Blimey, my first blog! Right.. this isn't going to be one of those diary type blogs where I tell you how pants my day at work was or how badly I burned my dinner. Rather, it'll be an expression of my innate nerdiness; I'll harp on whistfully about retro games, blather on about obscure kung fu films, books, comics, music, cars, booze and stuff like that.
I bought a boxed ZX Spectrum at an auction the other day (not sure why, I have two already) which got me thinking about the 8-bit gaming days of my youth, so to kick off the anorak proceedings here's a top-ten list of my favourite speccy games...
10: Chaos Absolutely brilliant fantasy strategy game - cast spells and kill wizards with dragons, bats, manticores (whatever they are) and a piece of string. Well, it was meant to be a snake but it looked like an old dressing gown cord to me...
9: R-type Top notch shooting-things game that was (and is) bloody hard. Didn't stop me wasting hours on it though.
8: Way of the Exploding Fist One of the first and best beat-em-ups. No ridiculous eight button control systems or finger bending combinations, just good, honest beatings. The 'kick in the plums' move still makes my eyes water.
7: Star Wars One of those games I seemed to keep playing even though it was far too easy to complete. 'Let's blow this thing and get out of here' indeed...
6: Skool Daze Great fun, despite the fact that I had no real clue how to complete it - I spent most of the time writing obscenities on the chalk board.
5: Rebelstar Another Julian Gollop-penned masterpiece (see Chaos). A strategy game that involved manouvring a squad of heavily armed yellow men around a warehouse...
4: Death Chase Basically riding some sort of weird bike type thing through the Forest of Dean, but bloody good fun nonetheless. Incredibly fast as well.
3: Manic Miner I played this for hours on end, despite the dreadful music and the fact that it was quite terrifyingly hard. Straying one pixel too close to some tiny hedges meant instant death. So you'd have to start again. And again. And a.. you get the idea.
2: Green Beret Along with the arcade, one of my favourite games, and I'm not even quite sure why. Perhaps one of the best games ever to revolve around killing soldiers with one of those strange kebab knives.
1: Renegade One of those games that (in my opinion) is actually better than the arcade. The 128k version had an awesome combination move that meant you could kick someone in the knackers, throw them over your shoulder onto some train tracks. Very antisocial. The icing on the cake for me though was the boss on level three - the fact that she looked exactly like my home economics teacher satisfied me no end.
