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Plz… What kind of a question is this? I was born a gamer. From the day I fired up our Amstrad CPC464 and saw those horizontal lines draw a v e r y s l o w d r a g o n across my screen I was hooked on The Hobbit. To this day, typing the word “please” come weirdly naturally to me because the first phrase I was forced to type over and over again? ‘say to thorin “carry me please’ Yup, the Hobbit taught me lateral thinking and manners.
Some of you may remember, that particular phrase is mostly useful back by the Misty Mountains to climb through a crack. You need to do it once. Maybe twice if you get captured by elves. Why the heck I was I typing so often? Yeah, save games were all sorts of hassle in those days. You had to remember to reset the the little mileage-type counter, fast-forward all the way to a blank bit of tape, press Pause+Record, type Save, lift pause (without bumping record) and wait.
And then to load you had to go through the whole rigmarole of a) finding the right tape, which of course you labelled, right? And b) finding the right counter number, which of course you wrote down on the label, right? And then c) fast-forward to the right bit of the tape and hoping like hell you had remembered to reset the counter before saving.
As you might have gathered, I had not.
Most of the time I was eaten by a troll, until I learned (and when I say “learned”, I mean “told by my dad”) to wait for dawn. Hey, I was about 6 years old, okay? I couldn’t read the books. The rest of the time, I made it all the way to Lake Town and drowned clinging to a barrel. Or possibly got crushed between barrels. I forget; it was traumatic. Yup, The Hobbit is also on my ever-expanding list of games I have never completed.
Never mind, eh? Start as you mean to go on…
This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part of this, please email him for details.
Other takes:
Next Jen: What Made Me into a Gamer
Aim for the Head: The Gamer I Am Today
carocat.co.uk: A Trip Down Memory Lane
Yuki-Pedia: A Tale of Two Games
gunthera1_gamer: Early Gaming Experience
Extra Guy: Ah yes, I remember it well
Silvercublogger: Uncovering Lost Treasures
Master Kitty’s World: Gaming Through the Years
Gamer Unit: What was the game that made you a gamer?
Game Couch: Karateka
The Hobbit is one of the first games I remember and I also have never finished it. I sat down with a BBC emulator this year and decided that now I was 25 years older I should easily be able to knock it on the head.
I didn’t even get far enough to be crushed between barrels.
I still reckon it’s great, but in a ‘in my day we didn’t have the things you fancy kids have today’ kind of way…
I never played The Hobbit, but I’m sure it would have gone in my stack of uncompleted games as well. And that’s one hell of a save scheme. If you dropped the prism, would you have to recalibrate the flashlight or could you go ahead and sprinkle salt on the part of the game you wanted to get back to?
I was always amazed at the images artists managed to make given the limited number of colors and pixels.
@Billy We’ll defeat it some day! Now that I have an emulator, I’m seriously thinking about it, but The Sims 3 just seems so much easier.
@Terry No, but if you turned widdershins three times and sang a song about gold then sometimes, sometimes the green fairy would drop the right tape into your lap.
@Jason It’s good, isn’t it? I had a green screen Amstrad so only got to see the dragon in all its glory when my dad cobbled together some arcane electronic gargoyle that converted the signal over to our TV. Even green-screen, I much prefer it to the terrible Spectrum intro screen
I feel your pain with the troll — I used to play the original Final Fantasy when I was 8 or 9 unaware that you could equip gear at all. It was my first RPG… how was I supposed to know?
@Anthony LOL. Yeah, those JRPGs ain’t so good with the tutorials. They’re getting better. I remember when I first played 8 and it was all “Spend your MP to kill for XP and gain AP and release your GF for MASSIVE DAMAGE”
XP and MP, okay. AP and GF, WTF?