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Sunday 17 May 2015

Lakeside

Decided to take myself out to Essex's one and only out of town mall and with a bit of nostalgia for you thrown in too. Opening up in the early 90's this was the first real big out of town mall in our area, true there was Bluewater that was much closer but that didn't appear to the late 90's early 2000's so it doesn't count.

Its three floors of shopping experience but the top floor is given over to restaurants and diners so it doesn't count. What you're here for is some gaming reminiscences aren't you. Well pull up a chair as all of these are now long gone.

This used to be a good place for video gaming in the mid 90's I got Parasol Stars from here as a Christmas present and we hilariously lost the car (a bright orange Volvo 340) in one of the open air car parks, incidentally there was an independent game store up on the first floor that had a rolling demo of Parasol stars on the Amiga, can remember the music and level 3's boss (a Nessie with a Volcano on its back) they also had a Super Gloveball for the NES as one of the few imports available, even though it used the worse than useless Power Glove to control it.

Down in the Brompton road spin off mall they had what I think used to be That'z Entertainment which had a small stall in the hall at Romford up until last year, they sold me a few Import games including SF2 Turbo (complete with PAL cart in the box for a pittance) and Super Buster Bros (actually Super Pang from Mitchell corp). They had a bargain bin out front that for some reason always had late era VCS carts in there, can remember Klax and some Tetris alike (apparently its Acid Drop and was released in 1992) and they later moved onto the first floor with a proper shop.  They had Bleem for Dreamcast which was nice.

They used to lay on a special bus to get us over there back in the day, but if you south Londoners want the same experience you can either use the DLR and change trains at West Ham and get off at Elm Park and catch the 372 or carry on to either Hornchurch or Upminster and catch the 370 instead.  Either way its an nice ride out in the country through farm land and a few villages (I always thought Rainham was more substantial) there are no real game shops apart from game and Brompton road has turned into a mega cinema but as someone who hasn't been back for more than a few years its not bad.


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