Category: History

Top 40 Nostalgia

  • October 7, 2023

Some years back I referred to my collection of ‘Too 40’ charts I used to get at the record shops. I had dozens of them lasting many years through the 1980s, and wish I still had them.

Recently I found some scanned in a historical website of Australian music. The scans were a little low-resolution, but the charts are still readable. Here’s one from March 1984:

Some iconic songs in that top 10! Also note that Thriller is at week 67 in the top 40 but a Midnight Oil album is at week 69! Incidentally I love how this scan is obviously of a copy once owned by a kid who wrote on it.

Here’s the back of the same chart:

These were about A4 size, always printed in two different colours, and usually sat in piles on a counter free for the taking. The fronts always showed the singles/album chart and the back was usually an ad that often contained lyrics. It was a particularly great week when a band I liked was featured on the back 🙂

Here’s the front and back of another from 1984:

99 Luftballoons spent at least two weeks at number 1 in Australia? I wouldn’t have remembered that, even though I did buy the single (and I believe own it to this day). Since I was a big fan of Nik Kershaw in those days, I’m sure I was thrilled to see him featured on the back.

Here’s one from 1985, in which we see the Countdown (a very famous Oz music TV show) promotion had ended:

And lastly the fronts only of two more:

That’s all I was able to find online, and since it was years ago I no longer remember where. If anything this dip into nostalgia makes me want to get my hands on one even more. Years back I saw one (in so-so condition) for sale in an antique store for some silly price and passed. Next time I may reach for my wallet, especially if it’s got a good band on the back 🙂

My Collections: Wii and Wii U

  • March 23, 2023

Nintendo released the Wii in November of 2006 to followup from the GameCube. It had a revolutionary motion control system and some notable software that was well-engineered to take advantage, and the Wii became a breakout success appealing to players well beyond the traditional demographic. It was a best-seller almost immediately, and would go on to become one of the most successful consoles ever made. When released I had trouble finding one, but Jim used his connections to get me (and himself) one for Christmas that year.

I liked the Wii, but I always felt it was a back step compared to the GameCube and during its lifetime I vastly preferred games for the Nintendo handheld systems. That said I’m happy for the great success of the Wii: it made Nintendo a lot of money and paved the way for the Switch which I feel is one of the best consoles ever made.

During the eight year lifetime of the Wii I bought 59 games, and here are most of them:

My favourites are the first party Mario games, Monster Hunter Tri and Hyrule Warriors (which I would rebuy for Switch years later). But the system lacks nostalgic appeal, the controls these days are clumsy and the graphics on a HD screen are fuzzy. The Wii was a system of it’s time, and I think best left there.

At the end of 2012 Nintendo released a followup console called the Wii U, and it was a disaster!

Even from the first reveal this thing confused customers: was it a new console or an add-on? What was that weird controller with a screen? Did it even connect to the TV at all? Nintendo’s marketing was poor, and the console was struggling even before release.

When it did come out things didn’t get much better. The Wii U suffered from a critical shortage of software (the strange controller made porting games difficult and development costly) and sales were poor. It would go on to be Nintendo’s worst-selling console ever, and a financial disaster.

I bought only 15 games for the Wii U, which is the least I’ve ever bought for any console. While a few of these were incredibly good (Xenoblade Chronicles X, MH Tri Ultimate, Zelda: Breath Of The Wild), many of the others struggled with weird controls or excessive load times. The Wii U may have had a (very) few great games, but it wasn’t a fun or comfortable device to use, and it was inevitable it would be replaced.

In retrospect we can see the Wii U was a stepping-stone on the path to the Switch, so for that I suppose we can excuse it. But it’s now a footnote in Nintendo history, almost forgotten only a few years after it was retired.

I’ll soon be selling my entire Wii and Wii U collections (including hardware and even original boxes). Neither the hardware nor most of the games have any great value these days, and even in good condition – as mine all are – rarely fetch a quarter of what they sold for back in the day. I do have two somewhat collectible Wii games (shown above), but the value of these is dwarfed by some of the NES/SNES games I have already sold (and Gameboy/GBA games still in my collection).

I won’t miss any of this once it is gone, and am happy for my once-loved games to pass to a new collector. I enjoyed the Wii in its time – and less so the Wii U – but as I said that time has passed, and I’m ok with just the memories from now on 🙂

  • Posted in Blog
  • Robert

Conkers, Milkies and Cats-Eyes

  • March 5, 2023

I got the usual things for my birthday (games, books mostly) but here’s something KLS got me:

It’s a little bag of marbles! Not new ones, but vintage ones from the 1980s. These are more or less identical to the ones I used to play with 40 years ago 🙂

This arose from me reading about an auction recently in which individual marbles from the 1950s – 1970s sold for thousands of dollars. Aside from the fact these once ‘worthless’ items can now be very collectible, reading the story triggered a lot of memories about a hobby I’d all but forgotten!

Back in primary school marbles was one of the go-to games at school. We’d all bring little bags of marbles with us to school and play endless games of marbles with each other. Rain or shine this was a game that could be set up and played very quickly and it was so easy to learn that anyone could participate.

Kids all over the world played marbles, and a quick google search shows the rules varied everywhere and in some cases were different enough to almost be a different game! Here are how we played our schoolyard tournaments:

– Select a hole in the ground, a gap in a wall/fence or if nothing suitable exists choose a big marble (we called them ‘conkers’) and place it about 2 meters away from where we’d roll the marbles.
– Each player selects the same amount of marbles from their collection. They need to be the same sizes and the same assortment of glass or metal ones.
– Each player takes turns rolling their marbles until they get them all in the hole or all of them hit the conker. The first to accomplish this is the winner.
– If playing ‘for keeps’, the winner chooses one of the losers marbles and it becomes theirs.

A search online suggests this is a variant called ‘marble billiards’ but as far as I remember this is the only way we played. I wonder if this was just the Newcastle rules, or if this version was popular throughout Australia?

Everyone seemed to have marbles, since they were able to be purchased inexpensively almost everywhere. We had names for all the different types and styles: ‘milkies’ were opaque glass, ‘cat’s eyes’ were like the ones I got for my birthday, ‘steelies’ were metal balls (usually just repurposed bearings), ‘tiger’s eyes’ were orange and black cat’s eyes. There were others as well that I forget, and again a quick search shows the nicknames were as regional as the game.

Marble collecting seems to be a popular hobby these days, and an entire industry has arisen around identifying and trading rare marbles. Although we had our favourites, we were never precious with ours and after we got a bit older aside from using some of them as ammunition in slingshots I don’t really recall what ever happened to our marbles?

I suppose we gave them away to younger children? Maybe we just threw them away? Maybe Bernard still has them to this day? I just don’t know. Marbles were fantastic in those primary school days, but then they just seemed to fade away very quickly. That said, I think it’s a perfect children’s game, and maybe it’s time for the worlds children to rediscover marbles 🙂