They Don't Make'm Like That Any More (Favourite Childhood Toys)

Member Name: eyedo6789

Product:	Favourite Childhood Toys
Date:	28/03/09 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Games Weren't Totally Computer Dominated Back Then

Disadvantages: Some Games Could Take Your Eye Out!

Okay, this is showing my age here people, but here goes.
(Period of play circa 1974 to 1984)

(In no particular order)

THE ATARI GAMES CONSOLE: My favourite game on it, mainly because I was deadly at it, was BREAKOUT. In this you had a small bat at the bottom of the screen which you could only move from side to side and a wall about 8 deep of different coloured bricks at the top of the screen.

There was a small gap between the top of the wall and the top of the screen playing area which effectively meant there was a thin unbreakable wall behind the main wall of bricks.

When you pressed start a small white ball came out of the side of the screen and you had to move the bat towards it to send it back and forth against he brick wall. Every time it hit a brick the brick exploded and disappeared. The idea is to destroy the whole wall.

When you get good at the game you can aim to just remove certain bricks to create a channel through which you can then aim the ball so that it gets around the back of the wall causing a bouncing ricochet effect between the wall of bricks and the protective thin back wall. This is the fun bit as the ball can get trapped between the two for a while and destroy many bricks in the process.

You have 3 lives; a life is lost when the ball passes your bat and you miss it. There are ways that you can win extra lives and sometimes get two or more balls in play simultaneously. On some versions you also have your bat size shrunk or lengthened.

When you have destroyed all of the bricks in the wall you get a new wall which is progressively harder than the previous one.

It's an addictive mesmerizing game that really has no point to it and which you can never really win at other than by beating your previous high score which is meaningless in itself. However, I did enjoy playing it but 25 years on it wouldn't really interest me.


SUBBUTEO: A table soccer game where you flick your miniature player's saucer shaped base into a miniature football to progress it down the felt pitch and hopefully past the opposition goalie. The game wasn't really that good but I used to collect different team's playing figures. I seem to remember owning the Arsenal, Celtic and Bournemouth & Boscombe Athletic teams.

RUGBY SUBBUTEO: This was based on the same principle although the rules were 5 times as complicated as the soccer game. It even included a scrummaging machine that you dropped the little rugby ball into causing it to randomly appear out of the scrummage.

CROSSFIRE: This is a strange one looking back at it and would in today's society be a million to one shot to pass health & safety regulations. It was essentially a miniature ice hockey pitch with a hard cork like surface, tough surround fences and a sunken goal mouth at each end.

Each player had a gun, yes a GUN!, perched on a pivot over his goal mouth (I don't think girls played this). The gun was loaded with solid metal, bigger than the size of a pea, ball bearings, yes METAL BALL BEARINGS!

There were two ice hockey like pucks on the flat board and you had to shoot and shoot as often and as hard as you liked at these in an attempt to get them into your opponent's goal mouth. The gun held about 8 ball bearings in it at a time and they could be fired in salvoes.

The gun was pivoted in such a way that you could shoot anywhere around your living room, bedroom or at your opponent's head if you wanted to! I never did but the phrase "careful, you'll 'ave somebody's eye out with that" was not just a figure of speech in this game.

It was a great game for little boys and I remember firing at the pucks with real venom and getting blisters on my fingers from it.

SCALEXTRIC: This is a car race track game with scale model cars and interlocking pieces of race track that resemble a real tarmac track. There were dozens of scale model cars that you could buy and collect (and a few motorbikes). The cars sat on a groove in the track that conducted electricity through them supplied via a mains transformer.

There were generally two lanes on the track; you controlled your car and its speed by pressing the trigger on your hand held controller and raced it against your opponent's car. The car could only follow the route of the track layout and could not change lanes so the only skill was controlling your car's speed so that it didn't exit the track at corners or through chicanes. You could also buy extras for your track like lap counters, spectator figures, grandstands and model trees etc.

The cars sometimes went wrong and developed minor mechanical faults so you would need to do a bit of a mechanic's job on them which made the whole experience seem all the more real.

Eventually, like many people, we became too good at controlling the cars, so to make things more interesting we put some oil on some parts of the track to cause the cars to skid and to increase the level of difficulty.

After a few years we had so much track that we rarely got it all set up in the house. So what we did was to buy a huge piece of ply wood that fitted the available floor area in the garage. We then permanently fixed the whole track layout and accessories on to the wooden base and attached it with lowerable thin ropes to pulleys that we fixed on the garage ceiling. We could then lower and raise the whole thing as and when we wanted to.

Ultimately we grew out of our love for Scalextric so we dismantled the pulley system and ropes and donated the whole boarded set up to a children's ward in a local hospital.


Happy days.

Summary: Oh To Be Young Again!