It's weird how certain things resonate in your memory, even if you haven't really thought about them for ages.
This happened to me most recently with the video I've prepared for Thursday's episode of Atari ST A to Z, which is on the subject of Microdeal's isometric adventure Airball, one of the earlier titles I remember owning and playing for the ST back in the day, and a monstrously difficult affair I never really got anywhere with.
Revisiting it recently, I discovered that 1) I'm still not very good at Airball and really have absolutely no idea what you're supposed to do in it and 2) Airball inexplicably "means" a lot to me.
I've been trying to pin down exactly why I feel that way. I don't believe I associate it with a particularly important moment in my life, or a specific event, or anything like that. There's just something… indescribable about it that really means something to me.
Perhaps it's the music? Airball has great music. The compositions throughout the game aren't especially complicated and use one of the most cliched chord progressions in the world, but those pieces of music have stuck with me ever since I played that game for the first time back in the '80s. There have been times when I've been doing things that vaguely remind me of Airball, and snippets of the music have come into my head, unbidden, even though the last time I played Airball before recording the game footage over the weekend was probably nearly thirty years ago.
Or perhaps it's the atmosphere? This is something I talk a bit about in the video, so please look forward to that. Suffice to say for now that Airball has a really interesting atmosphere about it. Its story is absolutely dumb as shit, but that doesn't stop it being an unusually atmospheric and emotionally engaging game for the Atari ST.
Or perhaps it's just a cool game that I've enjoyed revisiting. Whatever the reason, Airball means a lot to me, and you get to see me revisit it for the first time in a very long while on Thursday! I hope you enjoy.
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