Title: Sonic Blast Man

Format: Arcade, SNES

Released: 1990

OUTGROWING YOUR PROBLEMS

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Punch My Personal Issues

They say violence never solved anything.

They never played Sonic Blast Man.

I grew up in a tiny seaside town that had nothing to do in it. In my free time I’d make a sandwich and go into the woods for fifteen hours at a time or sit and wonder if black people really existed.

There was one toyshop, and as I didn’t give a shit about Sylvanian Families, there wasn’t much to spend pocket money on. When it came though, there was only one place it was going.

Going to the games arcade was like going to the once-yearly carnival – extreme excitement based around the blaring music and horrible lights, but tinged with the exhilarating fear of navigating through the crowd of chavs at the entrance and avoiding the gypsy owners.

Inside it was an Aladdin’s cave of games that the rest of the country was sick of. There was a three-player Aerosmith shoot ’em up that actually had Steve Tyler’s voice. In a bid to stay relevant your guns fired CDs. There was an amazing Spider-man arcade game that was glitched and sometimes your character just fell down dead; I asked for my money back once and was told ‘that’s how that game works’.

But it didn’t seem to matter. This was a place that I loved and somewhere that I could never possibly humiliate myself by allowing a woman to get sexually assaulted. Right? Read the rest of this entry »