“I’m not offering you an incentive as crude as money – though there’ll be plenty of that. What I’m offering you is a ground-floor opportunity in the most important enterprise on Earth. What I’m offering is a future – for you, and for what remains of the human race.
-Mr House
The unfortunately named Casio Loopy was a Japan-only 32-bit home video game console released in 1995. At that time the Mega Drive and SNES were dying out being replaced by the Sega Saturn, Playstation and eventually the Nintendo 64.
Casio (yes, the same people who make calculators and watches) thought that rather than attempt to compete with the big boys they would instead try to corner a niche market that was quietly growing at the time – younger female gamers. In that typically Japanese (and some would say sexist) way the designers produced a console that was the opposite of the harsh, mean-looking Sega consoles of the time and instead produced a light coloured, smooth edged little machine that was considered more feminine.
The Loopy was based around Sega’s vaunted 32X hardware and featured an interesting add-on package called “Magical Shop” that allowed it to link with VCRs and DVD players in order to take screencaps from them! These screencaps could then be edited with text and turned in to stickers via a built-in printer. The Loopy only featured a single controller port (clearly Casio thinks girls don’t like playing games together) and as well as the standard controller it also had a mouse.
Only 11 games were ever released for the console and they came on cartridge even though most companies at the time (with the notable exception of Nintendo) were turning to compact discs. The following are some “What if” box arts I have put together showing how the game library might have looked had it been better supported. Some are games from other systems while others are based on movies/TV shows at the time. I have tried to keep the “girly” feel Casio were going for.
It is the granddaddy of all home gaming consoles. It popularised the use of changeable cartridges and brought home some of the most classic arcade games (at least in dumbed down versions) for the first time. I was too young to appreciate the Atari 2600 back in the day. I was born in 1984 and the Atari 2600 was already seven years old at that time and while it hadn’t been killed off just yet it was already taking a backseat to the newer consoles coming out at the time.
Here in the UK of course, the Atari 2600 never had the popularity that it enjoyed in the US. We preferred our ZX Spectrum microcomputers for our gaming needs since the games came on much cheaper cassettes rather than the more expensive cartridges. The Sega Master System and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) would finally drag us away from our microcomputers on to dedicated gaming consoles while the Atari 2600 was more of a niche item in UK households. Despite this it achieved a loyal fanbase here in ol’ blighty and I am pleased to declare that I am now one of that fraternity.
My first experience with the 2600 was a brief trial of one about two and a half years ago and I was immediately hooked by its simple graphics, crude sounds and strangely addictive games. Since then I played a lot of titles using the RetroArch emulator app on my tablet which although better than most android emulators is no substitute for the real thing so once again I started putting the pennies away with the goal of getting my first Atari.
In the meantime I hit Ebay to price up what a decent console would cost and discovered that compared to the NES and even the Master System, Atari 2600s were relatively cheap over here in the UK with the average price for a decent working console with cables and controller being in the £40-50 range. The older models with the wood grain finish tend to go for a bit more being collector’s items these days but the later Atari 2600 Jr were well within reach. However, I had somewhat more ambitious plans. I actually wanted the Atari 7800 which while being a newer console was backward compatible with the 2600 meaning I could play games from both libraries. I found a decent 7800 for around £65 on Ebay and set my sights on it only to have it snatched away at the last moment. Oh well! With no other 7800s around I decided to ditch that plan and go for a straight up 2600.
A quick search and I found a 2600 Jr for the bargain price of just £41 including delivery. A quick click on the big blue button labelled BUY IT NOW and I could officially call myself an Atari owner. It took six agonizingly long days for it to arrive and it came in a big brown cardboard box. The seller had thankfully taken great care packaging it and it came out of the box looking immaculate save for a light scratch on the front that is barely noticeable unless you go looking for it.
