UncleClive Alien8's his readership
"What's the above cartoon about Clive?" You may ask, "Social commentary? A poke at tabloid reporting? Humour?". Yes Sir. Sorry Sir, it won't happen again Sir.

The above images will be familiar to perhaps only a small percentage of Uncleclive.co.uk's readership (probably males, over 24, living in the UK, who still play games and who owned a Spectrum and a copy of 'Back to Skool'). It's incredible to think that there are gamers leaving school now who were not born when this game was launched. What is very interesting though, is that the Skool Daze videogame was written by someone who also grew up in a different era to me... as a kid I did wonder why the teachers in the game carried around 'canes' and wore long black cloaks.

There is a lot of talk about resurrecting gems from the past for a new generation of gamers to (arguably) enjoy on new platforms such as the GBA, but to what degree will these need to be tweaked to cater for this audience?

I'm not just talking about old fashioned references within the games (for instance 'Raid over Moscow' would have to undergo a name change and probably be, God forbid, 'middle-eastern focused'), I'm talking about actual gameplay mechanics. For instance, what gamer would put up with the 'one hit death' and 'no save facility' systems in Jet Set Willy? If these 'unsavoury' aspects were changed for a re-release wouldn't that be like painting a smile onto the Mona Lisa? i.e. fundamentally undermining the spirit of the original?, that's before we even get onto sticking the characters into the obligatory '3D Environment'. I'm not suggesting that the past shouldn't be mined for inspiration, but the industry can, and has done better since the days when we were all wearing shorts, carrying catapults and writing out lines.

I watched seminal 80's brat pack flick "St Elmo's Fire" for the first time in 10 years the other day, and to be honest, I thought it was shite.