Hi everyone,
I'm Bart, and I'm a retro gamer... well, actually just a gamer, although I suck at modern online games so tend to avoid them... living in the Cambridge area. I've actually been lurking around RetroGamer for a while, reading articles and suchlike, but haven't got involved in the forum up until now.
I started out gaming on Defender in the local social club, and on my cousin's rubber-keyed Spectrum 48K. I then got my own Spectrum 48K+ (improved plastic keyboard by this time), started playing games and programming in BASIC. Shortly after this I also got an Atari 2600 Junior which, for a *very* long time was the only games console I'd ever owned. Then got a Commodore 64, which was great (although harder to program), but I only had it for about a year before I got my favourite computer of all time: an Amiga A500 with a 1MB RAM expansion. That thing was a revelation at the time, and I got a copy of AMOS with it, which was great (with hindsight I think Blitz might have been the better option but, oh well, AMOS was still awesome).
I fell out of gaming, except round at friends houses, in the early-mid 90s and only got back into it intermittently from the year 2000 onwards, before picking it up a bit more seriously again over the past 3 - 4 years. There were various reasons for this: our school went mixed when I went into the 6th form, and then the tech moved on and I couldn't afford a PC or one of the 32-bit consoles. Also I knew full well I'd fail my degree if I bought a PS1 or an N64 (not an idle concern: this pretty much happened to one of my friends, who managed to scrape a 3rd by the skin of his teeth because he spent all day every day playing Goldeneye, Turok, and various Mario games).
I did spend quite a bit of time playing games at friends' houses: DOOM, Quake (which I never enjoyed as much), Wipeout, the original GTA, Goldeneye, and lots of driving/racing games (particularly on the PS1), before moving on to PC games around the year 2000, particularly FPSs like UT, Q3A, and the Half-Life series, but also Need For Speed, and Fable. I kind of looked down on consoles at the time although, with hindsight, this was a mistake and I feel like I missed out on quite a lot as a result.
Not unlike srj672 I finally bought myself a Wii shortly after I moved into the first house I bought. Played it obsessively for the first year or two, and quite regularly after that. Fair to say it definitely helped bring me back into gaming: Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii, House of the Dead: Overkill, and the 2010 Goldeneye remake are amongst many games I've enjoyed on that system. I eventually picked up a PS3 in 2013, and this was really the beginning of getting to the situation I now find myself in where I've picked up, as cheaply as possible, a bunch of other older consoles, and loads of games along the way. My collection isn't that big, but I still think I own more games than I can realistically play through within the remainder of my lifetime.
A few years ago I also started working on some remakes of classic arcade games. This was just a programming side project to help me get better with client-side web tech, and particularly JavaScript, and nowadays I work on it from time to time just to keep my hand in with programming because I don't get to do much of it at work any more. I've written a version of Asteroids, called Shoot the Rocks, which you can find at
https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/, and a version of Star Castle, called Star Citadel, which you can find at
https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/. Feel free to send me any feedback/suggestions if you decide to give the a go.
Will look forward to chatting with you on here. Nowadays I also go to three or four retro events every year, usually up north, so I might bump into some of you face to face as well!
Bart