It was a great machine, and the best game game by far a very good asteroid clone, I cant remember the name, but it was a belter, and of course I held the top score. Mom, Dad, and sis all played the games, but none were as good as me
Eventually this was fased out in favour of a new upstart from America: The Commodore 64, and thus the fan wars started, something thats still going strong today as we all know.
Lets face it, 64k is far better than 48k, and the SID chip blew people away. Games like Elite, Griffon, Sentinel, and paradroid ruled the world, but it's family orientated games like Chuckie Egg (absolute classic) that drew in the "olds", but alone in my bedroom, it was either Elite or strip poker (digitised I know, but who cares when you're 13 and the internet was just a wet dream waiting to happen). Elite held the record for being 1. Top selling game of all time (until COD of course), and 2. the most pirated game of all time.
Time moves on though, and so did I, but instead of going for the obvious choice of the Commodore Amiga, instead I plummed for the more expensive and slightly inferior (graphically anyway) Atari ST. Still a brilliant machine, but I was always jealous of friends who had the Amiga. I missed out on Brutal's Speed Ball! I did borrow an amiga from time to time from a mate, but the occasional weekend was never long enough, and their choice of quality titles just left me wanting more. Still the ST was excellent for music creation, and thats something I got into quite heavily.
But still the Amiga modulator scene was jawdropping - using real sound samples to create music was genius, and I think that killed the ST deader than a door nail.
In between times I had to buy the Nes, Snes, Mega Drive and mega CD. All great at the time, but life (work) was starting to take over and I had to give up such childish things, and for a few years, I did.
But there was always the nagging voice in the back of my head saying that I needed something more from life other than work and games. So I headed off down to Dixons and had a look at some top of the line 486 Packard Bell PC's, and not surprisingly of course, I knew a shit load more about them than the sales staff, so I just bought the best one in the shop - Packard bell 435 elite, 2mb ram, 512kb vesa local bus VGA and 14" monitor. There was no sound card or CD Rom drive, and Dixons had no idea what they were, so I went to another local shop to buy them @ £330 for a Creative labs SB8bit and panasonic dual speed CD + £1000 for the PC.
I was in for an interesting night too, installing all this hardware with ZERO experience working with PC's was fun. But this was the start of a long and prosperous affair with PC's, hardware, software, gaming and of course windows and DOS.
Day 2 I bought an extra 2mb ram for £100, and almost unheard of amount for a computer back then 4mb! WOW. Windows 3.1 now ran in "true multitasking mode".
Anyway, games wise I started out with forumla one by Geoff Crammond, now a legendary game built on his physics engine, it rocked and looked awesome. Next up was elite frontier, Dune II, and Doom.
All absolutely brilliant, compelling and genre defining. These games led the world into new worlds, new ideas and a lot of new fans. Without these games I doubt we'd have the likes of Red Alert, StarCraft, and Battlefield.
One of the best things about PC's though was the fact that you could upgrade them, every single component could be updated and improved without having to fork out for another PC. I like that, and my old trusty PB had been upgraded as much as I could possibly take it, but the sad day came when I had to ditch the old bitch and get something newer. This time though I'd build my own and I did, I built a damned good P90 with 16mb ram, a whopping 200mb HDD and an 8mb vga card... all for command and conquer 1.
This went on for a while, upgrading, rebuilding, buying new, and so on until I hit a wall - Battlefield 2142.
Dont get me wrong, 2142 for me was incredible, the kind of time Sy spent playing BFBC2 is peanuts compared to the time I spent playing 2142 and Northern Strike. To be fair I never really got into Battlefield 2 that much, but 2142 made up for it for me. I loved it so much I even rented a server just so I could control who I play with... a 24man Panama Canal TITAN only server, and man did it fill up. By this time I was driving wagons and I had the money for all the hardware needs, and I needed it too, 2142 was a bit of a hog and I wanted something special to play it on. So I spent £1500 on top of the line hardware, and a 3 monitor setup. It's possible, but you do need SLI VGA cards with dual heads, so thats 2x nvidia GTS 7800 cards at £300 each! While the HUD stretches and loos naff, the game engine did however display a full unstreched view of the battlefield on 3 monitors, sadly though the bezels did get in the way a bit.
Unlike some people though I bought my copy from the EA store and got a download version, not a disk version.
And thats where my gaming problems start, I really loved 2142, but there were lots and lots of problems with the game, sometimes I'd re-install windows as many times as 3 times in a week just to keep the game playing. You see the game would play fine, I'd have a mammoth session lasting 16hours, go to be, get up, play again, but the damn game would NOT start, and nothing would fix the bloody thing. In the end I started to get so frustrated that I quit PC gaming altogether...
It'd be a couple of years later that I evtually found my next calling...
And one that led me to the PS3
