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GAMES OF MY YEARS: hANDHELDS - PART ONE

1/2/2016

12 Comments

 
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Do schools still do that thing on the last day of term, where the kids get to bring in toys? In fact, do kids even have toys anymore?

Nowadays, their big last day of term treat is probably being allowed to use their phones in class, so they can sit there Snapchatting one another. 

Being an old, old man, I struggle to imagine what it would've been like to own an iPhone as a kid.

​Back then, phones never left our homes, photographs were something you picked up from Boots, and if we had wanted to face-swap with someone we'd have had to use a Stanley knife.

And imagine owning a handheld thing upon which you could store hundreds of games - in full colour! With sound! And 3D graphics!

One last day of term, I remember David Dunlop bringing in a Star Trek phaser and communicator. I brought in a toy Lotus Esprit from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, which shot rockets out of the rear windscreen. Kevin Hill had Connect 4. And Jason Quirke... well, Jason Quirke had something called a Game & Watch.

​That was when everything changed.

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DA BOMB
Everyone crowded around Quirke to see his sophisticated new toy - as they tended to anyway because he was good at football, and girls seemed to like him despite - I noticed most days - his wart-y fingers.

Presumably, they all wanted some of Quirke's magic to rub off on them (though, let's face it, the only thing rubbing off on them would be his disgusting warts).

Of course, given that school establishes a narrative which adheres to no rhyme or reason, Quirke's warts were irrelevant.

It had been decided that he was cool, and so of course it would be him who'd bring the flash new technology into the classroom, making the rest of us look like children by comparison. Admittedly, we were children by any definition, but I think you know what I mean.

Quirke's Game & Watch was made by a company called Nintendo, and based on the cartoon Popeye. It featured the erstwhile sailor man doing his bit to clean up the oceans, by trying to catch cans of spinach and bottles of beer, thrown by his rubber-limbed girlfriend Olive... all while avoiding a large mallet wielded by his big-boned nemesis Bluto.

Also, it was a watch, for some reason. Although, technically, more of a clock, given that you would struggle to wear it on your wrist. 

​It was - as would soon become apparently - the template to which all the Game & Watch titles adhered... but I was sold. I needed one of these Japanese LCD game things, and I needed one immediately. 

TO ASIA!
Fortunately, my brother-in-law was (and still is) an airline steward, and his work would regularly take him to Asia, where such things were readily available - usually in cheapo knock-off form.

He'd come back with albums on cassette that would feature curious track listings (he picked me up a copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall, which switched to some other album entirely about halfway through), or bootleg designer clothes.

So it was that he returned from one trip with a Japanese LCD game that was no Nintendo Game & Watch, as I'd requested. I remembered it being some cheapo knock-off... until just now, when I did some digging, and discovered it was actually manufactured by Casio.

It was called Money & Bomb - and featured a security guard carrying a stack of cash to a waiting van - while avoiding the bombs of robbers. The trick was to keep the wobbly money stack balanced, while still moving forwards... and not dying.

Inevitably, it was impossible, and though the device was solar powered - futuristic! - the screen was blurry and the controls soft compared to my friends' Game & Watches. By now, even more had one of the Nintendo devices - with names like Fire, Snoopy Tennis, Donkey Kong Jr - but the one that everyone wanted was Donkey Kong. 

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DONK ON
​Donkey Kong had two screens; that was the big selling point.

Your character, Jumpman - who we later learn is called Mario - made his way from the bottom screen to the top one, in a fair representation of the iconic arcade game.

I may have been late to the Game & Watch party - but I was the first one to get Donkey Kong; a gift/reward for having my tonsils removed. As playground status symbols go, it transcended warts. In my head, it was like arriving at school in a Lotus Esprit, driven by Roger Moore.

Unfortunately, old games being old games, Donkey Kong wasn't actually very good. Or I wasn't very good at it. 

Don't get me wrong; I mean, for the time, it was a revelation. But those flickering, stuttery, graphics made the gameplay far harder than it should've been. As was the case with so many old games, the intent was there, but the available technology added to the challenge, by virtue of not being up to snuff.

This was back in the days when having your tonsils out meant staying in hospital for a week (nowadays you can get them removed at most newsagents). I was the only kid in an adult ward, and I became friends with the man in the bed next to me (these being the days where that still seemed somehow acceptable). I found Donkey Kong so difficult, that he ended up playing it more than I did that week.

I may have made it all the way to the top maybe once... perhaps twice. It became an exercise in patience and endurance - how much failure can a person tolerate? I discovered the answer to that question the day I threw my Donkey Kong across the living room, and cracked the screen. Inky liquid crystal oozed out. It was over.

