Author: kerr9000

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The GRcade Birmingham Christmas Meet Up 2024

So the 9th Of November was the GRcade Birmingham Christmas meet up, and it was a fantastic event where around fourteen of us met up, conquering all of the worlds possible train mishaps and issues in order to wander around the Christmas Market, repeatedly get lost and need finding, followed by going to JD Wetherspoons and assembling an ever growing Frankenstein table in the middle of the pub, where we all talked about video games, as well as pretty much every other topic in the world,  while watching the worlds shortest member of bar staff fill a ridiculously high coffee machine certain that at any moment she would topple forwards and just be a set of shoes sticking out the top of the coffee bean hopper.

After this we all went to the NQ64 arcade bar where we talked about games some more, played on a variety of arcade machines, tried various video game themed drinks and ate cake. We all had to leave at different times and combat all manner of difficulties to return home but it was fully worth it to meet the many fantastic members of this forum who attended. It was an event I will never forget and so many of you made a real impact on me, you are all fantastic people and may we have many more meet ups with hopefully an ever increasing turn out.

If you’d like to know anymore about what it was like here is a video I made at the time talking about it.

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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.
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SNES Game Review 48: Super Mario World

Game 48

Editor’s Note – The GRcade forum was experiencing some hosting and management issues at the time this was written, but it was not ultimately “coming to an end” or otherwise closing down. 🙂

I started trying to space my games out a bit, letting there be a wide variety and trying to keep the number of games which were considered true Nintendo classics to a minimum, it wasn’t that I wanted to ignore them, I just wanted to space them out, but now as the end of this forum is near I have thrown this to the wind a little and tried to talk about a lot of bigger games. I have over the last few reviews almost half stopped reviewing the games and just given stories about the games written chunks of my life almost. Gaming has had a huge impact on my life and it’s not just been the games it has been the friends I have made through them, the time I have spent collecting them and all the little things.

It has been suggested before that I own to many games, buy too many games and spend too much time on aspects such as cleaning and repairing them but there are reasons for this. This might be the most personal thing I ever write on here so maybe it is fitting that it is coming so close to the end.

As a child I was a chubby kid with lots of problems and a bit of an attitude. I was both dyslexic and epileptic, so I struggled at school particularly in my first year of comprehensive. Lots of people teased me about my inability to write property, the fact that I could miss spell a word ten different ways in one day, or the fact that I would go vacant when having a small fit and just look in one direction doing nothing saying nothing for a long time. There were two types of bullying I got one was the verbal the other was other kids trying to fight me. Eventual after a few fights I got a reputation, the reputation was that I was a psycho, this was largely because no matter how many people attacked me or how many times I got knocked down I would keep getting up and I would make sure that I gave at least as much pain as I got.. This was a good and a bad thing, it meant that I was largely left alone so the bullying greatly decreased but then no one outside of my small group of friends wanted to know me or have anything to do with me.

Video games were my refuge, I could forget about everything, I could retreat in to my bedroom all of the familiar things around me that made me feel safe and play some Super Mario land. With all of the secrets the game had, the Star road and the connected levels, hidden exits to various ghost houses, there was always a friend who could do a level faster or with more coins and the game just seemed to be infinitely repayable.

I have had some rough times in my life and games have always been there to offer a moment of escape, a chance to forget about my worries. It wasn’t just when I was a kid though. When I was in my twenties I was working in a pub, it was long unsociable hours, I would get home and my partner at the time would be asleep but I would be to stressed from my job to sleep, so I would need to spend time unwinding and most of the time this would be by gaming. I would walk in the door kiss my daughter on the head and then play a few games until I wound down enough to sleep.

I did buy some retro stuff back then but for some reason I didn’t focus on it quiet the way I have now. I suppose the following could go into the ‘’Why do we Retro’’ thread but It belongs here just as much. One day I was at work, I had been trying to get promoted, I was also at university at the time and I knew that I didn’t have long left. I didn’t want to be one of those uni students who gets a degree and then just tries to use it to become a manager without having worked all of the up, without having earned it through hard work. I had managed to become a supervisor but in order to be accepted as a manager one of the things you had to do where I worked was to be able to work in the kitchen successfully.

