TV Cream Toys Lite. Steve Berry
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Название: TV Cream Toys Lite
Автор: Steve Berry
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Юмор: прочее
isbn: 9780007328512
isbn:
At least Buckaroo! was blessed with simple gameplay. Easily snapped plastic mouldings (ten-gallon hat, pitchfork, grappling hook, billycan and all that) are gently lowered in turn by players on to a 2D bucking bronco.1 As the ad explained: ‘Put on a shovel, try a pick–if the load’s too heavy the mule will kick.’ Words to live by, we think. Too much weight causes Buckaroo!’s hair-trigger to release, sending the aforementioned implements flying across the living room, under the settee, into the dog’s mouth and so on.2
Later variations cashed in on Spielberg’s Jaws (the eponymous game was Mr a neat reversal of the same conceit: remove skulls, anchors, bits of boat, etc. from mouth of shark before it snaps shut) and, we presume, Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (Don’t Tip the Waiter employed a cardboard waiter on to whose carefully balanced tray players were required to add counters depicting pizza, cakes and sandwiches). Note the use of the exclamation mark in the title to imply excitement and/or surprise. Therein lies an unspoken suggestion that, at the climax, we might want to cry out the name of the game in a moment of catharsis and delight. This is a favourite device of toy manufacturers (see also Sorry! and Stay Alive!, although strangely not Yahtzee), pretentious restaurateurs (Fish!) and musical theatre impresarios (Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!). On a not entirely unrelated note, the phrase ‘fuck right off!’ works with an exclamation mark too.
1 The latest commercially available version of Buckaroo! is rendered in 3D as if, until the advent of CGI, children wouldn’t previously have been able to cope with anything quite so real. Alongside yer bog-standard Buckaroo! (with a design clearly riffing on the donkey from Shrek), you can also buy a seasonal Buckaroodolph! (‘the mule who doesn’t like Yule’).
2 If you’re so inclined, you can also play a variant of the game with your drunk friends. Once they pass out, pile on as many empty cans, fag packets, ashtrays, frozen sausages and shaving-foam squirts as you can until they wake up.
Obstacle to chocolate
It’s bizarre that this should even make it into a children’s wish list of most desired games or toys, being the very definition of the anti-toy Ostensibly a cross between a savings bank and a chocolate-dispensing machine, it actually fails to live up to the promise of either. But that is to underestimate its novelty.
Although in reality it amounted to a deferral of pleasure, no more than a tuppenny barrier between the chocolate and your mouth, there was still something of the faintly exotic in getting hold of a load more of those mini-Dairy Milks and Bournevilles than you would ever find in a box of Roses.1 In the days before washing-powder tablets and digital cameras, the fascination with anything miniaturised was not to be underestimated.
See also ‘A La Cart Kitchen’, Mr Frosty, Whimsies
The classic dispenser was designed and moulded in ’50s-throwback red plastic (leading us to fancifully imagine that the Fonz himself would dish out his chocolate from one) with properly embossed gold Cadbury’s branding, plus it came preloaded with a dozen baby chocs.2 In theory, a 2p piece slotted in the top would, with a twist of the hidden knob within, release a single, fully wrapped miniature that could then be enjoyed in isolation. In truth, and in part because not only was the chassis of the dispenser made of plastic but also the lock and keys, it took about ten seconds for greed to overcome the flimsy workings of this metaphorical chocolate chastity belt.
With the contents therefore devoured in their entirety (and not so easily replaced, at least not until the next Argos trip), what essentially remained was a moneybox and, given that it generally wouldn’t contain more than about 14p, not a very good one at that.
1 Oh, and Terry’s Neapolitans fitted too, didn’t they? Want to know what happened to Terry’s, once the pride of York, now just a Dawn French-perpetuated brand extension of Kraft Foods Inc, Illinois? The corporate giant bought the 1000-worker-strong factory in 1993 and closed it down in 2005. York Fruits? Produced in Slovakia, mate. Chocolate Orange? Czekoladka pomarañczowy more like. Where’s Michael Moore when you need him, eh?
2 Chocoholics, masochists and fatties rejoice! The freely available Chocolate Machine Money Box from Humbrol is a fair enough modern approximation of the old Peter Pan version. And guess what? The chocolate miniatures are actually bigger than the ones that used to fit in the old machine.
Bouncy castle for ball-bearings
Many board games–Othello springs to mind–usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’. Surely then, the motto for Cascade was ‘A lifetime to set up, a minute to play’. But what a minute it was!
Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was bizarrely addictive, totally pointless and definitively uncompetitive–one of those games where eventually no-one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board.
See also Crossfire, KerPlunk, Domino Rally
So the set-up, then: an acid-yellow plastic mat had spaces marked out for the five pieces of Cascade furniture. At one end there was a towering Archimedes screw that sucked up ball-bearings and launched them off a short ski-ramp. Then came the bam-bam-bam bounce across three taut red timpani thingies, before the balls hit a mini-pinball table and fell into several scoring slots. Certain balls would be returned to the screw via a three-foot track for another go around the system. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.
Of course, lest the gradient tolerance of your bedroom carpet be suboptimal, the little metal buggers would scatter to either side and roll under your bunk bed (we imagine Barnes Wallis felt similarly disheartened in that bit from The Dam Busters). The best improvement via improper game play was to put the launch tower on top of your wardrobe and let the balls really bounce. Constructing little obstacles between the trampolines, such as piled-up Subbuteo team boxes, would assist in efforts to test how high the ball-bearings would really go. A Mars-Staedtler rubber under the edge of each trampoline thingy helped angle them perfectly for extra distance too.
No-one had any idea what the scoring system was, but in the same way that someone can win ten grand on Better Homes without wielding so much as a staple gun, you could ‘win’ Cascade without any personal involvement whatsoever. СКАЧАТЬ