'Clunk-Click every trip'. Not the sound of Sir Jimmy Saville advising us to both close the door and put our seatbelt on rather the sound of a new game going into a Nintendo Entertainment System.

After a while all NES boxes stopped recognising that the Robbie Coltraine of a cartridge, we'd just wedged in the flip-top hatch, was actually there. Games wouldn't play. We bought a cleaning kit that consisted, essentially, of a yard brush and a barrel of alcohol. Yes, the NES is the 8-Trak of consoles. In fact I think that you could also play PhilipsV8000 carts in it. Our cleaning kit didn't solve things though so we had to hire a retired Ump-a-lumpa instead. I'd hand him a white-spirit soaked magic-mop and a chisel and he'd go to work in the grey lunchbox of doom. That kept things chugging over the christmas of 1991 but by spring he'd joined a union, we'd discovered asbestos inside the console and frankly things had turned ugly. Short story is that he had to go.

With Latimer the Ump-a-lumpa gone we had to resort to more prosaic means of starting the Austin Nintendo Maxi on cold mornings. I developed the most incredible methods of fooling the machine into accepting the British Museum Extension each time we wanted to play 'No kid, you have to kinda push the cartridge in to the left, then don't press it all the way, if it touches the bottom it won't work... that's it, easy now, easy, nearly there, easy......' **BOOOOMMMMMM**... nothing. Techniques would work and then stop working, but I dared not give-up the original methods just in case so I'd have to add a new step each time. Eventually it became quite zen; the process went something like this:

1. Remove shoes and socks
2. Reach into games cupboard
3. Close eyes and feel for the correct cart
4. Always reject the first cart out even if it was the one you wanted
5. Turn sleeve upside down and remove cart using only gravity
6. Take a sip of coffee
7. Tap the NES
8. Tap the TV
9. Align NES pads with ancient lay lines
10. Have the NES blessed by a gay priest
11. Open the flap while sneezing
12. Leave open for one hour
13. Close flap and repeat steps 6 thru 8
14. Open flap with a copy of 2000AD
15. Shoot cartridge into the slot with the Nintendo Bazooka peripheral
16. Report your car stolen
17. Press down until it clicks
18. Cut the red wire

Then, sometimes, it would work. The NES was my son's machine; he loved the Simpsons on it. This was the forgotten 'good' Simpsons game licence, the only occasion on which that show has worked in binary form. It was a dark game though, especially one level where Krusty had created a twisted circus nightmare obstacle course. Looking back I can see that level must have given the designers of Devil May Cry some evil inspiration. I could never do it and I'd dream, at work, of solutions. Luckily I didn't work with heavy machinery, or on a farm, or I'd be typing this with prosthetic hands.

But my game was Xevious. Man I loved that game, the most zoned I'd been since, well ever. This was a shooter/bomber Uridium-thru-90 degrees clone but how special it was. Even my wife would happily watch me play and encourage me onwards, fetching cups of tea and cake that she'd have to feed me while my fingers bled onto the stupid NES control pad. Those pads were so wrong, hands = round and soft, pad = angular and hard. I never did beat it. Sometimes felt that I was close, so close I could smell the 'Well Done' pay off. I could almost see, somewhere beyond the upper edge of the scrolling screen, could swear I could sense that picket-fenced bomb-free sanctuary where the mission and the world, and me, were safe. But it never came. The world was never saved and Monday morning came around again.

I get sad for those days, where 'homebrew' meant only dangerous RF connections and resoldering of bent ports. That's why I hate gaming on my PC, I have to do stuff to make things work but none of it is as fun, or as satisfying, as it was to fool a NES into playing a game, or to coax a Datacette into loading a C64 game off tape, or to clean up a PlayStation disc so nice you could eat your dinner off it and still play Metal Gear Solid.

My Ump-a-Lumpa went on to star in the Austin Powers sequel, so, y'know, alls well that ends well.

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