Author: kerr9000

The Sickness, life is short play more.

Ok so I must start by saying that this is an updated version of a post I made for my own now abandoned  blog back in 2015, I stumbled across it and thought that it seemed somehow more relevant and important now than ever and I wanted to bring something more akin to a long form essay here as apposed to the retro reviews I have done in the past as id like to make people stop and think. So without further ado here goes my old post with a little editing to add a little something to the soup. Oh and I suppose I should just add I talk about some dark stuff here like physical violence so consider this a trigger warning but id also like to think its a story of hope and of overcoming adversity.

I have been reading In the Pit with Piper, Rowdy Roddy Piper’s autobiography. I have to admit that its a very good read I have pretty much finished it with only a few pages left to go. The one thing that was always true about Piper was that he always told it like it was and this book is no exception. This makes it an incredibly interesting and readable book even if he he doesn’t go into much detail about his WWF days after Wrestlemania 2 and almost ignores his time in WCW. I am not really here to review the book though, more to talk about some of the things Piper mentions in it. Now you might think that a man who smashed himself in the head with a bottle just to get heat for a match, a man who made his living wrestling and who took risks he didn’t need too is not a smart man but I actually think that Piper was very clever. He knew how to sell himself he knew how to keep making himself relevant, how to fight the system and how to make sure that he never got completely swallowed up by all the craziness.

Piper talks in his book about what he calls the ”sickness” something about the wrestling business which made wrestlers go too far, do too much and take incredible risks and put tremendous strain on both there minds and there bodies just to do a good job, just to put food on there tables to feed there wives and there children, he talks about how many of his fellow wrestlers either committed suicide or died before there time because of this and how certain deaths really hit him hard. Piper argues that wrestling is the only industry he knows in which this kind of thing happens. Now on the one hand I have to agree with Roddy Piper, I believe that the sickness exists, but I don’t believe it is limited to wrestling in fact I believe I have felt its pull myself. I used to work for a well known Pub/Bar company, I am sure it wouldn’t take many guesses to work out which one but I wont say obviously for legal reasons. I definitely had the sickness while working there, this sickness was an urge to do whatever I had to do to be successful there, to get as high up and prominent as I could while taking all of the shots I had to in order to honour both the pub I worked for and the company name in general.

So what makes me want to talk about this now what made me take a small part of everything that Roddy said in his book and focus on it. Well we sit at a point where the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that tax credit cuts would motivate Britons to work as hard as people in China and that this was a good thing. Add on to this we have people like Alan Sugar from the Apprentice saying that no one in England is poor because we all have mobile phones and microwaves and there is suddenly this image being painted that a large number of us in the UK are lazy and should do more work and earn more money. Now if you look at the statistics around this the UK actually has on average the longest working week in Europe and our productivity is in the middle, this information has been published in several journals and papers including the Guardian. As things stand now about a quarter of the population will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year, with mixed anxiety and depression the most common mental disorder in Britain. So with this true people want us to work more and harder? So this politician is telling us we should as individuals work harder, we should do more and if benefits are lowered basically we should do this for less while Members of Parliament have huge wage rises and expense accounts which cause scandals sounds wonderful doesn’t it?

Now since I originally wrote this article things have gotten even worse with a pandemic and politicians proving ever more unreliable, and at this very moment furlough a device to keep people in work has been stopped so a lot of people could end up on there arses. When I wrote this the job market was already very much a buyers market with companies being able to demand almost anything from employees with the pendulum very rarely even in the slightest of ways swinging in favour of the employees. Now this is likely to become even more true.

