RETRO SPIRITS GAIDEN

 ...ARE NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM TO BE? I'm probably going to write the phrase 'pre-order' 34 times on this post, be warned! I pre-ordered my copy of the frankly awesome The Legend of Zelda-The Wind Waker . It was actually the first game I ever pre-ordered. It was previewed on a DVD cover disc given away with NGC magazine, remember those, eh? DVDs....Magazines!?! Hubba-Bubba! Sherbert fountains! Panda pops!  Great days. I knew I had to have the game the day it came out, and ordered in the pre. Anyway, I was immediately smitten, even the low resolution macro blocked DVD footage looked ace.  The baffling backlash mounted against the beautiful visuals, the early internet was enraged by this - 'they' claimed it looked like the game was for kids . Well duh. My excitement became feverish approaching launch day. I guess I'm a big god-damn kid.   My pre-order copy of the game, that I still own and cherish to this day, came with gold foil type cover, and a bonus disc co

RINGED FOR YOUR PLEASURE. The Saturn is probably my favourite console. There, i said it. cut me, i bleed Sega blue, and after many expensive back street surgeries, my kidneys have been sculpted into exact 1/6th scale replicas of the glorious 6 button Saturn joypad. Also, each of my buttocks has been botoxed into the same shape and dimensions of a model 1 console, with working CD lid - People can't keep their hands off those bad boys! Sometimes its tough to deal with the admiration as i saunter down the street, but i just have to express myself.... dear reader,   i haven't finished with this drivel yet, so skip to the pictures for your sanity. There's strong competition for my favourite console, sure. Like everyone else, i dallied with some transformative body piercing surgery to showcase my love of the SNES (lower lip replaced with a Super Famicom cart-hole flap for three years until it went that weird tanned colour that old Snes's go), and i have irreversibly replaced

1995. PLAYSTATION and I hit Southampton. It was September 1995 and Sony launched its all-conquering PlayStation in Europe. Grunge had peaked, Death metal was dead, and Britpop was popping. The general atmosphere of the time was thick with 'bloke', all mainstream media was dripping with a post-pubescent laddish-ness that referenced the worst excesses of the 1960's without the quality fashion or tunes. Back in '95, they dressed the sexism in a thin veil of irony to mitigate against criticism or immediate backlash. To be fair, this tactic pretty much worked. In 1995, Lara crofts' Low polygon T&A bore-fest was merely a year away. Tomb Raider was a media darling for two main reasons (see: T&A) with its awfully modelled and textured heroine having the right proportions and attitude for brands such as Lucozade to take advantage of. They wouldn’t do that today. Capping an odd decade off, the artistic highlight of futuristic space year 1999, was the image of a fully-

 TELLING A STORY IN A LOGO Most people love a good logo, hell, sheeple spend thousands of pounds on something just because it has a specific logo on it. From clothes to cars, to music and peppermint susans. Stick a fancy logo on it and they will come. In flocks. What, if anything, do logos tell us about the companies that use them? Frankly, i don't know and don't care - let some academic graphic design  spod dissect that nest of thorny, worm can opening, high falutin' vipers. COHERENT SENTENCE STRUCTURE BE DAMNED!   What I do know is, on 16 bit consoles, like most people, I  love  a good logo.  A fine 16 bit shoot 'em up, by masters of the art - Konami. A nice pixel art logo for a shooting game puts you in the right frame of mind for unleashing laser death. Some logos might push it further and hint at the content of the game (Castlevania's castle strewn logos spring to mind), and importantly for me, a really good logo tells you with about 84.3% accuracy, that the c

THUNDER FORCE 4 My copy of the game, sporting Japanese box art from the 16 bit era. lovely. TECHNOSOFT absolutely crushed it on the Megadrive. they first popped up with a conversion of THUNDER FORCE 2 - the first game I saw running and subsequently played on real MD hardware. It was good I suppose , buttery smooth and busy...certainly a step up on anything I'd played on my Amiga at the time, it was strong, but not a killer app. Back in the day we had an independent games retail shop in town, that up until late 1989 dealt exclusively in tapes and discs for home computers of the time. It was run by an affable chap who seemed very old and wise, but thinking back now was probably a techno-spod style standard nerd in his late 20's. Typically, you'd find him sat by the window near the shop entrance playing some sort of flight sim on a 386 PC, using some god awful graphics mode which probably made him blind by the time he was 32.  He'd obviously decided to branch out into se

  LETS TAKE A MOMENT...LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE SEGA MEGADRIVE! Sleek , glossy, powerful but curiously lightweight, this is my fully functional japanese Megadrive posing for photos like the self promoting narcissist it is. If you looked that good, you'd be the same way.   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeRggpthtyqHkhNcyTDvNLSGU_Rv39K2I

My first Blog post, lets talk about Gradius... A 'Shmup'. A 'shooter'. A 'horizontal shooter'. Does this sum up Gradius? No, no it doesn’t. Does it broadly outline the genre that Gradius (or Nemesis, depending on your taste and/or physical location on this planet we call Earth) lives within, sure – if you’re the sort of person that likes their entertainment neatly defined and ordered by general theme, you’re probably happy to hear it slots in the genre rather nicely. I never liked the term 'Shmup' however, back in the day it was always ‘shooter’, or if you were talking to your Nana, a 'Tele-game' (her words). As it clearly states, this is Gradius  That laser . A mesmeric screen wide, single pixel string of blue hot plasma death, times by five if the Vic Viper is fully optioned up, instantly cutting a path through alien space craft and environmental hazard alike, with  those  ‘plinky’ explosions, the power-up SFX loud in the mix, creating an