M18CTID
Well-Known Member
Seeing the FFP thread upstairs veering wildly off topic and taking on board the advice from one poster about continuing the ZX Spectrum discussion in The Cellar compelled me to finally start a topic about something that used to cause no end of arguments in school playgrounds up and down the country (and in our case, it actually nearly earned us a battering off the local parkie when we told him that his C64 was a shit computer)
For those of you too young to remember, the constant disagreements about which was the best computer used to often quickly degenerate into slanging matches which, I shit you not, were sometimes more heated than rival football fans going at it. I'm not sure whether this level of animosity exists today between XBox and Playstation users but I'd be surprised if it did.
For the record, I was a Spectrum owner - I got mine at Christmas 1984 - and before long was entrenched in the bitter rivalry with C64 users. There were more Spectrum owners at school but I think this was simply because it was a more affordable computer. The arguments were always the same - the Speccy lot would mock the C64's blocky graphics, impossible to decipher machine code, and lengthy loading times of games (I seem to remember a game called Son Of Blagger on the C64 taking 17 minutes to load), while the C64 mob would retort with jibes about the awful colour clashes on many Spectrum games, crap keyboard, and the utterly shite sound (even as the proud owner of a Spectrum I found it difficult to disagree with this latter point lol)
However, unlike many other Spectrum owners at school my bitterness towards the C64 waned rapidly when I played games such as Summer Games and Way Of The Exploding Fist - both of which had an arcade feel to them that equivalent Spectrum versions couldn't have dreamt of emulating - and before long I came to appreciate both computers for what they were. A lot of my fellow Speccy-owning mates considered this as being tantamount to treason such was the extent of the tribalism that existed between both camps and when you look back on it all, the whole concept of football terrace-style wars over computers was rather silly.
For those of you too young to remember, the constant disagreements about which was the best computer used to often quickly degenerate into slanging matches which, I shit you not, were sometimes more heated than rival football fans going at it. I'm not sure whether this level of animosity exists today between XBox and Playstation users but I'd be surprised if it did.
For the record, I was a Spectrum owner - I got mine at Christmas 1984 - and before long was entrenched in the bitter rivalry with C64 users. There were more Spectrum owners at school but I think this was simply because it was a more affordable computer. The arguments were always the same - the Speccy lot would mock the C64's blocky graphics, impossible to decipher machine code, and lengthy loading times of games (I seem to remember a game called Son Of Blagger on the C64 taking 17 minutes to load), while the C64 mob would retort with jibes about the awful colour clashes on many Spectrum games, crap keyboard, and the utterly shite sound (even as the proud owner of a Spectrum I found it difficult to disagree with this latter point lol)
However, unlike many other Spectrum owners at school my bitterness towards the C64 waned rapidly when I played games such as Summer Games and Way Of The Exploding Fist - both of which had an arcade feel to them that equivalent Spectrum versions couldn't have dreamt of emulating - and before long I came to appreciate both computers for what they were. A lot of my fellow Speccy-owning mates considered this as being tantamount to treason such was the extent of the tribalism that existed between both camps and when you look back on it all, the whole concept of football terrace-style wars over computers was rather silly.
