![]() Of course, in the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t take long for the home versions of all three to arrive – and fine ports they all were – and my Spectrum +2 wasn’t far behind either. ![]() And for me at least, there was no better advert than seeing any of them for the first time than on the living room TV! If only they had home computer versions… If only I didn’t have a VIC-20… As an aside, when I said the majority of First Class was “completely forgettable” I was doing a disservice to its presenter, Miss Great Britain 1984, Debbie Greenwood, who could definitely give Sarah Greene a run for her money! But make it through those, and things got interesting because the last round was an arcade game round, where members of the team were nominated to compete against each other on Hyper Sports or Paperboy, and I think 720 too. ![]() No one remembers First Class because the majority of the programme was completely forgettable – a BBC1 kids quiz show with general knowledge and popular culture rounds for teams representing their schools. Over on kids TV, which I was becoming a bit more choosy about by this point, the biggest thing happening was probably Zammo’s ongoing slide into heroin oblivion on Grange Hill if only he hadn’t made such a big deal of winning the moustache-weighing competition, he might have got away with it, and we’d have never had to suffer Just Say No… We also suffered the end of Bananaman, Robin of Sherwood and the wonderful Terrahawks, but we did see the launch of Gaz Top’s Get Fresh on Saturday mornings (though he was still no Sarah Greene), The Trap Door (which also spawned the best looking Spectrum game ever), and a quiz show that no one remembers called First Class… We also got Neighbours for the first time, most hours of the day from what I remember! Shame you had to sit through so much crap to get to those five minute slots, though we were, of course, entertained by Samantha Fox’s Touch Me on there in its first year, so you got something else worthwhile out of it sometimes! I was also a big fan of courier-cum-detective Boon, which would be around for another six years from then, though I always feel that over time it got a bit eclipsed by the adventures of sexy antiques rogue Lovejoy, who first appeared in 1986 too. I seem to remember Today by The Smashing Pumpkins too, and bands like Faith No More and Suede. Sounds simple enough, but there are a whole array of obstacles to overcome along the delivery route.It’s easy to forget there was TV outside of Miami Vice in 1986, such was its influence on the style of a 14-year old at the time, but it did exist! The Chart Show started a 12-year run, and would become almost equally influential later for its indie or rock chart every other week… Winona by The Drop Nineteens, in my top three favourite songs ever (behind The Cure’s Pictures of You and Ride’s Vapour Trail, if you’re interested) was found there. The basic idea is to control your paperboy (some versions were even released with a papergirl) on their bicycle and deliver all of the newspapers. The game looked fantastic but required a lot of processing power and, therefore, didn't convert well on every machine, but overall Paperboy was a fantastic game. Paperboy became the first ever Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game in the US and also the first Sega Master System game here in the UK. It was ported to most 8-bit home computers during 1986 and continued to be ported to computers and consoles until 1991. ![]() This highly popular game was first released as a coin-operated arcade game by Atari in December 1984. Delivering newspapers was a job I really didn't want to face as a youngster, and having seen the look on the local paper girl's face recently, I suspect I'm certainly not unique! However, when it comes to playing a video game where a computer-generated paper kid does all the work, now that sounds like fun! ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |