console games

I have been at back at my childhood home on a kind of urban detox. My life now is full of big out of town shopping centres and those retail parks that are built around big car parks.

So I have been sorting out lots of boxes of old things and junk, and have dug up the old consoles that me and my brother used to play.


They are a heady slice of nostalgia. Look at the Japanese-import megadrive with 16 BIT proudly across it in gold. This was back in the days when the only region/copy protection that Sega/Nintendo used was making the US/Euro/Japanese cartridges slightly different shapes (which you could circumvent by simply breaking off a small plastic tab on the console). What a different world we live in now.

Also the Sega light gun thing for the 8-bit Sega Master System – the microswitch trigger (microswitches on game pads = unheard of these days!) still feels awesome. I layed down a lot of gangstas with that thing, and never once thought of holding it on its side.

And look at the size of that Atari Lynx – it’s bigger than the non-portable consoles!


Finally here is a cool controller that I used to use on the old Sega Master System. I was trying to work out for ages what the switch on top was for, and have just remembered it was so you could use it on the Atari ST, Amiga and so on, because they all had the same kind of connector... things were simple in the past.