I wish I was joking.
Before university, I was a gamer in the sense that I had a dodgy old PC and no money for games, but played a lot of C&C and Simcity and, god, Diablo. Diablo.
These days, if you go to my alma mater, in student union terms it's just a cafe near a gym. (At least, it was a few years ago, but I really haven't been back since.)
Back in the day - and how I simultaneously love and loathe that phrase - it was the crappiest kind of boozer, the kind where you go to drink and sit on the chairs and booths that hadn't been changed for fifteen years, or out in the conservatory area where you were bloody lucky to get a seat. And you drank, and you drank, until the place started to feel pleasant enough or you passed out, whichever came first.
Around the corner, though, past the fruit machines and the cigarette machine (and god knows you could smoke there those days, before passive smoking was invented) there was a bank of arcade machines. I'm going to tax my memory here and try to fully remember them, but in my first year for certain there was a Crazy Taxi machine (with steering wheel and pedals!), a Virtua Tennis machine, and... I think... I a football machine next to them, then the stairs up to three pool tables that had seen better days before glasnost.
I'm getting ahead of myself here, though, because that was the main student union, on-campus, where you could booze before going upstairs to a nightclub that, really, wasn't; just a stage and a floor and some steps designed to kill the drunken, with a coat-check operated by an uninterested student.
If you were in your first year, though, you could spend the cost of a train ticket on glorious, glorious beer and not have to leave the halls of residence because - fact fans - it had its own bad / nightclub, i.e. a bar with a few seats and a massive dancehall area with, yes, another bloody stage.
It also had a few arcade machines, and thus was my addiction rekindled.
Sadly, it was rekindled to Windjammers.
Now, let's not beat around the bush.
In a triumph of style over substance, Windjammers is, basically, Pong. Why lie? But it did have a certain kind of style about it, and it was kind of fun, and it was on this huge, clunky Neo-Geo arcade machine that had the distinction of offering not one but four games for your perusal.
Next to it was a Bust-a-Move cabinet, too, but again we're kind of getting into the hazy - sadly hazy - realms of memory here.
So when I was on-campus but out of lectures, I could play Crazy Taxi, and when I was back at 'home' I could play Windjammers, and that was, in its own kind of way, a style of happiness.
This is basically where the story ends - the machines were replaced, over time, as they either wore out or the rental costs were too high or, in one memorable case, the entire bar closed down because the manager had been fired due to an unwavering love of vodka - but there are a couple of changes that are worth mentioning.
Firstly, the off-campus bar got a machine called Carnevil, which was... Crap. But fun, in a crap way, if standing in a bar with a plastic day-glo shotgun was your idea of a good time. And it has the distinction of being where I met one of my oldest, best friends, too, so Carnevil will always have a bit of a place in my heart.
Secondly, the on-campus bar - and it's kind of sad and kind of not that it's not there anymore, because let's not mince words; it was a shithole, no doubt about it, but it was our shithole, and that just sounds wrong, so let's move on - had the first two House Of The Dead cabinets, and that was all kinds of a revelation, back then.
Looking at it now - and here you go:
It was just all kinds of crap. The graphics by modern standards - hell, by any standards - are blocky and crap, the cut-scenes are cringey, and it's just not altogether a pleasant experience. But at the time, hell, it was just cool.
Even then we probably secretly realised it was, at its' heart, a by-rote, timings experience, learning when and where things would pop up and then trigger-pulling like a maniac, but in two-player mode, it was just the coolest, really.
The sequel was better - especially graphically - but still retained a couple of features including the trigger-clicking (i.e. shooting as fast as possible by holding the gun a certain way) gameplay but included better boss-fights. The one thing both of them had in common was a certain financiocratic approach to completion, because the final bosses were impossible to defeat without paying to continue so, in effect, you were paying for a chance to get your name on the scoreboard.
(Oh, sure, perhaps it was a skill thing, but that never seemed to work for anyone in our group, so... Perhaps we all sucked.)
Over time, the drinking would get harder, and fruit machines would replace arcade games - and that was a change for the worst. But like I said in the previous post, winter is coming, and these memories are keeping me warm at the moment. So there you go, I guess!
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