Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 15

Battling Tops? Why, ’tis a grand olde European folk game, sir, as famously depicted in sixteenth-century paintings by Brueghel and his ilk. However, we suspect his Battling Tops weren’t housed in a blue-plastic arena, presumably didn’t go by such wrestling-ring monikers as Super Sam, Tricky Nicky, Twirling Tim, Dizzy Dan or, erm, Smarty Smitty, and certainly were far from Ideal.

Yep! Since 1968, the company that invited you to wind up Evel Knievel had been dishing up more red-plastic crank-powered fun with their repackaging of an old wooden favourite. With defiantly un-medieval box art depicting various ’50s-type kids and their worryingly Barry Cryer-like dad enraptured by the centrifugal tournament taking place under their noses, this was the tabletop arena game to end all tabletop arena games. Wind the spindle with string, give a yank on the starting cord and away you go!

See also Crossfire, Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots, Hungry Hippos

A similar game, Space Attack, was an air-hockey variant on the rotating theme. Crank the red handle with all your tiny might and stop the spinning top being knocked into a trough with a plastic slider. Or, as they put it, ‘Fight off the lightning alien attacks!’ The ‘space’ theme was provided by a piss-poor ‘galactic’ backdrop on the field of play, with a pointless concentric red ring design overlaid. They might as well have written ‘Look, it’s in space, all right? Use your bloody imagination, you ungrateful little sods!’ and been done with it. Ideal at least went the whole hog and–in the wake of Star War s mania–launched a rebranded Battling Spaceships game, which also included some extra, Monopoly-inspired round-the-board progression.

Space Attack and Battling Spaceships shared one gameplay drawback–the frequency with which one of the spinning combatants would be knocked right out of the ring. Frequently the victorious top would be the one that found its way under the radiator, still merrily buzzing away on the lino long after the rest had limped to a standstill.

Although the original is still out there, produced under licence from Mattel,¹no additional TV Cream points will be awarded for spotting that this game and its various spin-offs over the years have left us with the legacy that is Beyblades. Now those things really do look like you can take someone’s eye out with them. They’re like Chinese throwing stars. Seriously, they’ve even got ‘blade’ in the name. Why hasn’t someone reported them to Trading Standards?

Space Attack On the rebound

1 You won’t be astounded if we tell you that the arena of this new game is bleedin’ tiny now, will you? This isn’t just a case of ‘the memory cheats’–we know Wagon Wheels and Creme Eggs are the same size and our hands just got bigger. But with these games, they’re deliberately shrinking our childhood!