I'm game for a go on new consoles

Mar 13 2009

THE VIDEO games market is big business at the moment.

It’s been reported that sales of games has overtaken CDs and DVDs. For a relatively young industry it’s come a long way in the last few years.

I remember the first console we had at home. It was the one where two stick men jumped up and down trying to bat a square tennis ball from left to right.

It was simple yet strangely addictive, even to this day the beep-beep-beep-boop is still etched in my mind. The technology got a bit better through the 1980s, though we paid the price by having to sit through the dreaded loading screen. Games came on a cassette and took so long to load you could pop to the shops, buy dinner, cook it and eat it before they were ready to play. Although more often than not they crashed within 30 seconds.

Computers got a bit faster in the 90s when floppy discs became more common, although for some reason I could never get them to work either. A decent game would come on four discs, and it was always the third one which failed.

I lost interest for a few years whilst several games consoles came and went, and it’s only been in the last couple of years with high definition gaming and the one where you have to jump around the room to control that I’ve found myself getting back into it.

The graphics are nicer, they load in seconds, the puzzles are more perplexing and every bit as addictive as the square tennis ball game. My only real issue is with the controllers – they seem to have more buttons than mission control and, as hard as I try, I just cannot seem to press the right combination to pull off the special moves.

I am absolutely convinced there will be a generation of children born with eight fingers on each hand, purely for gaming purposes.

I’ll be with you on the Breakfast Show this week, Monday to Friday from 6am on 96.7 West FM.