![]() ![]() Yet back in the early 90s, if the word “shareware” was stuck onto your three-and-a-half-incher, you knew you’d have unrestricted access to plenty of hard and frantic fun. Whether that was being limited to bombing around Gare d’Europa in a Feisar to CoLD SToRAGE’s Body in Motion on Wipeout 2097, enjoying the Net Yaroze Hall of Fame on Official PlayStation Magazine’s demo 42, or dashing through the epic, famous, ten-minute run-through of Resident Evil 2, you got a great taste of the game… but just not quite enough. While modern games now regularly allow time-restricted access to the full game before you have to buy them – and, with the likes of modern Telltale games, you’ll be given a whole episode of a series for free – demos, historically speaking, only gave you a brief insight into the biggest hits of the day. In the case of Wolfenstein 3D – the first-ever first-person shooter I (and many others) ever played – it literally opened out in front of you. In those days, all you needed was a floppy disk drive, and in a matter of moments, a whole new world opened out in front of you. Games were expensive and hinged massively on how good your PC was – the early 90s, you’ve got to remember, was a time when hardware capabilities were improving exponentially. Like me, my mates were too young to have consoles of their own, but many at least had family computers. I had to plan in advance for any gaming session so-called “instant gaming” was experienced solely through my friends’ greater technological fortunes. Even terrifyingly crap titles like BC Bill took upwards of four hours.Īnd so I spent a lot of my time outdoors, cycling circuits around the block and waiting for the cassettes to do their duty. Sadly, whatever I played, I’d have to wait a minimum of 15 minutes for them to load, and that’s if the tape didn’t jam. While most of its games seemed tedious, insanely difficult or downright unplayable, there were a few I just couldn’t get enough of – International Karate and Shinobi were particular standouts. I was without anything approaching “cutting edge” for a good few years, but I learned to work the C64 surprisingly quickly. In my earliest days of gaming, I only had access to an inherited Commodore 64 and a broken ZX Spectrum. ![]()
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