Last Friday saw the inauguration of the Friday Night Gaming Club, where a few friends and I gathered at my house to play a selection of games. The idea was to play some games in a bit more depth than at other gaming nights I have organised. Each attendee picked one game and we all spent some quality time with each and shared our opinions whilst sinking a few beers and eating several tubes of Pringles!
The games chosen and our thoughts on them were as follows...
Command & Conquer (Sega Saturn)
It may be getting on for 15 years old and using the Saturn pad instead of a Mouse may have been annoying, but Command & Conquer was still one of the favourites of the evening, with Pete and Rob S both getting the addiction and making it difficult for anyone else to get a look in!
Cyber-Lip (SNK Neo-Geo AES)
One of the launch titles for SNK’s legendary “arcade at home” console, Cyber-Lip is a decent looking Run & Gun but we all felt it had one glaring fault – the inability for your player to be able to shoot diagonally. The lack of variety in gameplay and unlimited credits also made it a rather unchallenging and uninteresting game – Rob F and I completed it in around half an hour, and not a moment too soon! One source of amusement to me was that when entering your name in the high score table the alphabet is wrong, with ‘N’ coming before ‘M’!
FIFA 98 (Sega Saturn)
The graphics look crap in comparison to the PC and Playstation releases, and the gameplay is rather sluggish, but FIFA 98 was still the source of much enjoyment to most of us, with several high-scoring games culminating in a 5-3 scoreline contested between the two Robs.
Samurai Spirits 2 (SNK Neo-Geo AES)
SS2 was far more appreciated than Cyber-Lip, with everyone having a good few battles with each other. Still an impressive-looking game and one of the finest fighters on the system!
Stunt Car Racer (Commodore Amiga)
Opinion was split on Geoff Crammond’s 3D racing classic. Personally I think the game looks and plays great for it’s time and was a superb technical achievement, but some of the other guys bemoaned its sluggish nature and tricky control mechanism. Each to their own! 
Zool (Commodore Amiga)
Rob S and Rich hogged this platformer for much of the evening and were very complimentary about the graphics and sound, though Rich was cursing the difficulty level! One thing it did do was make us all yearn for Chupa Chups, the confectionery that was the recipient of extensive advertising within the game.
Wonderboy (MAME)
This was chosen in a random draw to be the arcade challenge of the night. Whoever got the highest score would have the privilege of choosing the consoles and theme for the next games night. I actually got the high score (around 85,000) but since I chose the systems this time, it was only fair to let somebody else have the choice next time, and that person was Rob F who got the next highest score.
Once we’d had our fill of the older games, we spent some time playing 2-player Guitar Hero on the PS2 and then embarked on a marathon Mario Kart Wii session, spending over an hour on the 4-player offline multiplayer (where we discovered that it is far easier to play with a Gamecube controller than the Wii Wheel!) followed by nearly the same amount of time taking it in turns to have 2-player online races against players from across the globe. I finally won an online race, beating 10 fellow players on the Luigi Circuit track! 
All in all it was a great evening and we’ll definitely be doing it again in the future.