16-Bit Boy: Reboot & Rewind
The noughties have been all about reboots. Star Trek, Halloween, Dr. Who and even bloody Reginald Perrin have all been dragged from their graves, dusted off and sold to a new audience keen for entertainment. There’s been so much rebooting over the last few years that upon a Sunday afternoon visit to your granny you half expect to find her riding a skateboard and detailing the finer points of the UK grime scene. Nightmarish images aside, there have also been plenty of gaming reboots, with Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter all on the receiving end of new-fangled updates. Yet for every classic title that has been successfully rejigged for the skunk-addled, happy-slapping, metro-sexual youth of today, there are plenty of acutely naff yet brilliant games that killed many an hour of my soul-crushingly banal and boring childhood that have fallen by the wayside.
It’s true that a game like Family Feud on the SNES was so awful that given a choice between playing it again and taking a head-first nosedive down a steep flight of stairs, a la Father Karras in The Exorcist, you’d have to be clinically insane not to choose the latter. But much like a tattered, dog-eared copy of Razzle that you spent the majority of your adolescence furiously wanking over, there is something strangely comforting and exciting about revisiting characters and scenarios that at one point so dominated your life.
Treasure Island Dizzy: worthy of ressurrection?
Kudos to the chaps at Rising Star Games for trying to resurrect the strange alchemy of New Zealand Story on the Commodore 64, with its narrative of a brave, problem-solving Kiwi set to a strangely melancholic soundtrack evocative of some indefinable future heartbreak. But what of Dizzy, the yolky protagonist of Treasure Island Dizzy and a host of other titles? Surely society isn’t so advanced as to not appreciate an adventurous egg adrift in some kind of experiential, logic based nightmare. The same can be said of Dynamite Dan, whose commitment to blowing stuff up needs no post-modern spin.
In a perverse sense it would be hard to beat another Super Mario Bros 2, purely for the unnerving sense of alienation its foreign graphics and gameplay instilled in me upon playing it for the first time. These days Mario is an air-brushed commodity ranked alongside Mickey Mouse or Will Smith, but Super Mario Bros 2 offered an experience comparable to a robot’s hallucinations as they come down from a four day magic mushroom binge. Strange, utterly bizarre and not just a little bit creepy.
This yearning for the halcyon days of staggeringly crap games like Emlyn Hughes International Soccer, Duck Shoot and Samantha Fox Strip Poker is perhaps indicative of a desire to somehow tap back into the youthful, wide-eyed enthusiasm and expectations that gaming offered way back in the early 1990s. But, sadly, the endless summer days of watching Andy Crane on Bad Influence and listening contentedly to Dominic Diamond’s lilting Scottish brogue on Games Master are long gone, leaving only the faded outline of broken dreams, sexual failure and the yawning chasm of death in their stead.
New Zealand Story and Super Maro Bros 2: two of my favourite old games… loved them both back in the day (not in the day they came out of course, I’m not that crusty).
The Games Master reference was about to lead me to say “we need another Games Master.” But I’m not sure we do. Basically: they did what everyone’s doing now, only better. It’d serve the purpose of showing everyone how rubbish they are at covering games, but very little more.
I /would/ like to see another Bits. I think there’s a lot to be said for DISCUSSING games. Total pub-talk – speak first, think later material – but thoroughly interesting. It’s what I hope the podcasts are like. Or what they’d be like with an offbeat feminist edge.
We can be the new ‘Bits’, lewis. Just with man-tits and beards.
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super mario 2 is a real fav, its so odd and i’m pretty sure its the only mario game in which bowzer isn’t the big baddy at the end.
i used to love games master and bad influence but never really watched bits, i think the podcast format probably works better because you’re not under any of the constraints that the televisual format enforces.
dexter fletcher actually came to my school at the height of his games master fame but i was always a dominic diamond man!
This is not quite the era you are reminiscing over, but it is still worth a look. Sing along now…”Hey Hey 16K…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCdNrRNS4g
I’d like to announce that I was on an episode of Bad Influence and Andy Crane was a lovely man. Carry on…
No way! I used to love Bad influence.
I was watching some episodes on youtube the other day and its really funny because all the games and technology is so quaint by todays standards.
There’s a classic moment where Andy Crane is looking at this ‘new’ virtual reality thing that could help disabled people throw a virtual ball around a empty virtual room :/ but anyway the best bit is where we first see this virtual world and Andy declares it to be just like real life when its just some blue and grey polygons. I’ll try and find it.
This one is funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ2-Fe3DnE8&feature=related
Ahaha! Yeah if I had thrown away all my copied Amiga games back then I’d have had none left to play!
I remember watching Bad Influence now. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was until watching on Youtube.
Sorry about this but here’s another classic moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDlbgZ5s8iM&feature=related
Fast forward to 04:34 for a slightly awkward interview.
2:55 on that last link – I’d *love* to think that’s Graham.
Sadly, that wasn’t me.
Try this one; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_W0lHlFsa4
Holy shit, are you Curtains Boy on the far left at the start?
That is amazing. This must be Twittered right now.
No!
I’m the “Graham’s just crashed the Tom Cat” person. You get a great view of the back of my head, but I’m in it again proper a bit later on…
At about 4:00 in when Violets playing Keyboards, just behind her, little kid, light blue jumper – that is a young master Jones circa 1994.
That’s mad, that kid with the curtains looks just like you.
thats amazing!
i’m genuinely impressed.
bad influence was defo one of my fav programmes as a kid, alongside a weird comedy/drama called spatz (i think!) about people who worked in a burger bar. and ofcourse pugwalls summer.
i also remember patrick moore on gamesmaster used to be really insulting to the kids when they were asking him for advice or cheats!
Haha! I remember Spatz! and Pugwall!.
(To some really shit rock music) “Nobodies gonna tell me what to do! No.Not.Me!
ah pugwall, amazing. especially the palpable look of embarrassment on his face as he blasts out that bitchin’ guitar solo!
if i remember correctly he also used to break the fourth wall and address the audience with witty asides, often about his meddlesome sister ‘marmaloid’
Ahh the shite we used to watch, the good old days where summer lasted for months rather than a couple of days.
Bet no one remembers ‘Betty’s Bunch’ though, Sunday morning after ‘The California raisins’ cartoon?
bettys bunch was great, or should i say ‘bonza’!
why did australia/new zealand pump out such great kids tv in the 80s/early 90s?
‘the shite we used to watch’ is a great programme idea for one of those ropey digital channels. stuart marconie has already signed up to dissect what made ‘around the twist’ such a family favourite.