Something happened in the mid to late nineties. I remember it quite vividly, though I remained unaware of it’s greater significance until a few days ago. I think it was the tail end of 1997, maybe the beginning of 1998 - either way it doesn’t really matter.
I guess the story kind of started about a year before then, when I visited the local(ish) Game store (yeah, we still had one of them then) with a school friend and saw for the first time an N64. It had Mario 64 running and I had a quick play, running around the castle, before being told to come off it by the miserable store assistant. I recall being unimpressed, I don’t know why, but it felt a bit empty. The controller felt unwieldy and the game lacked something, my opinion of course, and to be fair I hadn’t “really” played it, just mucked around for about 2 minutes. But yeah, it left me feeling a bit cold.
At this time my home console was a Sega Megadrive, most of my mates had Playstations, one had a Saturn (jammy git!) and I think the rest played most of their games on PC’s. They would all tell me tales in the morning via school registration about their new consoles, how good the games looked, in particular how amazing 3D games were. I was still loving my Megadrive to be honest, it had rich and colourful graphics and worlds brimming with character. Couldn’t ask for more as far as my ideal games went, but for some reason I started to feel that I was missing out. Looking back it was probably just the social aspect, talking about the bits of shared experience of the new games that you and your friends were completing at the same time. What you had done to get past the big bad ass boss on Alien Trilogy or how you were tripping out to the CD quality tunes on Wipeout, whilst you nailed around the track in record time barely touching the air brakes.
No-one really wanted to know that I’d finally nobbled that cheating git boss on Blades of Vengeance or that I’d grabbed the Stanley Cup on NHL 95. I started a bit of a downward spiral with games that I’ve only really come to appreciate recently.
I’d do my slave labour paper round, £1.14 a day, collect my 8 quid and head off into Hanley, more specifically “Fantasy World” to peruse the second hand Megadrive section and trade in my games for credit against them. I’d normally take a bag full, and come home with 1 or 2 “newer” games. It was pretty stupid, but something that I carried on right through later years… anyways. I got burned quite a few times, sometimes you’d find a right gem (Story of Thor!) other times I’d get suckered in by the screenshots on the back of the box, or even worse the box art itself (Rise of the Robots, Batman Forever). Yet, I persisted, I think I was looking for something totally amazing, so that I could try and get my friends back interested in my dated machine, come on, come over for a game of co-op on Alien Storm eh!
So yeah I was still loving most of the games I had, and just wanted Sega to keep putting stuff out for MY machine. Forget 3D it’s cack I’d say, mainly because I was immature and it was something I didn’t have. So I’d go all defensive and make out it was rubbish anyway.
A year later, I’m at my best mates and he’s had an N64 for his birthday. Still, I’m a bit unimpressed. Quite enjoyed playing Killer Instinct, but wasn’t so keen on the pad still, preferred his brothers chunky clear controller. But overall, can’t remember being overly enthusiastic for the games, Extreme G and something else (made a good impression, must have been amazing). Then he got Goldeneye, it looked pretty good.
For some reason I refused to play it for literally months, I would sit around looking miserable whilst thinking about Micro Machines Turbo Tournament or Red Zone. I can’t use that awful controller… I was kind of half watching, watching my BEST mate and another mate forge a tight friendship whilst offing each other with remote mines in the Basement of some random building. So yeah, a bit of jealousy crept in. I started to view games as a social tool, something to do with people to have common ground and shared experiences.
I stopped watching after spending enough time studying my mates playing, working out strategies and understanding all the properties of the different guns, the layout of the maps - the cheating characters, god DAMN Oddjob. Someones running up the middle of Temple, oh right, keep shutting the door on them break out the AR33 from the other side. Mop them up whilst they are fumbling around trying to open it. Proxim mines? Ah yes, stick them behind the ammo crates, or on the notice board in Facility. I got good, quickly. I even began to like the controller (still do)! Yeah, 2 v 2, license to kill, power weapons, NO ODDJOBS. How crazy, me and my mate we were the dream team or something, everyone thought I was amazing at the game. That was high school.
2000 June/July I forget, I just remember legging it after the postman who hadn’t even bothered to knock on when the post didn’t fit through our door. I wanted my Perfect Dark, my first pre-ordered game. Turoks had come and gone, but this was the one I’d been waiting for. It was amazing, I thought, we played it all summer, and I mean all summer. 10am until 10pm, shit we forgot to have dinner. I feel sick, nah, it’s just the combat boosts. God knows how many times we played humans v simulants, 4 falcon scopes 2 combat boosts… it was pretty damned good. Summer passed by, time slipped away.