I told my mother I'd dropped it down the stairs... but she didn't believe me. Consequently, I wouldn't own another handheld games machine for seven years, until I could afford to buy one myself.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
​THE COMPLETE GAMES OF MY YEARS
12 Comments
Meeeeeehhhhhhh
1/2/2016 01:45:40 pm

They still do the bring toys in, my kid took a hot wheels in, they also did a teddy's picknic he took a cuddly dog. I love handheld they are still my fave, as a kid my brother had astro wars, pacman, frogger etc grandstand games, there was rather alot but all I got was one of them binocular ones, warbirds I think it was called or something like that the case was silver and you had to shoot down the red baron and his mates, it got very repetitive very fast and you had to face bright sunlight to even see anything on tne screen so you ended up with a comedy tan like when people put ink on the lenses only in white. I got a gameboy that fell off the back of a lorry in 89 was so pleased until I realised the games never decreased in value so my mum wouldn't buy thrm, too expensive, I only had 3 games, I sold it to fund my second hand mega drive game habit. But when I got that shiny red gba sp many moons later I was like a kid at Christmas, such wonder, little snes and mega drive style games on a little folding box of joy that fitted right in my pocket. Now I own 36 handhelds I think, from atari lynx to wonderswan and gameking 2 and almost every version of every Nintendo one, 3ds, 3ds xl, new 3ds, 2ds that kind of pointless thing not each one that features a different game tie in, but each redesign, I still love them they are still magical, would not feel the same to me if I didn't have cartridges or discs to shove in em like a proper console, guess I'm old fashioned in that respect as everything is downloads and emulators today but they just dont grab me.

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Mr Biffo
1/2/2016 01:54:39 pm

Man alive, Meeeeeehhhhhhh...! Paragraphs, love! But anyway - yes. I did always want a Lynx, but it was just too far outside my price bracket at the time. I think it was for the best I never got one...

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Meeeehhhh
1/2/2016 01:57:18 pm

Sorry I was in mobile facebook mode. Dont hit that button unless you want to post.

Jensen 5
1/2/2016 03:44:06 pm

I had a lynx. In hindsight it was terrible, but at the time the idea of playing full colour games while my mum was watching brookside was somehow magical.

I don't think I ever unplugged it from the mains, as it could eat a pack of batteries in about an hour.

Col. Asdasd
2/2/2016 09:09:09 am

The binocular games were a real curio, weren't they? I had one, it was about racing, or shooting alien spaceships, possibly both? I remember it being more impressive than most LCDs hand-helds, possibly because of the 3D effect.

There's a tenuous connection to be made to the Occulus Rift I'm sure. Well, not on here maybe. But you could get away with it in the Guardian!

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Chris
1/2/2016 05:34:47 pm

I had a Zelda Game & Watch (I never used it as a watch), which I managed to clock twice. Actually it remains one of the few games I've been any good at.

I say "had", I still have it! It survived a coke drenching on holiday in a caravan in Derbyshire, where I also remember buying a padlock for some inexplicable reason (I still have the padlock too, it took many years to actually find a use for it)

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Mr Biffo
1/2/2016 05:37:00 pm

Show off.

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Kelvin Green link
1/2/2016 08:33:51 pm

I brought in <i>HeroQuest</i> and the feral, rabid beasts stole or broke half the pieces.

I had the Game & Watch that featured Mario and Luigi working in a bottle factory. it was terrible and smelled strange, sort of like how you'd imagine a robot being sick would smell.

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Col. Asdasd
2/2/2016 09:01:33 am

I had a bunch of these as a kid. Sonic, Sonic 2, Daffy Duck... I'm not sure why, even the relatively good ones weren't really up to much were they? God knows why I kept pestering my parents to buy me more.

I'm still haunted by the dirge-like quality of the music - surely these hand-helds are the reason why, to this day, pop culture associates gaming with the accompaniment of squeaky, a-melodic beeps. I'm not old enough to remember the firsts generations of systems, but surely this was the only point in the medium's history (the horrors of the PC speaker aside) where it was even close to an accurate portrayal?

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LeighDappa
2/2/2016 10:49:02 pm

I absolutely love Handheld Gaming and prefer it to Home Console Gaming.
Unfortunately, I got my first Handheld which was a GameBoy Classic in Early 1998. It can with a "36-in-1" Cartridge which had 'Batman' and 'RoboCop' on the sticker label but not on the Cartridge.
Three years later, I got my own 'GBC' and then a 'GBA'.
I currently have a 'GBA Micro' and a 'Dingoo: A330' so I can play the old 8-and16-Bit Games.

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Mr Biffo
4/2/2016 02:53:00 pm

Yeah, there's something about handhelds, isn't there? I probably play more stuff on my phone than anything else, just because it's convenient.

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Leigh
5/2/2016 09:35:19 pm

I had Donkey Kong. It wasn't that hard, mans. It can't have been, because my mother got so addicted to it that one day I left her playing it when I went to school and she was still on it when I got home. I had to stage an intervention. She's never played another game since.

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