You turn your Xbox on after a long, hard, days work. As the machine boots up you hear a faint voice. “Please mister, help me mister”. You shrug it off, it’s been a hard day. You sit back with the controller in your hand, rummaging to find something to play. The voice, again. “Please mister, help me mister. It’s me, Milo. I’m still in here. Get me out, mister”.
You wondered why the old man in the bric-a-brac store in Guildford you bought it from stressed you take good care of it. Now you know.
I used to sneak into my uncle’s shed when I was a kid, he had a massive lead lined crate at the back.
Inside were all sixty three of the unspoken of Commodores, the ones before the 64, back before Jack Tramiel convinced the team to stop using a small piece of Stonehenge in each device and oh god, the photographs of the tests. I’ll never forget them. Just horrible what those machines did to people.
Even in their lead lined crates, you could feel them vibrating to themselves and listen to the sid chips faintly chanting.
Entirely true story, right. You can measure my depression by how often I’m listening to Balloon Man. It’s been bloody decades now and even when things are tremendously shitty, it has never once failed to cheer me up.
There’s a bunch of other Robyn Hitchcock numbers that hit the right spot in that particular regard but Balloon Man is the most of them, it’s an unceasingly silly joy of a song and “I wish I could ride a horse” is up there with “I’m going to burn your bongos tonight” as peak-fun-Hitchcock lines go.
Many thanks still to the old dude at the other table at Telfords one night in the nineties who asked me and a friend whether it was our first Hitchcock gig (it was) and promised it’d stick with us and we’d have a ball. It did, we did. Haven’t looked back since.
The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.
Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.
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