101 Challenges:

Challenge number – 43

The Japanese Jive Challenge was always going to be a bit-of-bun (peice of cake for the stupid out there) All we had to do was turn up at the local arcades in the Akihabara game-land area of Tokyo and play some video games against the local youths. 

This was p*ss easy for the following reasons; 

1) We're what you would technically call "socially integrating inadequate nerds". We don't understand this either. At school we had loads of friends - Pacman, Mario, Luigi, Zelda (a foreign exchange student) and the little Mushroom headed guy (can't remember the freaks name - he was a quiet lad and only hung out with us for one summer before his parents moved him to a posh school) there were more but the good times ended when Pacmans Mum and Dad got divorced.

Ms Pacman (as she's now called) became a very bitter woman - she was truly heart broken and soul-destroyed. She turned a dark and horrible person and thought if she couldn't enjoy life then her son sure-as-hell wasn't going to either. So she locked him in her basement with some ghosts - we've never seen him since and the rest of the gang kind of lost their way - we say hi to each other if we ever pass on the street, but the magic has gone. Long gone. That Ms Pacman - she was a bitch quite frankly. 

Anyhoo, reason number 2) We're big and burly Scottish lads. If a 9 year old kid was to even think about trying to show us up, we'd just push them over or tell them Santa ain't real. That would do the trick.

And so, back to the Challenge. To be included in our war of pixel-terror was that dance mat game - the one which carries 48,291 epileptic warnings - a million flashing lights per second which create some sort of pattern on a screen in front of you that is humanly impossible to recreate with a mere 4 limbs. We initially thought that you hear music - and you dance. This ain't no kids game - it's a heart attack waiting to happen.

But, and not wanting to undermine the young folk of Tokyo here, we have been playing video games between us for about half a century now, granted when we first started it was two white lines with a white dot on the screen. You could select tennis, volleyball, soccer etc. It didn’t matter which you choose as every selection was the exact same as the previous or next option but at least you had a "select" button which added to the excitement.

From there we moved onto the Atari 1600 with its joystick －　another revolutionary device which in our opinion， is better than sliced bread and doesn’t get enough credit as what it should. Then we had a Spectrum 48k where you had to load the games in by a cassette tape and it made a weird noise like doooo dit, doooo dit dit, dooo dooooo dooo dit dit dooo dit dit dit dit.

We played so many games on this we learnt how to beat box the games into the machine using a microphone and doing away with the cassettes altogether. That’s how much computer games we have played.

Mum was good enough to keep us in with the “in crowd” and every xmas we got last year's amazing play-thing;

• The Commodor 64
• Sega Master System
• NES
• Megadrive
• SNES
• Gameboy
• Gamegear
• Playstation 1
• Xbox
• Playstation 2
• Xbox 360
• And the forever amazing WII
  

Yep we are still those ”socially integrating inadequate nerds” but now we’re old enough to buy adult magazines with nude pictures so it’s not as bad as it once was. Not bad at all.

My god how the games have changed over here. The Dance Revolution machine is hard enough but when compared to other machines in the arcades it’s like the cassette loading Spectrum of years ago. 

We danced, we drummed, and we guitared our way through the spectacular array of games that the youth of today splendour in, feeling older and further out of touch as we went along. We did hold our own though and commanded respect probably never seen by westerners in these parts before.

That respect came in the form of Lindsay ripping his shirt off to some air guitaring – yeah that showed them!

After a few near-death experiences (perhaps the Japanese should invent a defibulator simulator game) we then tried explaining the old Spectrum 48k (our one was the tiny thing with the rubber keys) to a few of the kids but they had no idea what a cassette tape was never mind a Spectrum.