That is pretty much my childhood gaming experience in a nutshell. Actually I very rarely saved up for a full price game, preferring to wait until they appeared on compilations (which I tended to buy with Christmas money) or rereleased on budget.

All my pocket money used to go on tapes from the newsagent round the corner. Mastertronic owned me financially, to all intents and purposes, then later on Codemasters, LOL.

I took my £1 pocket money and bought a weekly yes weekly games magazine (Games-X) and still have enough change for a sherbet dibdab and fruit polos!

I took my £1 pocket money and bought a weekly yes weekly games magazine (Games-X) and still have enough change for a sherbet dibdab and fruit polos!

Games-X was awesome!!!! 

Games-X was awesome!!!! 

Yeah i loved it too! I remember seeing screenshots in it even now, they got news out fast too, obviously being weekly and no internet back then, most people had to wait a month for news, imagine that nowadays!

You can read some of the pages on the magazine archive;
http://amr.abime.net/issues_29

enough change for a sherbet dibdab and fruit polos!

lol thats me to a tee..

I used to think i was the only one who did this.. its amazing how many of us got games down the newsagent. I was a paperboy at my shop and used to get some of the damaged ones free. A perk i guess but they were usually the rubbish games lol.

... when Rare/Ultimate didn't suck!

Wispas were proper and Sparkster was affordable on MD!

The first you saw of a new game was on the pages of a magazine and drooled over the pages with your friends at school.

...WH Smiths would load up a spectrum or commodore game so you could test it before you buy.

When you could walk into a branch of Boots in 1987 to witness a live comedy show.

AKA seeing a NES in action!

Or watch the sales rep make a ballox of a sale with a new customer who's as thick as he was..time to intervene, it was always funny, these guys never had a clue what they where selling to the public at the time.. And nor did they care, simpler times without a doubt .

.... you could walk into an old independent computer hardware/software store and test out games on the PC like Prince Of Persia etc? I remember walking into SRS Microsystems when I was a youngen with my dad, he would buy commodore stuff in there and I remember seeing all sorts of awesome stuff in there, stuff like Mega CD movie discs, new/sealed Jaguar games, mega drives, mega cds, pcs and all manner of games for such old systems as Spectrum etc.

Those really were the good old days! I remember seeing the intro to Sonic CD playing on a screen in there and thinking it was the greatest thing I'd EVER seen!

Great days

.....you would borrow all your friends best games and then sit for hours tape to tape recording them to a 90minute cassette. Pirating was never so good

You rushed home to play a game only to find it didn't actually work and you had to take it back