R Tape loading error, 0:1

We live in a violent society, driven by Daily Mail headlines calling for the banning of This Sick Filth. Guess what's to blame? Video games, usually. I sort of agree... but it's nothing to do with the content.

It's the loading times.

I remember when life seemed a lot calmer; people, in general, had a lot more patience, and were happy with their lot, by and large. Loading games from cassette onto your Spectrum, taking 5-10 minutes at a time, meaning you had to do your homework or something else other than staring at a picture of Horace and the Spiders. It created a generation of people who exercised patience, caution, and, in my case, sent in stuff like this to Your Sinclair.

I was only 14. Please be kind. Your Sinclair, by the way, is the biggest single influence on magazines today. Any magazine you see with even a slight sense of subversive humour, that's the YS influence. Just ask someone at SFX magazine.

I don't begrudge the PlayStations and Xbox 360s of today. Not in the least. I actually feel sorry for the kids who never benefited from the character-building trudge of azimuth alignment problems and waiting for what seemed an eternity for the latest Mastertronic £1.99 game bought with a hard earned fifty pee a week pocket money. Full priced games used to be under a tenner. Wonderful too if you had two tape-to-tape decks. Not that I ever did anything untoward. Ahem.

The 8-bit era gave us such classics as Head Over Heels, Batman: The Caped Crusader, Chase HQ, Sabre Wulf, Exolon, Cybernoid... They may not have the sophistication of today's games, but they had soul, character and spirit. Not to mention the fact that you did not take them for granted; you put in the time waiting for them to load, and by golly you were going to make the most out of them. There were no save points that you could casually go back to whenever you felt like it. If you wanted to complete the game, you had to do it in the allotted amount of lives you were given (POKEs and cheats notwithstanding).

Games were genuinely tough back then, too. Out of the (estimated) 1000 or so games I managed to get for my Speccy, I never managed to complete 75% of them. Games are too short and too easy nowadays. The stunning visuals, cinematics and sound you get today have been traded in for difficulty. I think I've perhaps been spoiled to the point that I would now struggle with playing a lot of 8-bit games.

Back to the virtue of patience, and I found it tested during last night's Execution of Gary Glitter on Channel 4. Despite my own stance on the subject matter, I found myself getting increasingly impatient waiting for the Glitter to become a bauble. I fully understand what Channel 4 were trying to achieve with it, but it would probably have been a bit more emotionally engaging if they used a celebrity subject who is genuinely liked by the public, or at least not as reviled as Glitter. Like H from Steps or someone. If nothing else, Channel 4 have managed to create an audience longing to see a man getting executed.

Well done.

I actually found myself hoping that they wouldn't cop out at the last minute and give him a reprieve. That's what sort of monster they created in me last night. Bastards.
The self-congratulatory back-slapping that will be going on at Channel 4 HQ today is ill-deserved. It was all about sensationalism, and the message of "should we bring back capital punishment?" was lost amongst Hilton McRae gurning and growling his best sub-Johnny Rotten impression, looking like Wang from Tekken as Charlie Brooker so brilliantly pointed out, and fictionalised sound bites from Britain's Second Most Right-Wing Man, Garry Fucking Bushell. The worst thing was at the end when I realised that Glitter was actually still alive, no doubt loving the fact that his monstrous ego is in the public eye again.

I wonder what ratings-baiting stunt Channel 4 are planning next. Possibly a frame-by-frame analysis of the former Cheryl Tweedy punching that woman in the toilets and her racist outburst that they want you to forget. Or, my favourite, Patrick Kielty in a real life Logan's Run situation.

We'll just have to patiently wait until then. Beeeeeeeeeeee boop. Beeeeeeeeeeee biddlybiddlybiddlybiddlybiddlybiddlybiddly... *


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* That's a Spectrum tape loading noise, by the way. Thought you'd better know that.