TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry

TV Cream Toys Lite - Steve  Berry


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if you were unlucky enough to be a boy and wanted one of these? No chance. You’d get boxing gloves instead and a stern talking-to from Dad.

       Binatone TV Master

      Blip…blip…blip…blip…

      The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.

      Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.

      See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000

      The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.

       Black Box

      Atomic mass

      While the juniors struggled with such 2D conundrums as spotting the odd one out in a list of prime numbers or reorienting dice from the sides you could see, seniors graduated to proper spatial-awareness posers and brainteasers of the Who was two to the left of the person three to the right of the queen next to the seven of clubs?’ variety. Oh yes, The Krypton Factor had a lot to answer for.

      All of which must have alerted the really big brains at the country’s centres of higher learning who–let’s face it–were slouching about in the refectory waiting to appear on University Challenge and wishing someone would hurry up and invent computers so they could practice their FORTRAN and COBOL. Weren’t they?

      See also Mastermind, Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons

      Solomon’s other games rejoiced in such fashionably abstract names as Entropy, Hexagrams, Thoughtwaves and, erm, Billabong. Each was clearly intended to be played with a furrowed brow and semi-religious solemnity (except, perhaps, Billabong, which possibly required a corked hat). Widely pirated since (particularly by jealous FORTRAN and COBOL programmers), Black Box’s most recognisable successor is probably the Minesweeper game on your work PC.

       Boglins

      Hand-puppets from hell

      You have to hand it to some big brain at Mattel: once they’d


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