My main inspirations for obtaining a licence to ride a motorcycle wasn’t to join a gang, or to race, or to grow a beard, get fat and become fearful of the rain like a Harley Davidson rider; but it was of course, Street Hawk.

Jesse Mach, ex motorcycle cop, now lone wolf working for the government fighting crime in a bustling city, dealing with crooks, robbers and thieves. Jesse was given free reign to deal with wrong doers on a military grade motorcycle which fired lasers and rockets, and could reach 300mph with “Hyperthrust”. At the time I didn’t care that a road bike was achieving speeds of a WW2 fighter plane around Los Angeles, I was more enamoured by Jessie and his exploits. A mysterious man philandering around L.A whose day job it was to protect the innocent, with a licence to kill. Street Hawk was a short lived television series that aired back in 1985 on ABC. It lasted only one season and there were only thirteen episodes ever made. And as with anything this cool and short lived, it gained a bit of a cult following.

He didn’t have a second helmet

Inspired by the enigmatic presence of man and machine dressed all in black, I did include some of that when customising one of my first motorcycles, the Suzuki TS125X. The Suzuki TS was released in Japan in 1970, with a simple and comfortable ride for multipurpose use. It was 2 stroke with a 6 speed gearbox and long fork travel. You could pretty much go anywhere on this little machine and have fun doing it.

A similar bike to the TS was the Yamaha XT ridden by John Rambo in First Blood.

Reliable and good looking, in the 80s the TS was given rad decals and a bright paint scheme. The classic look round headlight was replaced with a square fairing and lamp, emulating that futuristic Street Hawk look even more. My bike was in bright Suzuki yellow with retro decals, but my aim was to achieve more of a “murdered out” look. As it was my first attempt at anything like this, it ended up a bit more “Mad Max” than the high gloss finish of Jessie Mach and his black beauty.

From the same team who built the cars of Bladerunner and The Last Starfighter, the Street Hawk was designed by non other than Andrew Probert who had touched many 80s franchises. FRom M.A.S.K to Airwolf and TRON.

Hondas XL500 and XR500 were used as the base frame and many modified parts were introduced over the series timeline, from the practical to the purely aesthetic. Here are the specs;

MODEL: Top secret government project.

TOP SPEED: 200 MPH, 300 MPH with Hyperthrust

WEAPONRY: Laser Cannon, Machine Guns, Rocket Launcher

OTHER FEATURES: Infrared Cameras, Compressed Air Vertical Lift System, On and off road capability

My TS125 was a little less dynamic, no lasers or Hyperthrust, but I had, on more than one occasion, switched off the headlights and ducked into a driveway or side street to avoid the cops (Stealth mode), and if you drafted behind a truck you could perhaps pretend to “boost” around it.

Dirt bikes were mad popular back in the 80’s, the lethal 2 stroke power of the raspy, smokey on/off road machines gave them a rebellious streak all of their own. I used to stick on The Dirt Bike Kid back in the day, which, if you haven’t seen it, is a lot of fun. The premise is fairly simple to follow, providing you’re a complete lunatic or a child.

Jack Simmons, a small town geeky kid from a single parent family, spends his mother’s last fifty bucks purchasing a self aware dirt cross bike (A Yamaha YZ-80). Infuriated by his whimsical purchase, she sells the bike to a local shop owner but the bike returns to Jack signalling the start of a “friendship” between boy and machine.

Dirt nerd

Jack gets involved in a financial battle between a bank and a hot dog business, ran by a family friend. After hacking the bank with his best friend Bo, they attempt to stop the demolition of said hot dog business by disrupting the bulldozing with a pie fight, enlisting the help of his little league team. I won’t spoil the ending but in a nutshell the kid and the dirt bike win and the hot dogs are ok. A dirt bike was now a childhood dream, yet the YZ-80 was not a street legal machine here in the UK, unless you modified it.

In the early nineties a young man and a robot father figure ran from another man with knives for arms in Terminator 2. Although quite obviously Arnie was a thorough badass in the film, I couldn’t help but admire the rebel without a cause, John Conner, on his stripped down Honda XR complete with a ginger carrying a ghetto blaster. The Terminator 2 bike chase is to bikers what Bullitt is to car lovers and if you have no clue what either of these things are, get in the sea.

The Honda XR however, didn’t sound like it would have in real life, the bike was dubbed with the 2 stroke engine to perhaps further accentuate the dichotomy between the brutal black truck on Johns tail and Arnie on the thundering Harley Davidson. Legally I could only ride small capacity machines until I was 21. So dirt bikes were my preferred mode of transport until that time came.

He may have needed a step stool to hop onto the Kawasaki GPZ900 R in Top Gun but Tom Cruise undeniably looked rad in his flight jacket and aviators riding the iconic Japanese sports bike around an military air base. Whether you’re drag racing a fighter jet or running from an angry blonde in a Porsche, a sports bike is what you need. Like the Street Hawk bike, although this wasn’t a custom dirt bike, it actually looked similar in ways to the futuristic crime fighting machine. The GPZ also known as the Ninja 900, came in a range of quintessential retro colour schemes.

The littlest pilot

Some of the 80’s flagship models from Japan are often now referred to as “Jap Muscle”. Large litre bikes were relatively compact, fast, good looking machines with the edition of plastic fairings which certainly made the naked british bikes look ancient. Fairings were the future!

Talking about fairings, perhaps one of the most badass retro bike movies was Mad Max. Jim Rains or “Goose” rode a 1977 Kawasaki KZ1000, not a bike for faint hearted, a beast of a bike at a little over 240kg yet the strong 1000cc inline four cylinder engine could take you to 130mph. Because of its stability, power and adaptability the KZ was in fact used for many years as a police bike. Notably the KZ1000P was ridden by the T1000 in Terminator 2 in full police fairings.