So back to the sickness. I grew up being told that a Man was what he did, that to be a man you had to work hard and try to make the biggest impact on the world as you could, that nothing was more important than this, I suppose this was a bit of what would now be called toxic masculinity. So I ended up working from 48 to 70 hours a week trying to not only build myself up as something of importance but also to make the branch I worked for come across as the best it could be, and to try and push the brand name of the company I worked for. What did I get for my trouble? I got frequently punched, I had my arm dislocated by a blow from a wooden bar stool when I tried to stop a drunken jerk from hitting an eighty year old man with it, I had someone attempt to glass me, but worst of all I got my head smashed open by a gang of robbers with crowbars and to pour insult on top of this I also got punched in the mouth and had some of my teeth shattered for standing up to one of the robbers who decided he just might mid robbery want to rape one of my female colleagues. During all of this I worked myself up from barman up to basically the deputy manager of this place, I often did the stock for the place, the rota’s, disciplinary proceedings, and I gave it my all. I never really got a real thank you for any of it, I just had more and more demanded from me while my boss did less and less and tried to pass her responsibilities off on to other people. The only good thing about any of this was the bond I shared with some of my close co-workers, a bond that was forged in the fire of workload, a bond forged by the fact we all had to face being sworn at and spat at and attacked while those above us tried to get more and more out of us. What can you call putting up with this and actually trying to do more and more than a sickness?
So how did all of this end? Well the beginning of the end was when I ended up in a hospital room, my throat had closed and my body was covered in rashes and welts. I sat there as a Doctor told me and my father that my body was shutting down from stress and that if I didn’t change things pronto then I would most likely be dead in six months. You would think this would be the end. You would think I hung up my work shoes and went on sick or got a less demanding job wouldn’t you? Well the truth is I tried to ask my boss about less hours or a demotion and I got told do your job or leave. So what I did was continue to do my job. Why you might ask? Well I wanted the best for my daughter I wanted her to have the things I hadn’t had and I quiet bluntly didn’t really care if I died if that got her what she needed. If I had died the mortgage would have been paid off and as far as I knew at the time she would have been OK and I would have gone out in a blaze of glory at the top of my game. What actually happened was very different though. A few months went by and then I found that I kept seeing, hearing and feeling the robbery again and again, I could feel the crowbars hit my head, I could hear my ears ringing and I could feel the panic that I might die or that something worse might happen. This was too much PTSD (which I was later diagnosed with) and work stressed combined gave me what can best be described as a nervous breakdown. I ended up on sick-pay attending trauma therapy and trying to put my life back together, again I asked about returning to less hours or to a demotion and got told ”Come back and do the job your employed for or don’t come back at all” what is worse is that despite the PTSD was as a direct result of what I suffered while at that job, during the robbery my employer fired me while off sick, this was after a heck of a lot of messing me around I believe in an effort to make me quit. I still for a time wanted to go back, to work to work hard and to try and get my own Pub, and to go even higher up the chain, wanting that even for an instant despite all of what had happened to me cant be described as anything but a sickness. Add to this the fact I was with someone who didn’t support me emotionally, someone who didn’t care that I might die who only cared that I had stopped bringing in the money she could enjoy buying things to please herself with.
This is what certain people in the government and idiots like Alan Sugar seem to be wanting from my point of view, people who will push themselves harder and harder till they either make it or fall apart at the seams and they want this even knowing that it will leave people in pieces unable to cope. Still from the conservative point of view if someone ties a noose around there neck and ends it all then they are no longer a burden on the system. This is wrong, there are people out there who cant work, or who cant work as much and as hard as they are pushing for due to illness both physical and mental, this whole system and the pressure it creates makes them feel like less than nothing and that is wrong.  This pandemic might very well have swept the rug from out under the feet of countless people, people who have been in the same job for years trained to keep doing the same thing now finding that thing no longer exists and that a lot of there experience and hard work now feels like it was for nothing and like they need to start again, well this is somewhere I have been and I can tell you its hard and its scary but you can do it.
So where do I find myself now? I live a very different life, I work as much as I need to in order to get by, I make sure to concentrate as much on myself, my dreams and my hobbies as much if not more so than the work I do. I might be poorer but I am a lot happier. I have plenty of illnesses, I am an epileptic for one but I no longer have the sickness, I have learned the word ”NO” and I have learned to be more than just a job, I have learned to be a person. I have also learned to make sure that the people in my life are supportive people who love me for who I am and not for financial reasons or for what I can get them.
What can I say Piper was more than just a wrestler or a motor mouth I think he was a very honest man who said it how he saw it, there are not enough people like this in the world. You are being Missed already Roddy. RIP
You may be wondering how in the heck this is connected to video games and why I have chosen to put this up here but the honest truth is that I think that a marketing slogan which Sony used a slogan which goes ”Life is short play more games”. When I was young one of my uncles told me that no matter how much money you earn the one thing that you cant buy is the time back you spent earning that money. In these very trying times I think that fun is even more important than it ever has been, I think that people need to engage in there pastimes, talk to friends, spend time reaching out and talking to like minded individuals and its for this reason that I am very happy that all of us here are lucky enough to have GRCADE.

