Memoirs of a Gamer: Hidden bomber

When you look at one of my book shelves you will learn a lot about me. I read a lot for one. I like teenage fiction just as much as adult fiction for another and I like history, particularly naval history in the in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I think games define us in a similar way.  Not just through the types of games we play, but the experiences we have while playing them. My time gaming has been long and varied and has had quite an impact on different aspects of my life. Memoirs of a Gamer are the reminiscences of gaming moments that for some reason, have stuck with me (and others).

There is one memory of my early gaming life that is very clear. Me and my brother shared a bedroom when we were younger. We had bunk beds so, naturally, he had the top because he was awesome and hard, and I had the bottom because I was weedy, a nerd and consistently, unstoppably sarcastic. One good thing about sharing a room with my brother though was that he owned a Sega Megadrive. Now over the years I've owned very few consoles, don't get me wrong it's not that I hate them or anything, it's just whenever I owned one I always ended up wishing for a PC instead. But I love the Megadrive and it is one of the only consoles that I look back with the same fondness I normally reserve for the PC. I  remember quite a few stand out titles like Micro Machines, Sonic, Toejam and Earl; all great games, but all bastard hard at times (well for an eight year old anyway!). It was probably because we couldn't save back then, whether there was some sort of memory card on the Mega drive or not I don't remember, but if they existed we didn't have one.

For my Brother's birthday he had asked my mum for a particular game. She bought it months in advance because it was on sale at the time and she hid it away from me and my brother. The only thing was, we knew exactly where it was hidden. When my mum was out one day we crept to the cupboard, took out the case and hurried back into our room. My brother carefully pealed off the security seal and opened the case. He gently lifted out the cartridge, slotted it in the machine, and turned the Megadrive on. Mega Bomberman flashed onto the screen.

That first day we played a few games in the Battle mode and returned the game to the cupboard fearful of our mum's return. But as the days went on we got bolder, always playing for a little bit longer before returning the game. My brother soon had a great idea. We took the cartridge from the case and hid it in our room and left the empty case in the cupboard. We even eventually replaced the cartridge with something of similar weight so that if our mum ever picked it up for some reason she wouldn't suspect that it had been tampered with.

It soon became clear that we could leave the cartridge in the machine and mum would never notice. We also figured out that we could play on the Megadrive all night without our parents realising. Our bedroom was next door to our parents room but the walls were fairly thick and if one of our parents came to check on us we always had  plenty of warning. The floorboards outside the door were traitorously creaky and our bedroom door was big and heavy. In fact it was so heavy it was difficult to open and had to be pushed quite hard against the thick carpet, giving us vital seconds to hide the controllers and pretend to be asleep. The only give away to our crime was the red light that shone when the Megadrive was on, but a black jumper covered it without being obvious in the dark. We were masterminds of deception.

By the time my brothers birthday came around he had already completed it and we had played the Battle mode extensively. In short were fairly bored of the game. However, it was a great game, battle mode especially and i bought the remake on XBLA as soon as it came out purely for the nostalgia. There is one particular thing about the game that I remember extremely clearly and that was a certain power up (or power down depending how you look at it) which we called Bomb Diarrhoea. It would cause you to drop bombs repeatedly with every step until you ran out, and was a real pain in the arse, much like real bomb diarrhoea would be I imagine... (wait, I can't believe I just typed that, new low).

A few days before my brothers birthday he tried to return the cartridge only the case wasn't in it's usual hiding place. It had been moved. Sudden panicked searching took place and we eventually found it in a wardrobe our my parents room... already wrapped up... oops...