I was up in the kitchen one night and I had cooked all night, and had managed it quiet well. I cleaned everything up and went through the whole shut down process making sure everything is turned off, I got the rubbish in bags and walked it out, throwing it in the trash. I could have just left then and there having finished my job, but decided that to be nice I would go through to the bar area and I would help them close down. I walked through and there was a sudden flash of pain. I had been hit across the side of my head with a crow bar, I could feel the pain explode through my head, my vision blurred for a second and then a buzzing noise began to come from somewhere deep inside my head. I began to gain awareness of my surroundings again and I could tell I was surrounded by 5 or 6 guys, all of them were wearing Halloween style president masks. Before I could do anything else I was hit with crow bars again and again from various directions, in the end I took about 6 hits to my head. I never passed out but things got increasingly hazy from then. Somehow I made it from where I was to the bar, I kind of felt my way and crawled along the bar to behind it, and I ended up on the ground in the corner under the coffee machine. I could feel blood dripping from my head, luckily I had been wearing a leather cap to keep my hair covered and it seemed to have at least helped a bit.  There were two girls behind the bar one was about 2 years older than me the other was maybe 5. It had become a robbery and hostage situation all in one. In the middle of this one of the robbers decided that he wanted to rape one of the girls, I got up stood in the way and pretty much suggested that it would happen over my dead body, this resulted in me receiving a punch to the mouth which cracked one of my wisdom teeth in half. It was all a blur from then on, but thankfully my intervention had been enough to stop someone getting raped, they left with the money and they were never caught.

I was off for a month and I was only getting very limited sick pay so I pulled out my old consoles and began to play on them and something about them touched me, they took me back to a simpler time, back to my childhood and in a time when I felt the most vulnerable in my life they actually made things seem a little bit safer, they added some normality to a very horrible and strange time. From that point on I began to spend more money on retro games, I began to talk more to other people online, but I also realised that I was living in an awful marriage. My partner never seemed to care about what had happened to me, she didn’t support me, my mother and father were the ones who were there for me, the ones who helped me try and piece myself back together. 8 years later I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which for those who don’t know is basically when a traumatic situation keeps replaying in your mind, you can hear things and see things that happened before and you can feel the feelings. My partner was even less understanding.

I had to stop work and I had to have therapy. Part of my therapy involved having to talk about what had happened to me in great detail but after in order to calm yourself and try to leave in an ok mood and not leave the therapy upset you had to have a happy place. A happy place was a place you went to in your mind where you felt safe and well happy. My happy place was in my bedroom playing Super Mario World on my Snes, jumping on dinosaurs, collecting power ups and finding hidden secrets. I owe the game so much, it was there for me. During this period I didn’t leave my house much except to go to therapy. I sat and played my games, worked on my systems and tried to put my head back together. One of the only things that could get me out of the house was the idea of visiting a market or a retro store chasing the various games I had decided that I wanted the thrill of the chase was getting a game cheap. I got lots of SNES games and megadrive games and for prices which compared to now were for virtually nothing. I didn’t have a lot of friends after this everyone seemed to be too worried that they would say the wrong thing or they were just far more interested in getting drunk than in offering anyone a helping hand or a bit of their time. I had my games and my daughter, my X wife would go see her friends and leave me to struggle, she got increasingly mean to me even telling me that she wished I would die so I wasn’t in her way. My games became my friends, my games became my life. I had a few friends from ONM who I talked to and was close to and they helped a lot as well.

Super Mario land was one of my favourite of the retro games I had, I knew it wasn’t worth crazy amounts of money but it was worth a lot to me because it had been such a big piece of my childhood.

Yeah there is hardly any review here but the game is amazing the graphics were so bright, the music was perfect I would always find myself humming the tunes, but the playability oh my gosh it was simply an amazing game to play, every success felt well-earned every failure felt like it was purely your own fault you never feel like you can blame the game or like you have been cheated The game is a stand out 10 out of 10. I think I could make a very strong argument for it being the greatest Mario game ever. If you want the game then the cart on its own can be got for between the 10 to 15quid amount and I think this is more than a fair price. It was also available as a download for the Wii and Wii U I imagine these are now long gone though.

Sorry if this review went really far off tangent.