Aaron mentioning the Sears Wish Book brings back the memories. I remember spending hours going through the toy section, taking a marker and circling what I wanted for Christmas (of course I wanted everything). Aaron professionally nailing the Pixel Addict sponsor read 🤣🤣🤣 Merry Christmas everybody. 🎄🎅🎁
Merry belated Christmas guys and wishing you all a happy and healthy 2024! Thanks so much for all of your content, such an entertaining watch/listen that gets me through each Monday at work. Cheers!
It was always traditional to have a Christmas eve ghost story. The signal man is an all time classic. I think the author you mean Aaron is M R James, I'd describe them more as ghost stories rather than horror.
@@Lordborak316 I saw The Ash Tree the other day. The BBC version is completely crazy, a bit like The Thing! Another great source of (written) ghost stories, btw, is Rudyard Kippling.
Christmas games? For me it's a simple answer - Christmas 1989 Amiga Batpack. I can vividly remember loading up Batman The Movie early on Christmas morning, and that incredible bassy music starting! The game is still great fun. Thanks for another classic Christmas episode, only enhanced by the extreme knowledge of Aaron!
Bought my A500 in the summer of 1987. With the 1081 monitor, they cost me £920. No games in the shops for it. The only place that you could get an Amiga from was a Commodore business dealer.
There was a computer shop called Computerware in Bexhill-on-Sea that sold Atari STs and Amiga A500s back in 1987. I went for an ST that year as it was £299 inc VAT but the A500 was £500, excluding VAT! A year later I sold the ST for £200 and got and Amiga A500 which had dropped price to £399 inc VAT by then and I remember the ST going up in price to £399 but to soften the blow they bundled in a shitload of games. The price increase was due to a shortage in RAM chips if I recall correctly. Games were available in large numbers for both computers during this period.
i live in canterbury and im hoping you also visited level up games on the kings mile, which is another great retro store in the city, another one for the mapif not already included, thanks for the great weekly pod cast
WH Smiths was my GoTo for Games, and I think that we bought my ZX81 and Spectrum from there. I bought my Phillips G7000 from Rumbelows (electronics retailer, not sure if it was national) - and they were the only shop to sell the games for it too. Oddly, a memory surfaces of buying VIC-20 cartridges from an independent record store (Challenger and hicks I believe).
I remember the Commodore 64 kiosks at Sears. The computers rarely worked and after a time either the TV or computer would be missing. The lower portion of the kiosk is where the software was located. Mostly Commodore branded programs.
My dad worked ay JC Penney, my mom at Sears. They would each bring my brother, my sister, and I our own copy of the "Wish Book". We would circle what we wanted. Just like someone mentioned we wanted everything but out of 20 items we might get 2. Now we would get other things that werent in the Wish Books. Darn..........I "wish" now I would have kept those Wish Books as they would be full of memories or $$$$ if I wanted to sell them!!!
@dave if Argos was the store you all spoke of a while ago, where you would go into a showroom and pick up a ticket for an item to be given to you after check out we had a similar chain in the US called Service Merchandise. They had a large showroom that only contained one item of everything they carried when you paid you would pick up your items at a conveyor belt type area. They also had a large well-known catalog that you could shop for certain items that weren’t on the showroom floor for later pick up. They had such a great variety of items that my parents could do about 99% of their Christmas shopping in that one store most years.
There are actually two Star Wars Arcade games by Sega - the first, in 1994 is called Star Wars Arcade and was converted to the 32X. The follow up is called Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, which came out in 1998 and that was not converted, as far as I know.
Re: Christmas Games... Like Chris, for the last few years, I've tried to make a point of playing Xmas Lemmings, and Home Alone (PC). I start getting the urge to play them by mid November now. :-)
Accurate conversions of arcade classics like Space Invaders, Frogger, Pacman or Asteroids were few and far between, certainly on the ZX Spectrum which I believe was the machine Chris owned. Some were fun and a few were playable, but with only a few exceptions the vast majority were huge disappointments, rushed out to meet demand at a time when coders didn't know the machines that well. Almost none of them captured the spirit and speed of the originals.
Thanks again for the great content. Gremlins 2 I will defend it. The director didn’t want to make a sequel so he made it stupid on purpose. It’s ok for madness reasons.
