30th anniversary of the Amiga

I'm far too young to remember the ZX81 Before my Amiga I had a Spectrum 48, but it was one with a proper keyboard not the one with rubbery keys that felt like the cold skin of a dead body. (And yet I rather liked those but not enough to pay through the nose for that bluetooth one they released recently.)

And I also used to type in pages and pages of Hex (complete with a checksum at the end of each line) in order to play what turned out to be a slipshop Marble Madness clone.

But even though the tapes took an eternity to load, even though it sounded like a five minute fight between robot cats, even though the graphics were monochrome despite being called "Spectrum" and even though the games were absurdly and unforgivingly difficult I still think the Speccy version of Head Over Heels is the greatest game I ever played. (Ah, whatever happened to Jon Ritman and his lovely beard?)

Valence wrote: I'm far too young to remember the ZX81 Before my Amiga I had a Spectrum 48, but it was one with a proper keyboard not the one with rubbery keys that felt like the cold skin of a dead body. (And yet I rather liked those but not enough to pay through the nose for that bluetooth one they released recently.)

As if I wasn't feeling old enough already

I also went from a Spectrum 48 to the Amiga, but mine was the original type with the rubber keys. I wasn't a fan of the Amstrad produced Speccy plus things they made later (the Sinclair QL was interesting though).

And I agree, back then games were hard. These days even games with a reputation for difficulty can be finished in a few hours, I can't recall ever completing a single Spectrum game (bloody Thorin would never lift me out through that window, no matter how I asked him).

I guess having graphics help with visual clues and stuff?
*remembers old computers/DOS and old games as squiggly characters on a black screen*

The oldest games I recall are Spectre (I think it was called - some kind of racing game?) and Pathways into Darkness. Both played on my daddy's mac (late 80ies early 90ies?). I didn't get either game but Spectre was somewhat fun anyway... (Pathways wasn't - I didn't like how the big mouths on legs screamed when you shot them...)

Having graphics! Yes it was annoying when they were text only. Although it added to the atmosphere in an imaginative bookish way, typing in the correct instructions in the correct syntax was terribly frustrating even back then.

The Amstrad Speccys did lose the iconic look and feel but real keys did improve my performance on games like Hypersports and Daley Thompson's Decathlon. I could do the 100m in under 9.4 on my own machine but struggled to get under 10 secs with the rubber ones. But whatever keys you had the 400m was actual physical agony. 40-50 seconds of flatout button bashing was a new kind of pain to me. And these days they say video games are inactive and promote obesity!