicom - Super Mario 4, Contra Spirits, Legend of Mystical Ninja, Castlevania 4, Dracula X, Axelay, Mario Kart, Street Fighter 2, Final Fight.
N64 - Mario 64, Wave Race, Legend of Mystical Ninja, Zelda: Ocarina of time.

I've had most of the CD based consoles since, bit it was the cartridge based machines that I loved the most.

It's a good thread this. Weird to think of all the games. Ghouls and ghosts and how hard it was , i had totally forgotten.

Rainbow island and Prince of Persia too, completely forgot about them. Fantastic memories . I still play , love computer games and my 5 year old is starting to really enjoy them too. I wonder what he will be reminiscing about in 31 years time.

Multiplayer on Goldeneye on the N64, that was a great game. it was always a race to find the golden gun then it was more or less game over for the other players 😀

Good thread. For me it was Choplifter on the Apple ][
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At 10p a time, it was Pac-Man (memorised the routes) and Defender at the local Dayvilles ice-cream parlour.
Even won a Vic-20 playing Galaxians at a computer show. So yes, another wasted youth.

^^^ Not the Dayvilles in Wimbledon by any chance? If so then that was where I spent a lot of my time as they had had various machines and I was best friends with the managers son.

Ha! It was indeed; Peter, yes?

That's right. I was in the same class at school with him. Small world. I live up near Preston now and my next door neighbour is also from Wimbledon.

Indeed; we were in Primary school together, before I went off to boarding school. Good times!
(Keeping the geo link by supporting AFC)

Many, many hours playing

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Hunt the Wumpus is the first game I remember playing. Maybe on an Acorn Atom? Back in the days when there was proper rivalry between being a Beeb man (and it was all men) or a ZX80/81/Speccy man.

I lost a good chunk of my first year of college to this:

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Either on my mates Vic-20 or C64. Can't remember which. We'd sign in at the college, then ride over the fields to his house on my Honda H-100, get some cans of cheap beer and play sensible soccer all day.

Great thread. Many good memories. There was also an adventure game played on the Apple-II that started with you negotiating for stuff. We played that loads at Laskey's in Sheffield before getting thrown out on an almost daily basis 😉

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Was too difficult for me at the time but a few years ago I coded a remake to run in Linux terminal.

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and the free bat and ball/breakout game that came on the cassette in the box with the computer. Then-

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with

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I've got SNES and Megadrive emulators on the computer now 😀

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Started with an Atari 2600. "Completed" Centipede, it basically just looped back to level 1 and slowed down again.
I had a flight simulator type have that required both joysticks, that was tricky.

Next step was a Master System 2 with built in Alex Kidd. Very late nights and that music got in my brain!

MegaDrive (Road Rash was a favourite) next followed by a Gameboy.

Bought a [s]door stop[/s] Amiga CD32.

Then on to PlayStations.

Up down left right a b c start, sonic level select cheat on megadrive if I'm not mistaken.

Obvs SNES was far superior though. SF2, super tennis , Zelda, and the true king, the one and only mario kart

BBC B
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Master System
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PC Engine
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MegaDrive
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N64
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Amiga
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Definite favourite was Phantasy Star though. Dungeon exploration enhanced by mates spinning the gamers chair wildly as you made your way, with hair mousse sprayed on you when you ran into something dangerous 🙂 Took us months to get to the end boss, where you couldn't see how many HP it had. Then the backup corrupted and we had to start all over again 🙁

My fave games in chronological order

ZX81 - Horace Goes Skiing
ZX Spectrum - Manic Miner / Jet set Willy / Atic Attack
C64 - Monty On The Run / Elite / Sabateur
Amiga 600 - Another World
SNES - Super Mario 3 / Starfox / Donkey Kong Country
Mega Drive - Kid chameleon
Saturn - Virtua Fighter
PSX - Tomb Raider / Metal Gear Solid / Tekken / Gran Turismo
PS2 - GT4 / GTA3,VC & 4 / The Warriors / Tekken
PS3 - COD5

Did anyone have a neogeo or Atari jaguar?

Did anyone have a neogeo or Atari jaguar?

Neo Geo MVS was way too expensive for me back in the day. Always wanted a Supergun homebrew system which allowed you to play Neo Geo JAMMA boards on the cheap.

RichPenny - Member
Megadrive
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C'mon that's clearly a picture from the arcade version. I can't trust anything anymore.

Yeah it was a fortune... I want to weed out the rich kids

A game gear and sonic 2 was the one I got really hooked on, but I had a NES, with teenage mutant ninja turtles and top gun, they were fun, but suspect I was a little young to properly master them (suspect my dad bought them for himself...)

ZX81 - Horace Goes Skiing

Nope, that was the Spectrum.

Cranberry and Couger have an other go on Parachute and others here,
http://pica-pic.com/

Phantasy Star was actually amazing tbh- we got right up to the very end but never quite worked out how to get to the last boss.

Completing Magicland Dizzy was a big day for young me 😆 King takes queen

OricTrek for the Oric 1. Absolute POS.

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Loved this:

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I still have my Astro Wars, sadly non-functioning. I discovered that if you upped the voltage on the mains adapter, it made the display brighter. So I made it very bright, then very, very dark...

So so many games and systems, it’s impossible to have a favourite.

Main one through my teens was a C64 so I guess that’s the one.

Games were Ace, Uridium, Paradroid, Sanxion, Gribblys day out, monty on the run, crazy comets, hyper sports, boulder dash.

Any body remember GEOS for the 64? Basically windows miles ahead of its time that served little purpose, but was cool.

At 19 I got an Amiga, then ps1 to 3. Never bothered with anything else.

Oh, forgot Yie Ar Kung Fu ( ZX / 64) ,Marble Madness, The Hobbit and Paperboy.

Anyone remember Adventure Parts 1-4 ? They were text based adventure games on the Spectrum.

Happy happy times.

@Cougar, I stand corrected. IIRC Horace Goes Skiing was the free game that was bundled with the ZX Spectrum 48k.

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Spent many happy hours playing The Hobbit on the Spectrum.

stu1972 - Member

@Cougar, I stand corrected. IIRC Horace Goes Skiing was the free game that was bundled with the ZX Spectrum 48k.

We got a collection of random other things too- Survival (which was ace), Make A Chip, and CHEQUERED FLAG MOTHER****ER

Anyone remember Underwurlde? It seemed to go on forever.
Still remember the excitement buying it from W H Smith in Burnley. 🙂

Anyone remember Underwurlde?

Oh that was STUNNING back in the day. Knights Lore & Sabrewulf too which were of the same ilk IIRC

There's MAME and those Pandora dual arcade sticks with 900 or so arcade games.

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Some rare gems in this lot!

Another long termer and a game changer for me was Tomb Raider... It was just massively engrossing, i could play it for hour after hour after hour.

UFO Enemy unknown and Terror from the Deep... again, just played and played and played. Awesome stuff.