Julian "Jaz" Rignall
Playing video games since 1976.
Writing about them since 1983.
- 40 years ago Amstrad made a new PCW. Exciting! Meanwhile Sinclair was market leader in 1985, yet lost money and was looking for a buyer. It was also selling its mini TV, which was about to be made redundant by Casio's new LCD mini TV. Those LCD screens will never catch on...
- 40 years ago I was playing Uridium. It had (for the time) excellent graphics and felt technically slick and polished, giving it an authentic arcade feel that was very important to us way back when. However, these days its ridiculous difficulty level makes it hard to truly enjoy.
- Had a lot of fun talking in detail about Defender on this podcast. Real nerdy stuff. It's currently only available via Patreon, but will be available to listen to for free in a month or so. I'll repost when that version is available.
- It was such a cool thing for me to have @jazrignall.bsky.social on here. Mean Machines and CVG were my introductions to proper video game critique and analysis and he and his fellow editors helped shape my tastes. Oh yeah, Defender is pretty awesome as well. 😁
- 35 years ago, CVG reviewed Pilotwings and gave it the full-on props it deserved. I was also playing it, but we decided to hold back Mean Machines' review for a few months as we wanted to pace our import coverage (and also stop Nintendo UK whining about too many import reviews)!😁
- 35 years ago, Japanese animated movies were just beginning to become a big thing in the UK - largely off the back of the huge period interest in Japanese video games and culture. Helping fuel that fire were blockbusters like Akira - which the CVG team covered in this news piece.
- 35 years ago, Casio was advertising its most cutting-edge scientific calculators in gaming magazines - because schools were finally enabling their students to use these things in their math classes while also typing 8008135 and tittering like fools...
- 35 years ago, the Mean Machines team was playing SNES Actraiser - one of the best early releases on the system. The game (import only at this point) had a lot of Japanese text, but we figured out how to play it - and then put together these tips to help other players out.