So that’s a brief history of some of my inspirations for riding motorcycles, it would be good to hear your stories of what got you into biking and what do you ride? For those who don’t ride, maybe make it a news years resolution to saddle up, stick a lid on and go have an adventure.

This one is about computers. As much as console gaming forms the crux of what I discuss here at NRWG, it is occasionally my duty to draw attention to that parallel road, that meandering yet meaningful story of mankind’s attempt to entertain itself with computers before they were all plugged into phone lines. (Hell, many of them were before it was even a thing.)

So you remember back in the 80s when you thought your MS-DOS shit or your Amstrad CPC was cool? Do you remember the days before Japan started dropping unfathomable machines on the West one after another? Back before the Internet forcibly occluded every dark corner of electronics culture in stark detail, there was a time when Japan kept the best shit for themselves. And I can’t blame them when I look at some of it. We wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. Like apes confronted by Arthur C Clarke’s monolith, we would have felt so many emotions that we were reduced to hooting until dusk at the x68000.

My favorite touch is the little pole accessory for the mouse cord. That is very Japanese to me. I don’t even know why.

Sharp released the first model in 1987, naming the machine after its 10MHz CPU. It boasted one whole megabyte of ram, which today is about enough juggling space for one small photograph. ( I realize RAM and disk space are two different things, I’m trying to be illustrative here.) Despite IBM-style PCs in the West having moved on to the concept of built-in hard drives, the x68000 had no such bulk; it had its own OS that bore astounding similarity to MS-DOS but pulled all extra data from floppy.

We’re not here to get soggy over this thing’s data capabilities. When it comes to graphics and sound, the only things the Western world has that came close were the Amiga and the Atari ST… and neither could hold a shaky, barely-lit candle to this heartbreaker. During a time when a lot of people were gradually making the stroll from boxy candy-colored shit to VGA graphics, the standard color palette on the Sharp x68000 was 65,535 colors in a maximum resolution of 1,024×1,024. By comparison, VGA’s 1987 vintage can output 256 colors at a resolution of 320×200. Better get your bifocals out. Needless to say, this graphical depth demanded audio of comparable richness.

I mean, think about it – this machine hit its peak in the early 90s. This shit was like staring God in the face. Except maybe not as awkward.

Regular readers (if I have any; I certainly hope so, or I’m still in that coma and this isn’t even happening) are already aware of my desire to basically fucking marry the Yamaha YM2612 – the exquisite little weaponized synth chip that makes all our favorite Genesis soundtracks go boom-boom. The Sharp x68000 uses a slightly more grown-up, sophisticated cousin of the YM2612. The YM2151 boasts eight channels to the 2612’s six, and to put it in plain terms, the end result sounds far “cleaner” and also offers more potential detail. In other words, the music output on even the off-the-shelf model is delicious. I am terrible for saying this, but aside from the minimal loss of “ass-end” I seem to hear on x68000 soundtracks, I may actually like this chip better. Two key examples of its power to deliver are the x68000 retooling of Akumajō Dracula and the port of Thunder Force II. It even makes River City Ransom sound gnarlier!

Japan’s decision to only market this marvel domestically kept the x68000 a near-secret in the 80s and 90s, but the sheer volume and variety of titles released for it makes the secret all the more unbelievable. You would think more buzz would have been generated – even now, in 2017, when everyone has seen everything and it’s been made into twelve shitty memes, I look at the screenshots and the videos with a certain awe. I humbly present some highlights of what I have found in my plodding research.

Akumajō Dracula

Konami, 1993

It’s a remake of the original, but it’s arcade-quality. (in fact, the x68000 was the test system for the Capcom CPS system for many years.) I digress – the difficulty level is increased just enough to re-engage, the music is remarkable, and I especially love that Stage Clear theme. “Epic” applies here.

Dead of the Brain

FairyTale, 1992

1) this owns 2) ew though

It’s all in Japanese, but I get the general idea. It seems to be a really cool spin on Re-Animator by way of Return of the Living Dead… definitely inspired by both. The music’s not as mind-blowing here, but the graphics are really turned-out. It’s hard to do effective horror stuff in a game medium, especially the earlier you go in the timeline, but Dead of the Brain really impresses me by melding cartoony with frightening.

Dracula Hakushaku

FairyTale, 1992

I’m sorry, these just fascinate me. I’m noticing a dual theme with these graphical-text adventures: prominent tits and horrible things happening or being found.Still, really detailed illustration, great color choice to make for a dark theme.

A Preponderance of NSFW shit

Big Surprise, 1987-1993

It looks almost like cross-stitch. It is an open and kitchen-ready mockery of itself.

Just in case you wanted to jack off to this, well hey, at least it’s better than the same image would be rendered on a VGA machine. Don’t think too hard about what you’re doing, bucko. I guess people made do back then. Some of it’s awfully MSPaint, though.

Heart of Saphilamun

Annandule Project, 1991

I found very little background info on this one, in either language. It was apparently a hit, but in a flash-in-the-pan sort of way. Something about the screenshots and video intro I’ve found really unsettles me. Maybe it’s the brief, silent sequence depicting a nude woman literally fucking falling apart against a black background. Maybe it’s the horrifying winged snake thing. Maybe it’s the fact that I even asked on forums and couldn’t get a synopsis… it’s apparently loosely based on Lovecraft. I’ll buy that.

All of this has enraptured me with this mysterious device. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this glimpse into the grey shadows with me; I live for this kind of shit, and it’s part of why I love to write these articles. I get to pluck artifacts from the dusty ground of the wasteland, wipe them off, and decide they need talking about. Cheers.

See you in July, stay retro!