Over the top then lads.
By PaulEMoz

Like walking in the rain and the snow when there’s no place to go and you’re feeling like a part of you is dying. OK, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but we all love games, and there have doubtless been times in everybody’s lives when we wanted to play something that was just out of reach of our means. Those are the times when we have to go above and beyond the call of duty, and sometimes beyond the bounds of good taste and decency, just for a further life-enhancing shot of gaming goodness.

Take russ, for example:

"I forced my mate to buy OutRun on the Speccy. See, I still think it was great but I can just remember his tear-filled eyes looking at the telly, then back at me, then at the telly in disbelief.

Ungrateful little shit."

OutRun on the Spectrum. Enough to bring a tear to anyone’s eye.

Some people just don’t know what’s good for them. PaulEMoz’s brother is another example:

“I remember my brother was too young to go to Newcastle by himself to spend his birthday money, so as I was going I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to get him. He specifically asked for The Eidolon for the C64, but when I got to the shop, I really wanted Bounder. So I phoned him, told him The Eidolon was sold out, and that he should get Bounder instead. He didn't want to, but I insisted. Good game, Bounder.“

And people wonder why brothers fight? Speaking of which, here’s russ again:

“Doing a joint purchase of a SNES with my brother knowing that it would probably just be mine one day because he had epilepsy was pretty low.”

Did you know, Nintendo introduced this purely so russ could
have his own games console?

All’s fair in love and gaming. But siblings aren’t the only ones to bear the brunt of our gaming lust. Other family members are made to suffer too. Like moobaa’s dad:

“On the proviso that Dad and I would share the computer, we went halves on a C64. He brought it home after a trip to the city in 1983.

In 2003, over 20 years later, I bought him a Mini ITX machine as compensation.”

Ah, but can you play Paradroid on that, though?

Dads are great, aren’t they? JC’s dad risked jail for his kid, and probably doesn’t know it to this day:

“When my old man used to take us to Makro I used to take Atari ST discs out of the packaging and then hide them in my socks whilst pretending to try on some item of clothing in the changing rooms. Chav!”

It’s probably a fair guess that JC has Burberry wallpaper on his PC, then.

The Lime Street gang eagerly awaited JC, and the copy of Dungeon Master
hidden down his sock.

One of the great things about gaming is that it can be tailored to suit any lifestyle. For instance, the single player will never get bored. Take Dio for example:

“In my younger and more carefree days I spent many hours stripping the protection off games I didn't have original disks for. Then again, I probably spent longer stripping the protection off games I did have original disks for, despite the fact that I hardly ever copied them for anyone. Half the time it was more fun than playing the games. Guess I just needed to get out more.”

Or maybe you should have just bought better games, Dio. rowan’s tale epitomises single life as a gamer:

“It's not really worth documenting in detail but the amount of haxxoring config.sys and autoexec.bat to get different memory configurations for Frontier, Tie Fighter etc. in the days of DOS probably beats anything hands down for effort expended.”

Including any effort expended in getting a girlfriend at that time, no doubt.

But there are also those of us that are lucky enough to have a better half in our lives. Unfortunately, when it comes to games, sometimes they just don’t get it, as No Name found out:

“I wanted to buy Kati a NeoGeo Pocket, a Wonderswan and a ton of games for Christmas, but she insisted on a pair of boots.

You just can't please some people.”

OK, so, you can’t wear it. But what sane person would choose a pair of boots over this?

Women. You’d think she’d realise that boots only last until they get a hole in them, whereas a Wonderswan is for life. Now, Bog is astute enough to know that women, like games consoles, come and go, but the games themselves will always be there.

“I took up 3D animation as a career so I'd always have an excuse to have a top-notch gaming rig at the expense of everything else.

Even sex.

Even food.”

That’s a bit extreme. Everyone knows that you can’t have a proper gaming session without a Pot Noodle. Dio made sure he’d never go hungry whilst gaming, and nor would the people providing him with the games:

“When I was a sound engineer, I added the guys installing the Daytona machine at the Student's Union to the back of our extremely long “building-closed-to-all-but-staff-and-installers-for-gig-setup” pizza list. They left us two hours free play - not bad for two £3 pizzas.”

Mmm, tasty. But not as tasty as a two-hour Daytona session.

Six quid for two hours’ play? You’d have to say that was a fair trade.

Given the right situation, games can have universal appeal. They can bring families together, united in the joy of shared experiences. Or maybe not, as russ found out…

“My dad bought me my Amiga as part of a deal where I'd help him out producing titles for his wedding video business. I couldn't for the life of me work out how to get text to scroll smoothly in any of the software we had and I sensed his disappointment in me. The fact that I managed to master high speed vertical scrolling in Kick Off was of no interest to him and another bonding opportunity was lost forever.

