I forgot to tell you about this before I sodded off to Bosworth and Wales. Me and Paula (Wizzley's WordChazer) met up in real life at a gaming convention. She was working. I was playing the games and drinking her wine. *grin*
It was great to finally meet her after years of writing on the same sites (three of them to date, with us both firmly entrenched on Wizzley now). She's as lovely IRL as she appears to be on the forum, and VERY deaf aware too. Which is a good job really....
As for the Revival convention - WOW! She was there representing the Centre for Computing History. I arrived expecting to view a quiet exhibition of ancient computers, which was fine by me. I'm a historian AND a computer geek, so it ticked two boxes. What I didn't anticipate was walking into a MASSIVE collection of just about every computer game from the 1970s until today. Each one ready to be played on consoles that I hadn't seen in decades.
Paula and I played Pong on a black and white television. I then proceeded to game my way through various levels in the evolution of Mario, from an ancient Atari through Super Mario 64 and others besides. I was shocked at how rusty I was on some, and how much it had changed over the years, half without us really noticing. To my eternal shame, I got Mario killed by a goomba on the first jump in a 1990s version; left him stranded in a moat in the 64; and couldn't even work out how to get him onto the next level in the 1980s one.
What happened to all those skills gained in my misspent youth?! They must have been in the brain cells that I killed off in the early 1990s, when the misspending went into overdraft.
Paula, on the other hand, can game like a champion. I hand any pixel crown that I could have ever pretended to own over to her.
