Tag: Arcade

I’ll Tiger Uppercut any company who plans to obsolete my hardware

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (1996)

Well, one of my worst fears may be on the verge of being realised – I think I’ll have to go out and buy another laptop. You know I already hate spending money, but this thriftiness brings its own enormous benefits, including one of my greatest skills – I’m a dab hand at getting the maximum use out of knackered old hardware. This laptop I’m typing on is nine years old now, which is old-age pension territory for a little notebook like this.

Even when everyone else was upgrading their tools at the beginning of pandemic lockdown, ready for months, years, even eternities of working from home, I stuck it out with my trusty little laptop. And technology rewards you for your loyalty, you know, and it’ll look after you so long as you look after it – with the obvious exception of the most spiteful hardware of all, the printer.

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One boy’s brave mission to supply every home on the street with toilet paper

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Paperboy (1985 / 1991)

I’m sorry, but have you used the Internet lately? You go onto a website these days and you’re lucky if you can see any of the content. All the GDPR Suits are in your face with notices asking you for your cookies. What? Those are my cookies, you hungry e-whores, so get your own.

You get the feeling as well that this is something you really should be taking more notice of, like the app permissions on your phone. Click “Accept All” at your peril, because when your credit card details get harvested, milked for quite literally all you’re worth, your financial assailant will be perfectly entitled to point out that you gave them the express permission to do it.

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Throw 25 Pesetas in and feel the Fury

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Fatal Fury: King of Fighters (1991)

It must be nice to live in luxury, I thought to meself, as I sat back and loaded up the Metal Slug Anthology. I’d dropped fifty or sixty bones on that in 2006 for the Wii version when I was new to the series. Come 2020, I bought it again, this time on PS4 for a measly fiver. A fiver, for seven games, at least some of which used to come in their own dedicated arcade cabinets with some of the loveliest hand-drawn graphics you’ve ever seen. Posers like me can go on about how you practically need to sell a kidney to be a retro collector these days. But never mind the original, physical copies; if all you want in your life is the 1s and 0s, then it don’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

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Ryu, Ken and the Peanuts Parents’ Association are ready to rumble

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Street Fighter (1987)

I don’t embarrass easily, which any one who has ever seen me after a few gargles will know. But when my very awkward childhood is brought up, I find myself going as red as a well smacked arse. You know, I suppose when it’s written down, my childhood of eating coins and cigarettes and being obsessed with traffic lights and wandering around naked is all very funny, but when it’s said to me and brought up in polite company it doesn’t half get embarrassing. But that’s probably the same for everyone right? Right…?

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Those very early NES games… they’re not ones you get the bug for

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Donkey Kong 3 (1983)

Bugs, bugs, bugs… I’m telling you, they’re everywhere. It might even be that my house is bugged with listening devices – actually, I already know it is, I’m typing this on my phone right now. But I’m not talking about electronics here – I’m on about our constant struggle to keep human supremacy over our fellow partaker in earth’s space: insects.

It’s obviously difficult for even the most ennui-affected, do-nothing professor to actually verify this, but we understand that there are 200 million insects for every single person on earth. Are you serious?! My calculator breaks when I try to multiply 200 million by 7 billion. Well, strictly speaking that’s not true, but it starts giving me the letter “e” instead which obviously stands for error. But I think we can surmise that, if those insects ever did put all their differences aside, banded together and took us on… well, I’m plenty tough, but I ain’t tough enough to take on 200 million in a row, am I?

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He’s the rotten apple of the nasty Kong’s eye

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Donkey Kong Jr. (1982)

I know it’s coming, by God, I know it’s coming. I’m like the gorilla in that Dairy Milk ad, sitting and waiting on the drum-kit as Phil Collins lilts through the air, before everything comes crashing down. I’m talking about the biological clock of course, and how madly it begins to tick. It’s not my own clock, of course, my tadpoles are good for life. But the missus you see, the bells toll for her. She tells me now, “no kids”, “I like being able to hand them back” and all that game.

Don’t listen to all that, this is all just designed to trap young bucks like you and I into settling down. Then, before you know it, you’re changing nappies because you’re a “modern man”. Then you’re losing an absolute fortune. Then, you’re almost as much of a disappointment to your unruly child as they are to you. God, they might even bring the police home, or worse, someone who supports your favourite team’s biggest rivals. 

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Man’s been popping pills since 1980, and it ain’t never done him no harm

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Pac-Man (1980)

I hate to say it, but the day is rapidly coming for me when nightclubs will no longer be an acceptable place for me to show my face at. That said, I’m not writing off the possibility that I might win an explosion of money in my fifties, and take my suitcase of money down to the local club to shant it up with the local dollies.

Or better still, instead of spending my retirement measuring out what little money I finish up with, I could get my whole pension and go out in a drug-fuelled blaze of glory. For one night only, that might be acceptable. But until then, I can probably count my remaining nightclub appearances on two hands.

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Beer, boobs, hospitals and punctuality. Does it get more German than that?

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Double Dragon (1990)

I’m well versed in hospitals, you know. I don’t mean medical hospitals – dreadful places, you know. Full of death, and suffering, and the nurses are nowhere near as up for it as several video tapes from my youth had led me to believe. I did have cause to visit a general hospital in my adult years, in order to have a flap of skin cut off the end of my gentleman’s area.

And I was gutted, you know, as that was the only bill I ever paid in full and I still ended up getting cut off. I was unlikely to get the blind circumciser at least – that guy got the sack. At least my surgeon wasn’t money hungry anyway; some of those guys are only in it for the tips.

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You are the disappointment your parents feared

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dragonslair

Dragon’s Lair (1992)

It’s a terrible truth that applies to us all: everything in life is disappointing. Everything. It’s typical cynicism from me, I know, but you’ve got to be aware, and you’ve got to be prepared. I bet you’ve been disappointed by friends and family countless times. Your exam results probably fell way short of your expectations. Or if they didn’t, you picked a heartbreaking thing to do with them, like law or medicine or lion-taming. It’ll lash rain on your wedding day. And your children will be disappointments too, even down to their gender and unashamedly ginger hair.

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I’ll have you know I’m a Bunhole expert

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marblemadness

Marble Madness  (1989)

I’m not exactly sure when those stubborn little roundy things called marbles were at the height of their popularity, but as ever, the Wikipedia page on the subject throws up a huge amount of information. Did you know that over 12 million of the little fellas are produced daily? Call me cynical, but I’m sure that even with an automated process, we could put that manpower and raw material into some other, far more worthy venture. Like perhaps the materials involved in making marbles could be used to put a big roof on those sly Icelandic volcanoes. Or maybe they could be used in creating power suits for when those same robots follow Skynet’s example and turn bad – they’re tough enough little objects, after all.

Another repository of marble info and goodness, landofmarbles.com, tells us of various “fun” marble games that deprived children can play. The site, well worth checking out for its wonderful GeoCities throwback design, shows us via crude 1980s schoolbook diagrams how to play Puggy, Skelly, Bunhole, and my personal favourite based on its name, Boss-Out.

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