SNES Game Review 49: Super Ghouls N Ghosts

Sometimes there is a game series that just seems to pop up in your life again and again. I did a lot of my gaming on the spectrum to start with and I played a heck of a lot on a certain 9 or 10 games, one of these games was ghouls and goblins. Now the game worked on the spectrum it was perfectly playable but like a lot of spectrum games the game was playable but the graphics and the colours used were a mess. At the time we dealt with them because well hey that’s all we had. Compare this to now days when if a game on the current generation of Xbox one’s and PS4 doesn’t hit 1080p at a constant of at least 30 frames per second then it is considered to some degree to be a failure. I could go on to a whole rant about how gamers now days can be so judgemental or how kids have grown up as graphical whores who seem to deny a game any merit unless it meets a certain set of numerical standards, or how we could use our imagination back then but I wont. Instead I will simply say that when there was a jump in quality from one machine to the next it amazed us and we appreciated it.

Next Ghosts and Goblins game into my life, my brother’s friend was the first to have it on his megadrive which he would bring round to our house. One day he turned up with that and Rambo 3 and we all pretty much spent the better part of about 6 hours trying to get as far as we could in the two of them. I got the megadrive version myself some years latter. When I first saw the SNES game Super Ghouls and Ghosts my reaction was oh they ported it to the Snes and felt they needed to add a Super in to the name big deal been there done that. I was wrong though. I don’t know if you could fully describe it as a sequel as there seems to be a lot taken from both Ghosts and Goblins and Ghouls and ghosts in this game so it’s either just a sequel sticking very close to the original format or it’s a sort of Ghosts 2.5 semi sequel of sorts. What I do know though is that it is more than worth owning both the Megadrive and Snes games if you can pick them up, and if you like a challenge.

If you don’t like games that will repeatedly hammer you into the ground, that will repeatedly see you die and have to try again and again then do not go near this game. If you enjoy a challenge though and you get a great sense of pride from doing what moments before seemed almost impossible then this game is going to be digital crack to you. A friend of mine well his parents used to have a sort of agreement with him, he didn’t get much pocket money because they thought he would spend it all on sugared sweets and run around fruit loops so they used to give him a small amount but then they’d buy him games every now and then throughout the year. One of the rules though was that his Dad picked the games so he didn’t get rubbish ones (he got a say in his Christmas and birthday presents but not these random games) and that he had to be completing games in order to get new ones…. and yep you’ve guessed it the poor git got brought Super Ghosts and Goblins. I had gotten it myself so we used to compare how far we had got at least until the day he begged his folks for permission to trade it in for something that didn’t make him scream.

The graphics were kind of basic but had a lot of color in them and fitted the theme well. The music though man I loved the music from the very first time I heard it. One funny thing to note is that there used to be a sofa place not sure if it still exists if it does it certainly isn’t on TV anymore but it used to be called ‘’The Leather Warehouse’’ and for some reason I couldn’t Listen to the song in the first stage without singing  ‘’The leather Warehouse at a moment where it seemed to fit in’’  (the song goes kind of  Daaaa dadd daaaaa daa daaaa daaaa daaaa   followed with a silent pause and in the silent pause id always shout it) I was at a gaming convention in there retro room one year (Game City) which is held in Nottingham and I was playing this on the big TV and even did it, have to admit lots of people looked at me very strangely especially the younger ones who probably didn’t know what I was on about or thought it was some kind of bondage club… Still I digress the music gets in to your head so deep.