My first thought of the 2600 Jr was just how light it was. It can easily be handled with just one hand having an almost hollow feel to it. The cartridge plops in the top and looks very exposed compared to the similarly top loading Master System although it sits quite firmly in there. There are four buttons on the front – power, black & white mode (how retro is that!), select and finally reset. Power and the B/W switch are both sliders and still work very well although the power switch has a tendency to stick when switching the power off. The select and reset buttons are both push-down types and quite stiff although you can feel where they connect with the circuit. On the whole, very simple and user friendly.
The classic joystick is a bit of a let down in that it hasn’t faired as well as the console itself. While left, down and right work perfectly, up doesn’t work as well and the stick has to be really forced upwards. However, the 2600 is famous for having the same 9-pin connections as the Sega Master System and Mega Drive and so you can use a lot of Sega peripherals with it. As such I have used the standard Mega Drive controller as well as the Mega Drive Arcade Stick (as in the top picture) and the Master System’s much loathed Control Stick. With the Mega Drive Arcade Stick especially there is a real feel of what these games must have been like in the arcade back in the 80s but all work perfectly and are far more responsive than the Atari controller. Unfortunately the connections are on the back of the console which sees the cable fold awkwardly over the top.
As for running it through the TV I had very little trouble. It uses a standard RF cable and when I first switched it on, my TV was set to the channel I use for the NES/SNES. The picture was already almost perfect and needed only minute tuning to get it right. I have since tuned channel 1 to the Atari and channel 2 to the NES/SNES – I simply plug the same RF cable in whichever console I want to use which is far easier than replacing the cable in the back of the TV. It is also why all three consoles sit on the same shelf.
So with it all set up, what about games? Well the console was delivered with one of the many pack-in cartridges it came with namely Air-Sea Battle which is a very simple shooter intended for two players. Upon hearing I had an Atari 2600 a good friend of mine, Stuart Marshall, sent me down two cartridges he had spare copies for namely Centipede and Joust. Centipede needs very little introduction but Joust has gone from being one of the most frustrating games I have ever played to one of the most addictive. Like the console itself the cartridges are quite cheap with the bulk being £4-£6. I have slowly built up a small collection and I will go in to more detail about them in a future post.
I have to say I am very happy with my Atari 2600 overall. It has a real charm to it being easy to pick up and play with the minimalistic graphics and controls being surprisingly involving. You find yourself being drawn in to what you are doing which is always an important aspect of gaming. Not bad for a console whose technology is pushing nearly 40 now!
This was a quick video I put together of me playing Castlevania on the NES for the guys at Console-Zone.club which I help admin (you can see my characture in the site banner on the very left). Apologies for the poor quality but I recorded it by simply pointing a camera at the TV screen. I hope to get some proper recording equipment one day and make some higher quality videos.
Well, after the arrival of the NES displaced my Sega games from the upper shelf of the TV cabinet I had to find a suitable new home for them. Stacking them beside the cabinet was not an ideal solution and with very little space for shelves in my man-corner of the kitchen the only alternative was to put them in one of the spare cupboards.
Trouble was – there weren’t any.
So after much negotiation with the wife/boss/High-Empress-of-the-Universe I cleared the stuff out of one of the utensil cupboards on the condition I found a new home for the cables and boxes which meant rearranging the space under the stairs to accommodate them. I then proceeded to clean the cupboard out before putting in the new contents.
Once I was done I was a little taken aback at how small my collection looks. Of course, the fact that a lot of them are cartridges without their boxes goes some way to explaining it but still I was expecting it to look larger somehow. Nevertheless, it continues to grow steadily. At least it looks a lot cleaner now and the risk of the cat climbing over them or my daughter knocking them over is gone.
If you believed YouTube, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES is the most definitive retro console in the world.
I disagree.
Certainly, I respect its place in the history of video games and indeed do credit it with helping keep the home video game market alive after the 1983 video game crash. But that was America!
Here in the UK we weren’t all that bothered with video game consoles anyway until at least the second half of the 1980s. We were happy playing games off cassettes with our ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 microcomputers and when consoles did hit hard on these shores it was actually the Sega Master System, one of the big losers in the US market, that took precedence.
