Coming back down
By Kentish

I have just come back from my first overseas holiday since 2004 when I finished travelling. Jacqui and I went to visit one of her friends who lives on the shores of the azure blue Lake Annecy, in the shadow of the Alps. We ate reblochan cheese and saucissan and washed it down with litres of red. We swam, cycled, played tennis, and walked up snow capped mountains - well, crawled up in my case as the altitude seemed to infect my limbs with a mild paralysis. Aside from a few hairy moments in the car, I have been in a state of almost Zen-like relaxation.

Achievement Unlocked

I had been very much enjoying The Darkness before I left, and with my delayed copy of Bioshock arriving on the day we left, I thought I would be hankering for some gaming. But not so. I have enjoyed the break. I did take Edge with me, but a combination of the rather dull features and the really pissy, snidey review of Bioshock, (and yet an 8 - a token gesture on their behalf) made me want to dump it in the lake. Perhaps it was my heightened state of relaxation that made me prickle at their tone so much, but at that moment I really understood why people slate it.

Leave me alone Edge!

So I have resolved to get back some of the momentum I have lost, go out and buy Stranglehold and Halo 3, possibly Medal of Honour as well. And then there is the prospect of what to do with the ZX Spectrum and Amiga 1200 that have risen from the sepia-toned pages of personal history.

You see, the weekend before I went away, I returned to my beloved county of Kent to visit the folks. They have decided to move to Cumbria, so it was something of a wistful trip. Yet that was nothing compared to the nostalgic discovery that awaited in the loft. Taking the opportunity to have a clear out, my dad spent 30 minutes handing down boxes covered in dust and insulation fibres. Down came Crossfire, then the fucking lovely Super Cup Football, a battery powered table football type game that I devoted hours to thrashing my brothers at. Then things got really beautiful. Box after box of immaculate Spectrum games emerged - all of those beloved Ocean games from my article last month were there. Those little cardboard cases of late era Speccy vintage were covered in a fine layer of filth, but after dutifully cleaning them with a tea towel, they looked as new. NARC, Shadow Warriors, Chase HQ, Batman the Movie. They were all there, every single game we had ever bought. I had presumed them lost or sold off, but here they were - Thunderblade, Outrun, Enduro Racer, Savage, Dan Dare 3, Ping Ping. And then there were the games I had forgotten about - Shadow of the Beast, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 1 and 2 and Forgotten Worlds.

The tapes look fine, there is a 48K and 128 to play them on - presuming they work. What the hell do I do with it? Would it be a crime to sell? Would it be worth selling? (given that there are hundreds there - all boxed with instructions).

Random lovely pages thrown together

The Amiga came next - Shadow of the Beast 3, Wing Commander, Lionheart, and most precious of all, a boxed copy of Chaos Engine. Man, it looked so beautiful. No more will I have to put up with the pale SNES version. Well, not once I get it back from my brother, who snaffled it back to his flat in Folkestone. He might be a copper but I will burgle his bloody house if he makes any noises about keeping it.

And that was not all. In one humongously heavy box was a huge collection of magazines. There was every copy of Your Sinclair, which compared to today's shelf stackers, now looks laughably basic, almost fanzine like. I sat in a daze reading reviews of Nemesis the Warlock (damn it for always crashing on Level 6), Karnov, Psycho Pigs UXB...the list just goes on and on.

Well that is this weekend taken care of

I had a couple of Amiga Powers in there, 13 copies of Super Play, half a dozen early Edges and some really random Snes mags. Any of you remember Snes Force? Super Pro? Super Gamer (complete with gloriously shit Japanese-style pictures for the reviewers (unless Ryan and Damien Butt ran that magazine at the ages of 12 and 13). Each had clearly been kept for a particular reason - a review of ISS Soccer, some tips on SF2 Turbo, a review of Doom (how the fuck did they ever convert that?) I sat for an hour just sifting through. Some of the official Nintendo Mags did not pass the test, but most did, and have now joined the rest of the Future archive I have seemed to have built up.

The Kentish man says goodbye to Kent

There was so much history unearthed on that trip, which makes it all the weirder that it has been so quickly shunted out of my consciousness by mountainscapes and alpine marmots.

I guess that's not really that weird after all?

2007

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