To Super Bario, Glasgow’s retro-gaming pub, for a meeting with Neil about this very website. The site needs a minor upgrade, not least to make it look less dog’s-dinnerish when viewed on a mobile phone.
I learn during this meeting that the little expandable menu often seen on mobile websites is called a “hamburger menu.”
As if to reinforce the geekery of our technical website discussion, we play some two-player Pacman. Neil and I have long been each other’s Pac-nemeses. Who is yours?
I just about win the first Pac-off, Neil claiming the second by a far wider margin. We’d have played a best-of-thee but a queue of other players had formed behind us.
First in line is a teenager who I looks like she could be a serious retro-gamer who would take our Pac-asses to Pac-town. I ask if she’s good at the old Pac-a-lack-a-lack-dack, to which she says she’s quite good “but I’m not exactly of that generation.”
“Just be clear,” I say, “neither are we.”
“Yeah right!” she says.
Little shit.
Neil watches over her shoulder for a moment as she plays. Apparently she made a beeline for the nearest power pill. Our Pac-asses had nothing to fear. Pac-fear, I mean.
Because the machines in Super Bario are switched off at night, the hi scores are erased each night, which I always think is a shame as any reigning champ will have to reign in secret (even to him/herself, as you’d never know how good you were). The owners of the bar have now remedied this with a fix even lower-tech than Pacman itself:
