Thanks for your continued interest in my blog which I thoroughly love doing, going forward I aim to post two articles per week usually on a weekend, so stay tuned as I’ve some great stuff coming up over the next two or three months or so which I hope you’ll find interesting!
Can’t believe I’ll be uploading my 50th post in a couple of weeks!
What you may not know is they’ve also done several specials dedicated to a particular theme - Amiga, Resident Evil to name but a couple, the latest special is dedicated to Japanese gaming and it’s a superb read!
The magazine begins with a detailed and top quality article about shopping in the world famous Akihabara, the electronics and gaming district of Tokyo (number one place to visit on my bucket list!) followed by a map featuring the best gaming shops to visit. This special issue then goes on to feature articles about Lunar Silver Star Story, the biggest selling JRPG you’ve never heard of, Pachinko - a massively popular gaming activity in Japan, a guide to Japanese systems you’ve never heard of, and finishes with articles on Japanese exclusive shooters for the Sega Dreamcast, a look at seven experimental games for the Gameboy Advance which were never released outside Japan, and finally, a snapshot of Japan’s toy history.
It really is a fascinating read and worth buying for the article about Akihabara alone not to mention all the other great content, this is a must-read for anyone interested in Japanese gaming.
Available from https://fusionretrobooks.com/search?q=fusion+japan price £3.99
You could play games, this however required spending a ridiculously long time typing in a massively long program out of a magazine such as Your Sinclair or Sinclair User and usually no matter how carefully you typed everything in, upon typing ‘Run’ you would then get the message ‘Error at line xxx’, you would then have to go right back to that line where you’d discover you’d typed in a comma instead of a full stop. Also what games that were available were unbelievably basic and only in black and white.
The keyboard was a flat membrane affair making speed typing impossible as you really had to press each key for it to register, for extra power a 16K (!) RAM pack was available which incredibly stuck to the back of the machine with velcro, the major issue with this was that if the dog happened to bump into the table leg you’d lose everything you’d typed such was the instability of it.
Frankly the ZX81 was a good idea very poorly executed and I look back upon it in 2022 as a bit of a nightmare and a joke, thank goodness home computing and gaming have come on in leaps and bounds since then!