The NES on the other hand, while a cultural phenomena in the US, barely made an impact. I got my Master System when I was 6 in 1990. At that time I knew a lot of people who had Master Systems, I knew a handful of people who had a Commodore 64 and I knew two people who had an Atari 2600 (strangely)! I didn’t even see a real NES until about 1996 when a friend’s parents bought him one at a car boot sale for next to nothing along with two games – which rather obscurely were Godzilla and Days of Thunder. At that time we had ditched our 8-bit Master Systems for 16-bit Mega Drives and he had no real interest in it to the point where he loaned it to me for months at a time but only having the two games it didn’t leave much of an impact on me.
Fast forward to the beginnings of my renewed interest in old video games and my appreciation for the NES grew rapidly thanks to the abundance of US-oriented YouTube channels. Despite this, the nostalgia factor meant that my main goal was to build a complete PAL-region Sega Master System collection which given my limited funds left little room for the NES.
Then, as has been the case several times on my retrogaming journey, my wife’s quite extended family intervened. I swear I could never run away from her with my daughter without bumping in to one of her relatives! They are everywhere. I don’t think I would be safe in Outer Mongolia. Anyway, I received a message on Facebook from her cousin in Oxfordshire who had found her game console from when she was child and wanted me to price it up for her as she was going to sell it on Ebay. To my surprise it was an NES complete with two controllers, a zapper (light gun), a carry case and a handful of games.
Naturally I was frothing at the mouth at the sight of it but being the honest person I am I gave her a price which I believed was accurate but beyond my means. A few days went by and I couldn’t help but feel I had let it slip through my fingers. When I learned that she was yet to sell it I spoke to my wife about offering to pay for it over a period of time and she agreed we could do it. Better yet, since we were family we were offered it at a reduced price – RESULT!
It took several patient months to finish paying for it which meant that my Master System collection had to be put on hold for a while. All that was left then was to drive up and get it; a round journey of over six hours that involved a quick drive-by of RAF Brize Norton but sadly there were no Hercules or C-17s flying by. I brought it home, plugged it in and booted it up thus beginning my journey in to discovering the NES.
In terms of games there was a nice little selection already including the obligatory Super Mario Bros & Duck Hunt combo cartridge as well as The Simpsons; Bart vs. The Space Mutants, Pinbot and Guantlet but naturally having been force-fed NES games by YouTube I wanted more but wasn’t about to give up on my original ambition to collect for the Master System. Trolling around on Ebay I spotted the answer. I could have some of the most popular NES games of all time all on one cartridge for just £30! It was the Super Games 150-in-1 cartridge and included some of the greats like Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania and Contra to name but a few. The cartridge is normally set to the US/Japan NTSC region encoding but I read online that simply resetting the console five times puts it in to PAL. I was fortunate however to find one that had been permanently set to PAL which means I didn’t have to fuss about everytime I wanted to change the game.
And there we have it. An NES complete with an essentials collection. I even have a few Famicom (the Japanese version of the NES) games on there thrown in for good measure. I know it’s not the NES-purist’s way of doing it but I am a Sega fanboy after all. It wasn’t all roses however as a handful of the games on the cartridge glitch terribly but that’s about 5 games in total. All the big games like the Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden series work perfectly and those were the ones I was after. Sadly, no Ghosts ‘n Goblins.
Well, it has been a month and a half now since the NES made it to the Wilkins household. So what does the Sega fanboy think of it? Is it worth all the online hype we get from the Americans?
Well….for the most part…YES!
I adore my NES. I really feel like I have missed out all these years having neglected Nintendo. For a week I was truly addicted to Ninja Gaiden. Hands down I consider it better than the Master System’s Shinobi which I have never been truly fond of anyway. Of course, like the majority of players I couldn’t get passed Stage 5-3 which is extraordinarily difficult. While very similar in gameplay I am rather bad at Castelvania although in my defence I haven’t given it as much attention as Ninja Gaiden. A game I adore but had never heard of before is a Famicom game called Ultraman Club which is a very Mega Man-esque game. I could list all the games I have played so far and what I thought of them but then this would go on for pages and pages plus I haven’t played them all yet. I will talk more about my thoughts on the games in the future.
