There was an advert on television this evening for the one of latest computer games. It was a science fiction extravaganza with spaceship battles, futuristic soldiers battling giant monsters, alien landscapes and truly incredibly realistic looking action.
And I had so little interest in it that I can't even remember what it was called. Similarly I can't remember the name of the one that about a year or so made the front pages of some of our more easily outraged newspapers. In that one there were terrorist attacks on all sorts of locations, blood and murders galore and the opportunity to play as one of the terrorists. All this was rendered in almost cinematic glory. And frankly I couldn't care less.
Now if we were talking about Space Invaders it would be different. There was a game. Unidentifiably shaped little blobs of coloured pixels marched in juddering lines across the screen dropping "bombs" that were single pixels. Your defence was a little triangular "missile launcher" that you moved left and right and used to fire at the blobby things. You could hide behind the gradually disintegrating shields and every now and then shoot at the little flying saucer that whizzed across the top. Personally I used to play it as "Suicide Invaders" where my objective was to shoot away the shields and surrender. But that was probably just me.
They had them on what were then state of the art computers like the ZX81, they had them on machines in pubs but best of all they had special table top versions that you could put your beer glass on and sit down and play. How anybody can prefer all these super-duper modern games is just beyond me.
Of course, there was also "Asteroids" where the white outlines of unfeasibly geometric "asteroids" flew towards your tiny ship that you could rotate or fly around and blow them up. Of course that just gave you lots of smaller, faster moving outlines that you had to blow up and then blow up again to finally destroy them.
Simple, utter rubbish and so much better than anything they play today.
And don't get me started on "pong"!
2 comments:
How I remember playing the "Pong Game". Spending every day with students aged between nine and thirty-three makes me indeed wonder much about what time and life has become. Guess that there's stil much work ahead ! Please have a wonderful Tuesday.
I remember how much fun I thought Pong was and how much fun I thought Asteroids and Space Invaders were.
Then again, at the time, if you wanted to print pictures from your computer you did it with rows of characters that looked a bit like what they were meant to represent if viewed from a disatnce with a squint.
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