This still causes me little moments of discomfort.”

Ah well. At least we’ve got our friends to share good gaming times with. Or to help us in our never-ending quest for more games. Rod_S has a good friend indeed:

“When Virtua Racing came out on the Megadrive it was expensive, so I forged ID with one of my mates and we "hired" it from the local video shop, along with Mortal Kombat II. I've still got the VR cart.”

Look at that beauty. Well worth risking a criminal record for.

Well, that’s the better part of that deal. Of course, sometimes friends can be friends without there being any ulterior motives, and you’re just happy to share good times. When those friends can afford better games rigs than you can yourself, is it wrong to spend all your time camped out in their houses? No it isn’t. But just getting there can sometimes be videogame-esque in itself, as PaulEMoz once found out:

“When my mate Reedy got himself an Amiga, I found myself to be a regular fixture at his house. He’d invite me down more or less every night, and I’d go down there after Neighbours, and we’d play Populous and Starray and Silkworm and Rocket Ranger and Sword of bloody Sodan, and many, many more. Great fun.

My journey there was exactly the same every day. I’d leave my house, cut across the old folks’ lawns across the street and then make my way to Reedy’s house. It was pretty uneventful, until the time I was running across one lawn as usual, in the dark, only to find they’d strung up a washing line that day. Explaining the odd-looking red line across my forehead was the highlight of that evening, and my route to gaming goodness changed from that point on.”

Some might say that served him right. He should have known to somersault across that lawn.

The only known way to avoid old ladies’ washing lines. Incidentally, this
is the actual model used for the animation in ‘Monty on the Run’.

‘Friends’ can also be the subject of such gaming tales though. You know, in that “My ‘friend’ has genital warts and wants to know what he can do about it” way. Take cyric100’s ‘friend’, for instance:

“My mate (no, really!) decided that he wanted a new game, so wanted to take back and exchange a game he'd recently bought and got bored of. However, they would only take it back if it didn't work, so he and several other mates spent time putting all sorts of crap into the disk with the intention of it not working any more.

This was fine until he tried it in his ST, whereupon the drive immediately went 'AwwwwrrrrG!' and died. So he had to end up getting his parents to get him a new drive just to play the games he already had...”

That’s sickening. It sounds as though he didn’t even get to exchange that boring game! No boring games in koworld’s mate’s house, though:

“Someone I know agreed to marry his East European housemate so that she could legally stay in the UK with her boyfriend (who was clever enough to refuse the marriage himself).

My mate's charge for his vows? A SNES and every new release he wanted for a year.

He'd be downstairs happily smashing in combos on Street Fighter II in perfect time with the sounds of his missus shagging in the room above.”

A Sonic Boom indeed!

“Ha-aahhhhh-Do-oohhhhhh-KENNNNNNNNNNNNN!”

But going back to the topic of exchanging games, we’ve all tried that. Putting a ‘click’ in the tape, recording over the beginning of a game so that it wouldn’t work, or simply saying it was a gift and somebody else had already bought us that game; everybody’s tried to get two-games-for-the-price-of-one at some time. Self-proclaimed Scouser matt certainly has, as he got an early start down the inevitable road to wrongdoing:

“I've returned games to shops entirely different to the ones I've bought them from just to get an exchange. Cheeky Scouser!”

He said it!

Meanwhile, toxibunny went for the old sticker-swap ploy:

“I swapped the price-tags in the Woolies bargain-bin... 99p for They Sold a Million double-tape box instead of a fiver. That'll be on my list of sins when I die - it was for the Amstrad.”

Well there’s the real sin; he owned an Amstrad. Are you sure that wasn’t They Stole A Million, though?

“They Sold A Million? That’ll be 99p. Lottery ticket with that?”
“No thanks, I’d better quit while my luck’s still in.”

‘Swapsies’ would seem to be quite commonplace. What better way to get new games than to swap something you don’t play any more? How about swapping something that doesn’t belong to you in the first place? PaulEMoz’s brother exacts his terrible revenge:

"My brother Jamie quite fancied a SNES back in the day, even though he/we already owned a Megadrive. That’s hardly greedy, we all like as much choice as possible. He was still at school though, so affording to buy an SNES was pretty much out of the question. No problem, though. He simply swapped my prized copy of Landstalker for a SNES system. The funny thing is, I played the SNES for at least a few days before I started to wonder where my favourite Megadrive game had disappeared to. It was a good couple of weeks before he admitted he hadn’t just lent it to somebody, but it was in fact gone forever."

