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What was the first game you ever played?

This is probably the most frequently asked question I get on Twitter. Yet when I answer, I’m often met with blank faces, as I am actually old enough to have experienced a system that many haven’t…The ZX Spectrum.

This beast had 16 kB of RAM, an image resolution of 256×192, and sound was output through a beeper on the machine itself which was capable of producing one channel with 10 octaves. I don’t know how you have survived this long without one either!

On rainy days when me and my brother did nothing but argue, my Mum would load up Derby Day and once we had waited the 45 minutes for it to load, we would be occupied for hours betting on horse races.  Yes…you read that right…this is a betting game. I don’t know why I’m not addicted to gambling now, or why we even found it so fun to while away hours randomly splashing cash and hurting our eyeballs watching little horses blip along the screen but we did.

My aunt got this running on a emulator on Boxing Day last year and I still love this game and I’ve no idea why, maybe because it’s something different to anything else I do, or perhaps it’s the wit of the race organiser and the competitive element. It doesn’t stand the test of time like a Mario or Sonic game may, but I still play Derby Day to this day. I couldn’t find any footage on YouTube to share, so I may have to figure out a way of uploading some myself, in the meantime…

What was the first computer game you ever played? Share your experiences in the comments section for us all to enjoy

What is your Favourite Childhood/Retro Game?

This is a tough one…but I had to pick an interesting one to kick off a new blog/vlog series right? If you are a Youtuber post a video response, bloggers erm…blog and general internet people,  please comment below. I hope this helps me and yourselves remember some awesome but long forgotten gems, and to discover some older, but still excellent, new games to play.

Without further ado…Mine is Alex Kidd in Miracle World. I still to this day have not completed it, and it still to this day has the best boss battles of any game. I recorded myself playing the first few stages for your viewing pleasure.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World

PS. Games are definitely getting easier don’t ya think?

Occasionally I get requests to blog about specific topics…This is one such post and comes from a musical man by the name of Total Fidget, click his name to listen to his songs. So here for your perusal are my top ten game worlds, the virtual places I most want to spend time in.

10. Alex Kidd’s Miracle World – Where else do you get to motorbike through frog ponds and helicopter through jungles?

9. Simon the Sorceror – I actually wish a lot of the locations in this world existed, quaint villages and scenes with lots of character.

8. Animal Crossing’s Wild World – This is somewhere I’d like to go on holiday, a little fishing, bug catching and visiting friends are the order of the day.

7. Final Fantasy 7 – Cosmo Canyon especially, I do have a habit of thinking this game is overated, but the world and variety of locations definitely isn’t. Check out the observatory it’s amazing!

6. Folklore – This game does something very clever in presenting a world which is both whimsical and eerie at the same time. Colourful yet dark.

5. Majin’s Forsaken Kingdom – Like Prince of Persia but better, absolutely beautiful. I think this game gets overlooked “world wise” in favour of Uncharted but it really shouldn’t do.

4. Red Dead Redemption’s America/Mexico – One of the few games in which being a male character didn’t actually bother me, as between missions, I got lost in the exploration of the environment.

3. Monkey Island – A fun and more colourful Simon the Sorceror world if you will, but better for me as I love to be by the sea!

2. Enslaved’s “West” – I’m already tired of people marvelling over the “nature overgrown city” theme of Crysis 3. Enslaved done it years earlier. I love this world for how small it makes me feel whilst exploring it.

1. Fallout 3 -  The wasteland in all it’s vast and varied goodness. At first glance it seems a grey and green blur but there is so, so much to explore here. 100 hours in and I still have more places to visit for the first time.

I would love to hear your favourite worlds, so leave a comment below, that’s also the place to request future topics for blog posts.