One of many advantages of rising up with older cousins was the hand-me-downs that you just’d get, and the primary time I benefited from that in a gaming sense was once I was given a Commodore 64 in 1994. My cousins have been youngsters, and so they’d made the swap as much as the Mega Drive and SNES, so the trusty breadbin went to me. For essentially the most half, the video games they gave me have been precisely what you’d anticipate – a lot of sports activities stuff, TV and movie licences like Ghostbusters and Knightmare, and naturally arcade conversions like Area Harrier, Double Dragon and Paperboy. However like me, one or the opposite had a watch for foolish ideas, although this didn’t all the time work out because the presence of Bionic Granny proves.

One of many different issues I obtained a number of was Commodore Format Energy Pack tapes, and I wish to think about that my cousin noticed Sheep In Area and Assault Of The Mutant Camels on the duvet one month and determined it was an prompt buy. It was definitely a watch opener for me. I didn’t know that it was so much like The Empire Strikes Again as a child, however then I’d additionally by no means seen a Star Wars movie at that time anyway. The foolish title drew me in, and the straightforward shoot-’em-up gameplay stored me going when a number of the stuff I obtained for the pc was only a bit over my head.

I received’t fake that I used to be a Jeff Minter devotee from there on – I used to be seven, in any case – however it was my first encounter with a components that has stored me coming again to his work for many years since. Good taking pictures and a few references to ungulates, that’s all I want. I performed the free Java trial of Gridrunner++ to dying as a youngster, and hoped that Unity could be a GameCube unique I’d be recommending to all my buddies. I even broke my very own guidelines about not shopping for digital-only releases to select up Area Giraffe and TxK. So as we speak, I look again at that tape with quite a lot of fondness.