Randomate!!

randomate!!

I've become a tiny bit disillusioned with gaming as of late
Not multiplayer games/lans whatever, but the kind of games I normally love where you spend months building up a character ala Final Fantasy or baldurs gate, or unlocking levels ala GTA.I've been feeling lately that its a kind of an false economy , as you spend all your spare time locked in a room away from loved ones, food,natural light ,TV whatever, and while you have that feeling of patiently creating something , at the end of the day you come away empty handed.At least Airfix freaks have something to hang from the ceiling!.
So I decided to jump back into a bit of "twitch gaming" forgoing all the planning and patience those games need and go back to the adrenaline pumping stuff that attracted me to gaming in the first place.
I was stuck waiting for my elderly washing machine to finish drying my work clothes (long story) late last night , so using my mates laptop in the kitchen and with a usb/playstation2 pad I fired up MAME.(mame is a program that lets you run old arcade games on your pc, www.zophar.net is a good place to start if you're interested, downloading games for it is a bit legally naughty if you dont own the original arcade machine though,so I must have a chat with my mate,anyway... )
I figured 20 minutes , using his collection of ROMs and the select random game option should work .I figured it might throw up some interesting results so I made some notes...

random game #1
Gradius III
aha after R-type , the twitch shooters of choice were the Gradius ones.Gradius was more famously known as "Nemesis" on this side of the pond.Fast, hard, and with just a little strategy amongst the bullet weaving, Gradius III `had you picking up pods dropped by vanquished baddies to allow you to "buy" upgrades on the way. Being fairly late in the series of games (the 4th despite the title..go figure)gradiusIII has a fairly slick opening showing each of its predecessors title screens with the year they were released superimposed over the graphics. On hitting start, I was eased in with a series of defenceless ships dropping pods everywhere.Yeehaw thought I a minute later as I had missiles, shields , twin lasers and speedups coming out my proverbials ,all in making me practically invulnerable, at least I thought I was.At this point I was introduced to enemies best described as "flaming flying furious sand doggies" who turned out to be, in fact, actually invunerable.This consequently reintroduced me to the fact that Japanese shooty games get a bit crap after you lose your first life, in that you restart halfway through the level, facing the heavily armoured scum of the universe , armed with a solitary gun of about the same offensive power as a straw and some chewed up bits of paper, as THE F£$kING DESIGNERS HAVE TAKEN AWAY EVERY POWERUP YOU'VE GOTTEN UP TO THIS POINT .Unless you've the reflexes of a five year old kid that’s been drip fed Red bull and sherbet the rest of the game tends to be a short and rather eventful affair, the events usually involving your ship running into something moving a lot faster than it is.Still fun while it lasted

So on to game two, straight out of the randomiser we have :

Random game #2
Toki!!
Hurray!! I actually played this one, manys a 10p went into the battered, ciggy burned,slightly ramshackle one in amusement city in Dame st. Unfortunately after a while I realised I wasn’t great at it and ended up playing "splatterhouse" the machine beside it instead, which wasn’t much of an improvement really , but I could get to the bit where you got the shotguns.Anyway Toki,is a game where a monkey tries to save his human girlfriend from a wizard or something (what do you mean unnatural activities!? the monkey started off as a bloke but got turned into a simian with some sort of curse....or something of that nature).Its a platformer so you can run ,jump, and as all monkeys do spit fireballs at bad guys.Easing into it I make good progress , past the zombie monkey, shooting the flying jellyfish , attacking the vine climbing crabs and taking out the simian powered, steam shooting flying Aztec stone block.I'd never realised how bloody weird this game was.Anyway I'm at the part where the learning curve has gone all vertical themed and I'm simultaneously being attacked by a spider, some flying spiky things and a mysterious spear throwing ghost , when I remember why I stopped playing this bloody thing.Eight seconds later and this monkeys gone to heaven and I'm presented with the continue screen which consists of toki's girly begging you to continue or she's going to get killed, jaysus , emotional blackmail or what!!
I think about firing up splatterhouse , but instead stick to my guns and random-ate:

random game #3
Clowns ,
an Atari black and white game that was created before the dawn of time and probably ran on something that babbage designed.Thankfully it doesn’t run , well the screen went white and I didn’t wait around to see if it was going to work...I was here for excitement , I was here for fun , I was here for.....

random game #3(again)
Quantum
looking like asteroids on hard drugs , Quantum proceeded to run , make the screen go purple and then quit me out to windows, ok third time lucky

random game #3(no.3)
" vs gong fight"

farking bizarre
its a very early boxing game, featuring two teeny tiny boxers , in huge ring , reffed by what appears to be the bloke off the Pringles box.The cpu controlled boxer appears to have scarfed down a lot of controlled substances before the fight as he appears to move at something close to lightspeed.I attempt to punch it out of him ala stallone vs dolph lundren in rocky III. Unfortunately my boxer is sticking to Marquis of Queensbury rules, or else the other guy got to the pile of illicit drugs first as I move very slowly indeed .As I rise, dazed, from the canvas for the second time in 10 seconds I notice that Pringles man sounds like a "speak&spell" with a Mexican accent, strange...

It’s over all to soon , and as I eat canvas , and Dolph goes off to have a celebratory meal of steroids, I randomise again

random game #4
pop flamer
rather than write about it , here's my exact notes, I think that my dodgy neck muscle medication had kicked in at this point
WTF!!
Pacman with mice and flamethrowers
drink juice for added flames... barney the dinosaur.... drugs!....people paid money for this.....pop the balloons!...oh I'm dead...this game is garbage...
a frog

random game 5
last game , after this I called it a day and hit the sack
Phozon
shockingly this is actually quiet good, I've never heard of it before though as it wasnt big outside japan.Its a change from the shooting and junping in that its a bit existential .You're a molecule , (high concept eh?) floating around a screen , and at the start of the level you're given the shape of a molecular string , bits of what look like Veruca Salts chewing gum from Willy Wonka then proceed to float around , with you collecting them to form the right shape, all the while being chased by a ballooney thing that looks like something from the old windows 95 "3d flowerbox" screensaver.Sounds shite , but is actually bloody great...