The Megadrive classic, Landstalker.

Oddly enough, that’s what PaulEMoz shouted at his brother for swapping away his favourite game.

That’s impressively devious. More sibling fun was to be found in skip’s house:

“In 92 my brother got a NES (fucking expensive back then, about 200+ dollars) even though we got our NES fix at least once per week at my Auntie’s. Great fun was had with the Flintstones, Snake Rattle and Roll and some odd platformer (can't remember the name ) that I finished in about a week (I was stunned as I still hadn't finished SMB 1, 2 and 3).

2 years later I took said NES and games and traded it in for some cash to put towards the Atari Jaguar.

I did buy him an N64 a couple of years after. Then I had to buy another one for myself because when I moved out and got my place, he reminded me that I bought the N64 for him. Cheeky bugger.”

Brothers have got some nerve, haven’t they? Keeping something that’s rightfully theirs? How dare they?

Sometimes, you want something so badly that you’ll pay way over the odds to get it. Isn’t that right, 20th Century Boy?

“I bought a 486-33 in 1992 when they cost a fortune just to play Ultima Underworld. I don't think I've fully recovered from the expense.”

There’s gaming devotion for you. A lifetime of debt for just one RPG. You could maybe understand if it had been The Bard’s Tale. And it seems as though the 486 was a popular machine. 5th Earth was after one as well:

“It's not much, but I did I buy a rather old and crummy 486 from a garage sale for $50 just for the 5-1/4" floppy drive.”

Fifty dollars for a 486? That’s about eight quid in today’s money. A bargain and no mistake. Not that old PCs are the limit of our overspending. New tech can come at a high premium, too, as judesalmon’s bank manager will testify after hearing him ask:

“Does my trip to Japan to get a PSP count?”

Yes. Yes it does. Sometimes importing just isn’t enough.

Hello sir. PSP? That’ll be two thousand pounds in total, please.

And sometimes, we have to painfully let go of an old love in order to embrace a new one. Flabio did:

“I sold my C64 and all its games to buy a Mega CD.”

Hmmm. Probably not the greatest move, that one. matt’s was slightly more measured:

“I sold my SNES collection to fund the purchase of Playstation, and similarly my Atari ST to get a PC. What a fucked up world.”

Well, your world might be, matt, but some would argue you made the right move. morgan isn’t one of those, though:

“I too traded my SNES and a large collections of games for a PS and Wipeout. I've been collecting consoles for a few years now and when I think about the games I gave away I shed a lonely tear!”

Regrets; we all have a few. All was well that ended well for matt, though:

“I bought back a SNES a few years ago, along with a bunch of games that sort of got me back my collection.

Never play them, mind!”

See, he did the right thing all those years ago, after all.

For Dave, it was a case of mixing pleasure with pain. You can’t know one without the other.

“I got punched in the face when buying Jet Set Radio Future, except it didn't ruin the game one bit. Only delayed the purchase by another week. (He pleaded guilty BTW)”

There is justice in the world, then. Wonder what the sentence is for denying somebody gaming goodness?

“Mr. Nameless Thug, for senselessly detaining this man from gaming bliss,
I hereby sentence you to a life without games.”

Now it’s one thing to have some unknown lunatic cause you harm, but is it really worth it to knowingly put yourself at risk for a game? For swith, it was:

“I got up early to make sure I was about to receive Tempest 3000 from my old postie, but 11am came and no game.

A letter dropped through the door, not for me (who the fuck IS this James O'Malley anyway?) so I popped out to have a word with the postie. He kindly said he'd give me a lift to the depot.

Got there, and luckily with a couple of minutes to spare I collected my parcel.

Now where the hell was I? It dawned on me I was very lost. It took me 2 hours to get home but that didn’t bother me, it was a nice day. Got to the door, and realised in all the excitment I hadn't taken my keys with me (twat). So, I waited at the main door to my block of flats to wait for someone to let me in. Even then, I couldn't get into the flat, as the main door was locked.

I wasn't about to call a locksmith, and due to a bit of subletting in which I'm the sublettee, I couldn't call the housing authority to which the building belongs. In the end, I had to jump over the balcony, and walk along a miniscule window ledge and squeeze cat-like into the bathroom window!

Follow the red arrow to the games!

This is the route I took. I've never been so glad to be slight of stature! S'all good now, I'm back inside, but for a minute there I thought it was going to be a night in the park!”

Which would be a bind, because they don’t have electricity in the park, so there would have been no Tempest 3000. And surely that’s the most important factor here.