I love the game but it’s a hard one to rate as it all depends on if you like a challenge if you do then its an 8 out of 10, if you don’t then well its more a 5 or a 6 as your not going to be saying its bad but you will soon be referring to it with swear words and feeling like you wasted your money. Plenty of copies of this game cart only sell for around the 15 quid mark or more even imports. I would suggest it might be wise to look at investing in one of Capcoms classic collections as you wont pay much more and you will get a bunch of other games with it.. there have been classics like this for the ps1, ps2, psp etc. Capcom its stuff like this that makes me remember my love for you.

SNES Game Review 47: Street Fighter 2 Turbo

Sports games were no strangers to the regular update system, but there was a time when they were pretty much the only thing to receive this kind of treatment, sure there would be sequels to games in every genre but the following game will always be accused of being the game which brought on the situation we now find ourselves in, the situation of having improved versions of games, DLC ecetera, I am of course talking about Street Fighter 2 turbo.

Street fighter 2 turbo basically took the world warrior, increased the speed, let you play as the boss characters and had some slight balancing related changes, it wasn’t a whole new game it was simply an improved version of the original with a few bells and whistles tied on to it. No one really minded what it was because well an improved version of one of the greatest games of a genre who is going to complain about that? It is important to note though that while some of us moan now about DLC and about paying Extra to add a few new characters back then plenty of people brought Street Fighter 2 turbo for 40quid or even more if they were over excited and importing it.
I was young so importing it or buying one of the imports that was being sold in some of the gaming shops near me for figures around 80quid was out of the question. I didn’t expect to get it for a long time, one of the fortunate parts of both of my brothers being older than me though was that sometimes one of them would get something I wanted. I walked in one of the local games shops with my brother and they ran a system where games were kept in different sections in relation to their worth.. Now someone must have been looking at a Japanese copy of turbo and put it in the wrong section because it was in a section for 20quid games. The shop owner ran a policy where you could swap any game of yours for one of the shops games for 3quid if they were worth the same. The store owner was out and his wife was running the store and so my brother swapped some old game he had for Japanese Turbo for 3quid.
We went home and played the living heck out of it, for at least 2 weeks my house became the place to be, friends of mine and friends of his kept popping round to challenge one of us. I owned world warrior at the time and although Turbo was great I couldn’t help but think that it was in no way worth the massive amounts people were paying for it. It hadn’t moved on enough from World Warrior but then again it wasn’t a sequel was it. I think I enjoyed the attention and the way it brought everyone together almost more than the game. It did become the new version played at every party well at least until Super street fighter 2
As a side note I remember a special pad being made a pad which had buttons which could with 1 press cause your characters to do there special moves, I didnt need one of these as I was very good at the game but the whole idea fascinated me, they were also programmable so you could programme combo’s into a single button press. I messed around with this pad no end seeing what I could do with it not just on Street fighter 2 but on any other game. I did use the pad for training purposes though. There was a friend of mine who would always be Ken and would spam fireballs he had gotten it down to a fine art, he could do them so fast it would seem inhuman. He was a great person but he began to get a little too cocky with it and it started running friendly get togethers as he would fireball so much that no one seemed able to beat him, no matter how much you dodged or blocked it would get you in the end. So I got my brother to use the street cheater pad against me till I could perform fireballs at insane speed. Then I was ready it was Ken against Ken and I taught him a lesson about how boring fireball spamming can get… this in itself put me off street fighter for a little bit though.
I could talk about the graphics, the sound the characters but I did it all when I talked about world warrior, all I would be saying is a little better , a little faster, the same ohhh and you can play as the bosses. I gave world Warrior 8 out of 10 and yes this is better but it’s only just better really so I’d Give it 8.5 out of 10.
If you do decide you want this version and on cartridge then it will set you back around £10 which is well worth it but again you might want to stop and consider all of your options first (If you own a ps3 or xbox 360 then for £15 to £20 you can get the Ultra version of Street Fighter 4).  This game is also available on the Wii U as a download but then so is Street fighter alpha 2, a much latter street fighter game with more characters and a lot harder and costlier to track down on the SNES … as the price is the same if you want a downloadable street fighter for your Nintendo system that is the one I would go for.
Was this game the start of a dangerous trend though?