The state of games in Northern Ireland……

Ahoy there gamers,

I'm from Belfast in Northern Ireland and I kinda' have a problem with the games for sale here these days. Today's games are all about being big! Having massive ad campaigns and spending years in development, although most of the time the hype destroys most of the fun associated with the game anyways. I mean dont get me wrong i'm gonna play the **** out of GTAIV when it comes out and i'm a major XBOX360 fan, but what do you do when you just want to divulge and go back to the days when gaming was simpler, I'm referring to the early 90's. The reason games were simpler those days was mostly because they were just fun and making money on a game was just an afterthought, and also I was too young and stupid to know what the hell a worm in a space suit really meant.

The fact that retro doesn't exist at all in this place makes me pretty annoyed and being 19 years old I still associate games being the best in the late 80's and early 90's, owning a few good retro consoles like the NES, Mega Drive (Genesis), SNES, Master System, Sega Saturn, N64 and I even managed to track down a Dreamcast a few years ago, you can tell my favourite games all include sprite based combat or the awesomeness of side scrolling platformers. The two most memorable games to me would definitely be Chrono Trigger for the SNES and Comix Zone for Mega Drive; those games were the best because they were so **** hardcore!

I wasted many a rainy day in this fair city playing 2 player versus matches in Virtua fighter 2 for the mega drive (Genesis), having a whack at golden axe and beating guys twice my age in mortal kombat 1…..raiden upper cutting Johnny cage off the bridge into the spike pit…..those where the days!

These days games are all to **** corporate and I especially mean EA, these **** are the destroyers of independent games. If EA bought over every company in the world, every game we know and love would basically be turned into an annual over priced ****-fest with special editions like Guitar Hero 13 "Spring Edition" and people would just loose interest in games altogether.

So if you live in Northern Ireland and you're unhappy with the current state of the gaming industry, what can you do to satisfy your retro needs?

Nothing…..

Absolutely nothing……..

Unless you wanna use EBay!

After a good few hours of research I discovered in Belfast there is basically no where to by retro games, a few gamespot or game stores used to stock maybe a handful of SNES cartridges but now even there gone!

So It turns out if you wanna buy any retro games in Belfast, about all you can do is use a computer that is located in Belfast to log onto EBay and buy away, not much help when you don't feel like buying stuff off a site that sells AIR guitars for actual ****

Besides from knowing someone with a mighty collection, I myself have around 20 mega drive games and around 15 N64 games so that's not much to work with…or being near a convenient car boot sale, there really isn't anything you can do about it.

So I guess at the minute the only real viable option you have if youre a retro junkie is get one of the these ( a pc controller) download an emulator and get yourself some free roms.

It doesn't compare to actually owning the game, but in this place it's as close as you can get to having a packed retro collection.

This is just some of the wolverine stuff i did recently

My buddy spawn, drawn by john mc farlane (me) but created by todd mc farlane, weird huh