All this talk of games. Surely there’s an escape from this at work? Not if you’re ~J~ . Work was just a means to a better gaming rig:

“I used to work for a rather large company in Doncaster, and needed a DX2/66 to play Doom on. I just HAD to have one, so over the course of about 8 days, each night I'd stop behind and say I was waiting for someone to pick me up. When everyone was gone, I whipped out the screwdriver and 'removed' a perfectly good piece of hardware.

Next day, people would come to work and experience 'difficulties' with their machine. Seeing as I was the IT administrator, I'd quickly diagnose the fault, purchase a new part (for some remarkable reason they only had the best ones in stock!), keep the new part and replace the old.

Doom . Obviously worth risking the sack for.

At the end of it, I had a super-duper machine.

I also tried the same thing about 3 years ago and ended up with a lovely TI4600, 512Mb RAM, 120Gb hard drive and SB Live Platinum!”

Let’s all be friends with ~J~. Five years from now, he’ll have a PC powerful enough to access The Pentagon, and free of charge.

Speaking of friends, let’s get back to the subject of playing games with friends. Or more specifically, kids that we only befriended so that we could play their games. disciple had one such ‘friend’:

“When I was around 12-ish I used to go round to the house of a 6-year-old lad who had an MSX and Manic Miner. He wasn't particularly interested in computer games and always wanted to go out and play which I wasn't interested in doing. I was there for his MSX.

Going round allowed me entrance to his house, so what I'd do is get him to play hide and seek. I'd have him looking for me outside while I'd fuck off up to his bedroom to play Manic Miner for a good thirty or so minutes till the poor bastard got fed up of looking and came back in.

Looking back on it, was it worth the deception? Hell, yes.

Unfortunately it didn't last too long though as he eventually cottoned on to where I'd be 'hiding' every time we played hide and seek.”

What can you do? The kid was a fast learner. Maybe you could have persuaded him to play “Blockie” instead?

On the subject of convenient friends, we’ll leave the last word to Dave:

“Years ago as a youngster, I would go to my grandparent’s house about once every two weeks and sit there bored as fuck. There was the TV that got no reception, the forty-year-old couch that was impossible to get comfortable in (still going on strong, now sixty-years-plus), and the two or three little WWI trinkets that my brother and I would play with seeing as there were no toys anywhere to be seen. It was worse than church.

Then one day I was sitting outside in the backyard, staring at the grass (probably hunting for worms which would soon be split into multiple pieces just to ensure that they're still made with 8 proper hearts), and I noticed new kids playing in the backyard of the next house over. Turned out that's where their uncle lived (he moved in recently), and they visited quite frequently. It also turned out they had a NES, with a copy of Contra. Seeing as I was deprived of video games as a child, I was instantly hooked.

Who wouldn’t give their right eye for an afternoon with this?

At first things went great. Nearly every time I was at grandma and grandpas, they were there, and I was jacked into Contra. Eventually though, they grew tired of the game and didn't really want to play. They'd rather go outside and play games with younger brother and me. This was endured for a while until it become apparent that valuable Contra time was being eaten away by this monstrosity called physical activity. I would have none of it.

Somehow I convinced my grandpa to build a tree house for us up in one of his three apple trees (which never produced even a single edible apple - never knew fruit could actually be grown rotten either). It was high, in a tree (naturally), and quite possibly one of the most unsafe things in the world to stick a youngster on top of, but it was mine (I was the dominant brother; hence everything was always mine, and still is to an extent ).

Turns out Mr. “I don't like Contra any more and would rather waste my days encompassed around a bat and ball” (see Major League Baseball) liked my tree house. A shame seeing as only those who provided adequate digital-narcotics were allowed access to thy tree hut. Contra play shortly ensued.

Dave bargained from a position of strength.

But what’s this? You caught onto my little bribery trick? You went ahead and had your uncle build a tree house of your own (because you were somehow convinced that I lived next door all the time and would punish you if I ever caught you inside of it without my permission – thank you very much well timed spring break )? A shame seeing as mine’s better than yours. Yeah, that’s right, it’s better. See how much higher it is? See how the tree it’s built upon produces only the finest grade A apples? See how your tree drips sap and spits pine needles all over you all day long?

I was never denied Contra ever again.”

And nor should anyone be.

We do love our games, and as can plainly be seen, we won’t let anything stand in the way of our fix. With games and consoles getting better and more plentiful (and seemingly more expensive), you have to wonder to what lengths and extremes our kids will go. Then again, if little Johnny down the street has got Half-Life 3 and we haven’t, chances are we’ll be helping Junior to get it from him. What good are the experiences of our youth if we don’t help our kids to learn from them?

May 2005

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