So I’ve decided to make a blog for some reason… Why because everyone else has done it and I realised I do have some opinions to opine after all.

So… As I think deeply about this dilemma as to what to blog about (and yeah I do have opinions on everything) I’ve decided to make this blog about video games… How novel.

Now video games have been made fun of by everyone… So this will be nothing new. Proclaiming you like video games on internet is like claiming that the sky is blue or that Chris Brown is an awful human being.

Now I’m actually quite young (19) so I grew up on Gamecube and PS2 but I like to collect a lot of the retro video game consoles and games… I guess you can blame the amount of retro reviewers and collectors on YouTube for this. Plus modern gaming is starting to get really crap, I blame Don Mattrick and companies homogenizing into yearly franchise release as they see gamers as the great cash cow and not a bunch of enthusiasts bound together by their love of many disparate types of gaming.

So I’ve decided to make my blog about specific video game consoles… But as opposed to making this about why the NES or the SNES are so great…. I’m going to make this about semi-obscure consoles.

I say semi-obscure because whilst some of my consoles are more obscure than others they aren’t really majorly obscure. Amongst my collection are consoles like the 3DO or the Vectrex, they aren’t the most obscure thing’s out there, whilst not everyone is going to know what they are there are people that will know of them. It’s not like I’m talk about the Casio Loopy or the Watara Super Vision.

And the thing is a lot of the more obscure consoles I own are just repackaged versions of other consoles. The Sega NoMad is just a portable Megadrive and the Neo Geo CD is just a more cost efficient version of the Neo Geo AES, which in turn is just a consolized version of the Neo Geo MVS. And with all this it brings me to the first console of this first blog… The Amiga CD32.

Now what is the Amiga CD32 you may ask?? Well it is a consolized version of the Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga was a computer that was capable of doing computer things but it was also capable of games. The console itself isn’t actually all that different from an actual Amiga computer and it’s easy to hack it to do all the things the original Amiga computer can do. Infact it’s actually possible to get an attachment that lets you play the original Amiga floppy disks on it. However for the purposes of this blog I’m going to focus on the stock system.

The Amiga CD32 has a rather boxy design. The console has a head phone slot on it which whilst unusual can be useful if your TV doesn’t have a headphone slot or alternatively doesn’t have one that works properly (yeah, yours truly – getting a fat TV these days that works at all is a nightmare). The disc slot opens upwards. One odd design however is that the controller ports are on the side of the console which can be quite annoying depending on where you put it.

Also the power adapter is huge and it has a Commodore logo in the middle. Its design is fascinating to a geek like me but to any normal person it’s just odd.

Now what’s the most important part of any game, well – being able to play it and what do you use to play it. A controller of course. Some of these are ergonomic delights, others seem to have been designed with the anatomy of a strange alien such is their tenuous link to human anatomy. The problem here is that when I got my Amiga CD32 from Ebay I didn’t get the official controller so I can’t actually give a real opinion on it as to whether the designer of the controller had actually fitted it to a human hand… But I did find out that it was listed as one of the 10 worst controllers so maybe I’m not missing out. It also looks like the handle bars of a bike.

Instead I got this thing.

 

This third party controller is made by Competition Pro and it’s passable. I mean it’s not terrible but it’s not that great either. The buttons are fine (expect for the fact that the one of the bottom right on my device is worn, unresponsive and just nasty) but perfection from something this old is not to be expected. The D-pad is quite stiff which makes pulling off certain precise movements quite arduous – and these old games were tough enough. However there is a saving grace, the CD32 utilizes the same 9-pin port as established back in the Atari VCS days and carried forward on systems like the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis for those of you across the pond). And, unlike a Megadrive controller whacked without pause for thought into an Atari 7800 port, which results in an eternally firing pad, the Amiga 32 follows the same wiring scheme as the Mega Drive, allowing the pretty decent controller’s from that console to just “work”. Nowadays any company with the temerity to follow the same controller wiring scheme/plug shape as another would probably find themselves buried under 3 ton of dead trees in the form of writs, summons, patents and copyright infringement claims from the likes of Apple & Samsung. But these were less corporate, pioneering days where the devices and the games, and indeed the gamers themselves, came first.

Of course now a days the most important part of any games console is to play games. So what games did the Amiga CD32 have? Well quite a few. Back in those days one of the most prominent genres was platformers. These very from the awesome Super Frog to the also very good James Pond 2 series. It also has more strategic games like Worms and Cannon Fodder. It even had its own version of the popular arcade fighting game Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo.

So as you can see the Amiga CD32 is a very good system. So hopefully it’s either convinced you to buy one.. Or at the very least you look at this blog and thought to yourself “Yes… That’s a thing.”