Читать книгу TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve Berry - Страница 19

The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.

Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.

See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000

As for the games themselves, they were clunky interpretations of bat ’n’ ball favourites such as squash or, erm, football (actually more like doubles tennis)¹ on the basic, easy Jet-orange model. The beige variant promised some capacity for Tin Can Alley-style shooting games with a so-called light gun’, which inevitably didn’t work unless you were holding it so close to the telly you left scratches on the screen.² The two standard controller ‘bats’ were chunky boxes with Etch-A-Sketch-type knobs that, fantastically, could be packed away into the Binatone’s battery compartment for storage.

The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.

1 The lack of ‘play against the computer’ option meant that a lot of Binatone-generation kids grew up ambidextrous.

2 If the gun broke, you could still turn the sound off and watch the silent cube ‘target bounce sss-softly off the imaginary walls of your TV set. A nice precursor (hem hem!) of the Windows screensaver, we feel. Plus, the gun itself, cable tucked neatly into your snake belt, made for an excellent Blake’s 7 ray gun.