Retro gaming – getting started

Posted by admin on June 28th, 2012

A few months ago the ZX Spectrum had it’s 30th Birthday.  I read a lot of gaming press and there was a lot of coverage of this milestone and it made me feel very nostalgic about old games.  I never had a spectrum but I did have some consoles a bit later in my life and of course I play the Xbox now.

I did some digging around on the internet and realised two things, firstly there’s a wealth of information out there about gaming going back to Pong and secondly there are lot of people out there who are interested in retro gaming.

To be honest I found it all a bit overwhelming, there are lots of consoles, lots of old computers and lots and lots of old games.  I wanted to narrow it down a bit and so I thought about what I had enjoyed most about old games.  I came to the conclusion that it was usually Nintendo and Mario in particular that had made me buy consoles in the past so that seemed like a good place to start.  I remember going out to buy a Super Nintendo (SNES) because I’d seen Super Mario World playing in a shop, the same thing happened with the Nintendo N64 when I saw Super Mario 64.

However I never owned or played on a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and so that seemed like as good a place to start as any.  I hunted around ebay and found one at a reasonable price which I bid for and won.

I’ve got to say it’s quite cool (very retro) but quite cool.  I only have one game for it and the video connections are quite archaic but the gameplay is great and I’m glad I bought it.

So if you are thinking about getting into retro gaming but don’t know where to start think back to your best early game experiences and then use that as your starting point.  Now then I wonder how I go about playing Colin McRae Rally the original.