My daughter recently completed Pokémon X (44 hours, all by herself – I’m very proud), and as she’s so into Pokémon at the moment, reading a pile of old magazines, watching the TV series on the 3DS Anime Channel, obviously she has taken an interest in the upcoming Pokémon Sun and Moon games. There was even a demo on the 3DS which she has sunk several hours into, and, as the title of this post suggests, she has been pestering me to get it when it comes out.
It reminds me of a time when I was 7 or 8, and I spent a number of weeks pestering my mum for a copy of a Spectrum game. A game I barely knew, and wanted based entirely on an old copy of Computer and Video Games that contained both an advert and a review.
Yie Ar KUNG-FU (I don’t know if the odd capitalisation is important or not) is a one-on-one fighting game not completely unlike Street Fighter. It wasn’t the sort of game I’d normally play, but I was obsessed with the vaguely similar Irem/Data East arcade game Kung Fu Master at the time, so maybe that was part of the reason why I wanted it.
“Mum, see, it’s only £7.95”
I’d say. £7.95 being about £22 in today’s money.
“And it has all these people to fight”
I don’t really think she understood how important it was that you could fight several different characters. “Yes, that’s good”, she’d say.
“And this one has a stick”
As if that was going to convince her. Every conversation mentioned some facet of Yie Ar Kung-Fu I’d gleaned from the advert and this, very short, review:
“£7.95 is good because the magazine said it is good value. And the Spectrum version is cheaper than the other versions.”
Not that the screenshot is from the Spectrum version. That didn’t matter. “Yes, it’s still a lot of money though.”
“I wonder what I’m getting for Christmas?”
You may notice that my method of asking for the game doesn’t actually involve the important act of actually asking for the game. Funnily enough, my daughter has used the exact same tactic, although she later stepped it up a notch to “when we get it”, leapfrogging the question entirely.
“You can do a jumping punch, like this!”
I demonstrated, by jumping and punching, in case what a jumping punch was wasn’t clear to my mother. She was unimpressed.
Of course, I never did get bought a copy of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and it’s probably just as well. When I bought it for myself some years later, I’d imagine for 50p second hand, I was disappointed with it. Slow, difficult and fiddly to control, I’m glad I never had it as what would have been a wasted Christmas present.[ref]Incidentally, the review directly next to this game, on the same page, is for Saboteur, which completely passed me by at the time but turned out to be absolutely fantastic.[/ref]
Pokémon Moon, however, will be excellent and as a parent who understands these things (my mum either didn’t, or understood far more than I gave her credit for – hence why I didn’t get it) I’ve taken note.