There is a…BUT…when it comes to the NES though.
Being a Sega fanboy used to the bright, vibrant colours of the Master System I find the NES’ graphics to be dirty in comparison. Honestly, there are some levels of Ninja Gaiden that wouldn’t look too out of place on the ZX Spectrum. It’s not a major criticism because excellent gameplay more than makes up for it.
So, in conclusion; am I about to discard my Master System for the NES? Not yet. I am at a point now where I recognise both console’s strengths and weaknesses but while I do love the NES and have spent much of my relatively little free time with the little grey controller in my hand, it hasn’t torn me away from the Master System especially now I have returned to collecting for it. Maybe, nostalgia for me has been the deciding factor in that but I do maintain the Master System has some great games and I continue to discover new ones I have never played before.
Who knows?
What I will say however is that the NES and the Master System have both kept me well clear of the Mega Drive, Mega CD and SNES. Maybe I am an 8-bit guy which frankly I have no problem with.
Thanks for reading.
Introduced a mate of mine to the ZX Spectrum for the first time with a simple game of Pinball
A quick video I made for a Facebook group I help Admin called Console Zone. It is level 1 of Star Wars Rebel Assault on the Sega Mega CD which is notorious for its difficult controls.
Check out Console Zone on Facebook
Well it was going to have to happen eventually. With a Master System joining the Mega Drive/CD and the SNES it was getting a little crowded under the TV in the living room. My suggestion to the wife of throwing out the Sky TV box didn’t go down too well because she would miss Keeping up with the Kardashians (yeah I don’t understand the appeal either) so the only alternative was to take out my consoles and put them in another room.
This of course presented its own problems namely where they were going to go and what TV they were going to be hooked up to. The most obvious place would be the bedroom but since our bedroom is already bulging with clutter the wife suggested the corner of the kitchen. Brilliant! That way I can still indulge in a bit of retrogaming in my free time and be on hand for the wife if she becomes ill.
So I had the consoles and the games but no TV and just as crucially no TV stand. Ah but alas my wife was already on it for she had decided we needed a new TV stand in the living room and informed her mother who promptly bought “us” a new one for Christmas freeing up the old one. So not only did the consoles relocate in to the kitchen but the TV stand did as well.
So all that remained was the TV. Now, flat screen TVs are ten-a-penny these days providing you don’t want 3D HD with HDMI input and a whole host of other abbreviations. However, they aren’t always the best for playing old consoles on. This was especially true for my Mega Drive which for some reason really didn’t like the modern TV in the living room. What I needed was an old cathode ray tube (CRT) set which was what these consoles were designed to be played on.
We used to have one in my daughter’s room for her to watch films on but it got put away so I ventured in to the wardrobe where I was attacked by a number of teddies, books and other small items from on high before I retrieved said-TV. After nearly busting a gut lumping the thing downstairs and taking it in to the kitchen I hooked it all up and waited with baited breath.
What I got instead was a black and white picture. Yes, it seemed that the TV objected to having been pulled out of retirement and decided to not work properly if at all. Frustration caused me to curse my luck quite loudly. There was nothing that could be done for the TV and it was time to retire it to the TV cabinet in the sky.
I therefore turned to Facebook and one of those local buy/sell groups. I put out a message asking if anyone was selling an old style TV and was soon contacted by a rather nice chap from nearby Chepstow who had one. All he asked for it was that I go and get it – result! So I drove the fifteen minutes to Chepstow (and spent another fifteen minutes walking up and down the street trying to find his house) and picked it up. I brought it home and Le voilà! The man-corner was up and running.
Now I just need something to sit on…
Just a bit of footage I took of me playing Transbot on my Master System for some friends of mine on the Facebook group Console Zone. I just pointed my camera at the TV since I am not yet technically minded enough to record everything directly. Transbot is hardly a revolutionary game but being a very early title for the Master System it has a certain charm to it.
Tony's Domain 