I recently finished the TV series The Curse. A drama by the usually brilliant Nathan Fielder. This was not brilliant. It was utter guff. Boring episodes and an ending that made me so angry I texted a group of friends with the most expletiveladen WhatsApp you’ve ever seen. As a result of this I have decided to NEVER watch a TV series again. I just can’t take the risk.
But how to fill the void? YouTube. I’ve been enjoying a lot of YouTube. And it’s mainly retro gaming. It’s generally wonderful, heartfelt stuff. Except the American YouTubers. They are so angry and there’s always beef with other YouTubers.
I’ve moved on from people recapping and cleaning Amiga cases with a toothbrush and instead watch old gaming TV shows. I got into this via RoseTintedSpectrum. He’s done commentary over all four seasons of (Breaking) Bad Influence and it’s absolutely hilarious. Check it out (although it’s NSFW, as all the best things are).
If you don’t remember Bad Influence, it’s a videogame show for kids hosted in the most part by Andy Crane and Violet Berlin and is a brilliant time capsule of the mid-Nineties. There’s a lot of talk of the Watara Supervision, a handheld I had never heard of. Andy genuinely believes this is a legit competitor that could destroy the Game Boy. Spoiler, it wasn’t and it looks absolutely awful.
My favourite bits are in the later shows when the internet is just beginning to take off. Andy is so not impressed and calls it “boring” and refers to anyone who uses it as “spotty geeks”. It’s absolutely wild. Pretty much every week he is backing the wrong horse – he raves about the Saturn and completely disses the PlayStation because it only comes with a demo disc, not an actual game.
As someone who hosted a show about gaming, Thumb Ba
