Electronic mini-snooker

Pre-Game and Watch, the cutting edge of electronic game playing (never “gaming”, please) was led by “Only From” Tomy, who loved to package an array of red LEDs with a little joystick and two buttons in various guises. The variety of things you could get away with representing with little flashing lights was, of course, extremely limited, and only two categories really made the grade in these formative years - space battles (light on dark - perfect) and sport (balls - round, see?).

Among the latter were a variety of golf games that were never much cop, and a big old yellow thing called The Big Game, a Keegan-endorsed football two-player from that bastion of rehashing other people’s consoles under different names, Grandstand. But it was another game, Palitoy’s Cue Ball, riding high on the first wave of snooker mania, that really cleaned up.

Now you too could rub metaphorical shoulders with Ray Reardon and Terry Griffiths, albeit in a jerky, red-on-black version of their domain, where the delicate “tok” of cue on ball was replaced by a guttural electronic grunt, and the laws of physics were, to say the least, variable. The main disappointment with the game was the ratio of the game unit footprint (promisingly massive) to size of actual playing area (dismayingly minute). It was like buying a snooker table and finding it encased in its own life-size beige plastic Crucible Theatre.

The days when computer games would actually live up to the haywire anticipatory imagination of a child were still a long way in the future, but there was a sort of satisfying, simple sturdiness to these games, especially the way they still carried on sort of half-working when you’d got really bored and pried them apart with a screwdriver. Try doing that with a DVD-ROM!