My other mate bought a big ugly breeze block. It had Halo on it, this was also amazing. It was our social games n’ drinks thing for a fair while. All nighters, stinky sweat smelling rooms, awful really. Somehow I held off buying an Xbox, and I got a Gamecube when I was at uni. F-zero GX was mint. Hook it up to the tiny TV in the communal kitchen and gather round, jump up and down all screaming at Black Bull, or Fire Stingray or who ever. Again it was somehow social. This continued when I quit uni, and caved, buying an Xbox for Halo 2 (I pretend to myself even now, that it was for Fable). Xbox Live, it’s the way forward. Now I could play with mates online all the time. What a god damn time sink though, how many days have I existed inside Bungie’s exquisitely designed matchmaking? I don’t want to know.
Then there was the 360, it’s still here. Modern Warfare, Call of Duty again loads of time, a bit of Gears of War and more Halo’s. More recently Battlefield. But you know what I’ve realised? I miss my Megadrive.
I didn’t even realise it, I’d been playing stuff that in all fairness I’m not even really keen on. Just for the online, just for the good times. Connection, with people. Is that bad? Well that’s it, now I know, and from now on I’m going to just play what I enjoy.
Now if only someone would knock on and ask for a game of EA hockey, team-mates Canada, Playoff Best of 7, shall we see if we can get any further taking in turns on Zool, or you know, play a bit of co-op on the Lost World. Yeah okay, let’s fire up the old Megadrive one more time!
ps. I don’t know what that all was, it just IS. OH and excuse the terrible writing/punctuation.
Resident Evil Zero (Disc 1)
more scans/pictures to follow…
I’m thinking of selling my Gamecube Resident Evil’s.
I’ve got Resident Evil Zero, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, Resident Evil Code: Veronica X and Resident Evil 4. All owned from new and in immaculate condition.
All open to reasonable offers, I will be ebaying these if I don’t manage to sell them by other means first. @mattyr64 on twitter or via email mattyr64 at gmail dot com
one severely slimmed down collection (not including my c64/spectrum stuff yet)
stuff: yellow original, micro, metroid 2, astro boy + tetris not for sale.
all of the rest open to offers and will be going on ebay/gumtree soon.
Richard Burns Rally (PC)
Publisher: SCi games
Developer: Warthog
Following my previous post, I got this beast for pc, and it’s proper good. 1680x1050 resolution, maxed graphics, full speed and awesome frame rate. Handling is excellent with a 360 controller or wheel, and no faffing around, the controllers were auto-detected and a doddle to setup. Apparently, they don’t quite make them like they used to!
Headed over to http://forum.rallyesim.fr/index.php and got the crazy French dudes amazing updates that add in multiplayer championship racing, loads of tracks, and pretty much EVERY rally car since the games original release. Love it.
What are you waiting for? The game is £3.95 on amazon.co.uk, brand new with free delivery and it’ll run on ancient rigs…
Link to purchase: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Burns-Rally-PC-Gamer/dp/B000C97156/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334259389&sr=8-1
And here’s a comprehensive tutorial that I found, on setting up all the add-on mods at ralleysim.fr…
managed to find a mint condition copy of this amazing game for £2.99, yes that’s less than 3 quid, totally ridiculous - considering it’s far superior to most current gen games! i saw TOCA 3 whilst i was there for the same price, may need to purchase that too.
How to (or how I) setup a shared internet connection between a mac and a c64!
I have an iMac that connects wireless to a bthomehub router, and I wanted to get my c64 online using the built in ethernet port on my iMac.
I connected a crossover cable between my mac to my c64 with a 1541u, but I assume the same settings would work for any other RR-net devices.
I then went into system preferences>network (on my mac), clicked on ‘ethernet’ on the left hand panel and set Configure IPv4 to ‘manually’.
I then opened up network utility, found in applications>utilities in finder. I selected airport from the dropdown menu and made a note of the IP address. In my case it was 192.168.1.73
This is the IP that the mac is using as assigned by the router, I decided to use free addresses in the 192.168.2.xx range for my c64.
Back in network settings underneath Configure IPv4: manually, I entered 192.168.2.1 as the IP address (the rest is left blank). Click apply at the bottom and exit network preferences.
Next go into system preferences>sharing. Click where it says ‘internet sharing’, choose share your connection from: airport in the dropdown menu and to computers using: ethernet. Exit preferences, you are done here.
Basically your mac will now be acting like a router/gateway for you c64 connection.
I then went on to setup the c64 apps with the following settings:
IP Address: 192.168.2.2 (this is next available IP as 192.168.2.1 is already taken by your mac acting as the gateway)
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway IP: 192.168.2.1 (see above, this is what you configured on your mac)
DNS IP: 192.168.2.1 (same as above, not sure what this is, but it works!)
That’s it, you are done, so put down your iDevices and get tweeting on your c64!
The twitter client I can be seen using in the picture is breadbox64 and can be found here, this version needs to be setup with an ipconfig file using the above settings. It is also available as part of contiki (this is the one I’m using!), contiki can be effortlessly setup and downloaded to use your network settings on this website!
