Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column, the 13th of its kind.
Only one “bit” in the free version this week, the demands of the new radio show and ensuing cross-country move mean I will be scaling down what I give away for free over the next weeks. I hope you understand. Paid subscribers will get their usual gigantic wad of quality. And you can join them ANY TIME by clicking here and selecting the option that costs you literally one shiny UK pound a week. Approx. I’m not an economist. But the people who run this internet thing are. Ish. And you can cancel at any time.
Ok. On y va with with content.
So SERIOUSLY folks? If you normally just READ these? Give the audio version a try. It literally has these words read out loud. And you get THE THEME TUNE!
Let’s Call This Bit Dominik’s Famous Friends, because that actually WAS a section of the old Dominik’s Big Purple Column.
DOMINIK’S FAMOUS FRIENDS
I want to talk about missed opportunities. Of the infiniteness of life and how you never know what is going on outside of your own circle of existence. I know. It’s a pretty big topic for a videogames column/podcast thing. But it’s ALL to do with videogames. On two levels.
Brian McClair. Legendary footballer for Celtic and Man Utd. He has a podcast called Life with Brian which I cannot recommend highly enough. His guests on it are wonderful: he has had comedian Mark Steele, Mani from Primal Scream and the Stone Roses, greatest snooker player ever John Higgins, Raymond Meade from Ocean Colour Scene to name a few. He is also one of the most intelligent footballers ever. And I LOVE intelligent footballers. Because there aren’t many – him. Graeme le Saux Lee Dixon. Pat Nevin.
Now when they asked me to go on his podcast, I thought it was because I was a well-known Celtic fan and he played for Celtic. However, once we get chatting Brian revealed that he was a MASSIVE videogame fan in the 90s. He lived on one side of the road and Gary Pallister lived on the other. Brian was a Nintendo guy and Pallo was a Sega guy. And they would just cross the road to each other’s houses and play videogames. And that is cool. And what is even cooler is that Brian loved GamesMaster, and I said I wished I’d known cos I would have LOVED to have had him on as a guest, him and Pallister would have been great, and then we had chat about whether Sir Alex Ferguson would have let them go on GamesMaster or not. Anyway, the podcast is called The Life With Brian and I thoroughly recommend it, not just the episode with me but all of them, he really is a unique guy. But the COOLEST thing Brian said was that one of the games that first got him into videogames was Asteroids in the arcades. And that was probably my favourite of that golden era of arcade games because it was the first truly open world videogame.
Brian McClair's podcast. Give it a listen. But listen to MY one first, eh?
I spoke about PacMan in a previous podcast and how that blew my mind because it was the first game I played where you could exit the screen and come on at the other side, albeit through one single corridor. But Asteroids made that nuts because you could go off the screen ANYWHERE and reappear at the other side with utter mathematic precision. And I am a maths geek, I love words, but I also love numbers and Asteroids was a game of angles. There was a great tactic to rack up huge scores where you just got it down to one medium sized asteroid and then sat in one of the corners and waited for the UFO to appear. If you got your angles right, you didn’t even have to move – you could fire across the screen or ever off the screen – cos the laser shots went wraparound as well. And you could just pick him off and it was so rewarding.
Now I can tell why Brian McClair liked Asteroids, because he was a university student when he started playing football, one of the very few to do that – and he studied Maths. So, he is also a fellow maths geek AND I know he likes John Cooper Clark who is one of the greatest performance poets the UK has ever produced.
So, you know what’s coming… it’s YET ANOTHER VIDEOGAMES POEM BY DOMINIK DIAMOND. I thought I’d write a poem trying to pull all that together – the wraparound nature of asteroids and how if I’d met Brian McClair earlier in life, we’d have been pals.
It’s a poem of regret, of missed opportunities of wondering what might have been and who else may have been sitting out there playing videogames and watching GamesMaster, and who I could have been friends with.
It’s called…
I’m Brian McClair
(Sometimes the simple ones are the best)
I couldn’t beat those asteroids in the arcade near my home
Battling waves of giant rocks mostly on my own
And then one day this kid came up and said I’ve got a tip.
I’ll show you how to crush this game with mathematic zip.
I'm Brian. Brian McClair.
He dispatched the wireframe rocks without breaking sweat
Leaving one to drift across the screen from right to left
His spaceship in the corner his lasers cutting paths
He turned to me and winked and said "see this son? This is maths"
I'm Brian. Brian McClair
He must have played for half an hour on that initial screen
Dispatching UFOs with a grace i'd never seen
He was playing the angles rotating his spacecraft
He was THINKING how to play the game This boy he wisnae daft.
He was Brian. Brian McClair
HE said right son it's your turn I've shown you what to do
Get about these asteroids I've go things to do
A different game with balls and boots I'm feeling quite excited
Today I play with asteroids tomorrow Man Utd.
I'm Brian. Brian McClair. Call Me Choccy
“Why Choccy?” I asked.
“No time for that, son. This poem is over.”
“What?
And tso it the FREE version of this week’s Little Old Purple Column. I’m going to be tightening up what I’m giving away for nothing over the next little bit, because the new radio show and subsequent cross country move is taking up an insane amount of time. If you DO want to get another couple of thousand words each week written AND spoken out loud by me including THIS WEEK…
The return of the best toy we ever had BEFORE video games
AND
Chat about the best 4-player games of all time. And by that I mean “4-players on their arses in the same room on the same machine on the same telly you can stick your modern online gaming right up your arse because this was proper interactive social gaming.”
AND
A bit of game news about a game everyone in the whole world loves but I don’t.
All you have to do is click this button
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Hopefully see some of you in the PAID section and the COMMENTS section afterwards. Otherwise until next week? Keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
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