Garwoofoo
This is the Science Museum's regular "history of gaming" event that they seem to run regularly these days during the school holidays.
We went today and really enjoyed it, though it was a bit disappointing to see almost everything hooked up to modern LCD screens and invariably displaying in the wrong aspect ratio. You'd have thought that with the whole "history of games" thing they'd have made an effort with the older machines to manage that a bit better. 90% of it was NES/SNES and later, with just one wall given over to older machines (one Spectrum, one C64, one CPC64, one Amiga and so on) which was a bit of a shame. It was a treat to play on a working Vectrex but apart from that there wasn't much I hadn't seen already.
Good to see a lot of the kids playing the older titles though and some of the themed displays were quite interesting. Having every major Mario game in sequence on the same row of tables really showed up the progression in the series and the games' mechanics, then you walk round the other side to see the same thing for Sonic and 20 years of progress just looks like exactly the same game with slightly shinier graphics.
Still, time flew by and my boy's got a new appreciation for some older titles he hadn't seen before. We didn't have any trouble getting time to play pretty much anything we wanted, and it all seemed to be in working order. Would generally recommend it if anyone's thinking of going along as time just flew by when we were there.
