Matthew Knott

Got a thing for retro consoles? I have, it seems, although I didn't realise immediately.

I seem to suddently have a collection of "vintage" consoles, and it's great!

What does the title of this post mean? Nothing. It's just borrowing from last nights reality rubbish. What's this post about? I'll tell you what, bits in multiples of 8, specifically 8, 16 and 32.

I've basically resumed my goal of accumulating retro games consoles, successful or otherwise. It all started when I fixed my Dreamcast last week, and remembered the fun I've had at other times in my life, the feeling associated with a certain console (mainly envy, I'll get onto that), they may be old smelly boxes of circuitry and wires, but their also memories goddamnit.

The two consoles I've started my quest with are the Sega Saturn and the Super Nintendo, a flop and a hit respectively. Both have one or two things in common though, I've never owned either, but have always been a little envious of friends who have. As a child of 10, when my friends had mega drives, I owned an Atari 2600 (woody and a newer plasticy one) and later in life, I was lucky to have a Nintendo Gameboy for my 13th Bithday. When I was 15 I had a Gamegear, and that was the last console I was bought before starting work. Since working I've added a Gameboy colour, DS Lite, PSP, Gamecube, Turbografx 16, Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox 360, Wii and PS3.

I think it's because I was fairly deprived in terms of 16 bit gaming action as a child that I have this yearning to relive the games I played on other peoples systems. So, SNES and Saturn are where it starts. I could've gone for a Megadrive, their cheap enough, but it's not held much magic over the years, perhaps it's because I had closer friends with Megadrive's than the one person I barely knew who had a SNES. I remember loving the animation and game play offered in Mario and Zelda. The vibrancy I remember from the games may be a result of a poor memory or screwed up contrast and brightness settings but the gameplay was still excellent.

I chose the Sega Saturn as my other starting system because a friend at the time used to rave about its 2D capabilities, and fair play, titles like X-Men, Children of the Atom were astoundingly good, and still are. Not really being one for the button bashers I'm more looking forward to Virtua Cop and Panzer Dragoon.

Next on the list is a Lynx and a Gamegear, but we'll see how it goes.