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A long and arduous drive down to the very nether-regions of the United Kingdom was a pretty spontaneous, for me anyhow, decision that much to my girlfriends displeasure, she wasn’t going to be able to join me on as she couldn’t book the time off.

5 hours down and 300 miles later I hadn’t seen a single pirate, plenty of coastline but not a galleon to be seen or a sea shanty to be heard. I already had feared the chances of me finding the SCUMM bar were slim and when I got to Penzance this was confirmed.

In place of what I would have expected to be some pretty awesome pirate shops selling Cutlasses and Grog I stumbled across some very sub-standard town stores and a gaggle of emo kids who were probably running about 3 years behind the times. I guess fashion takes a while to get down to the west country.

In fact I think the ONLY pirate related thing I saw in Penzance was a small boat anchored in the harbour that was selling nick-knacks with a pirate flag, unfortunately I didn’t get chance to check it out due to the absolutely atrocious weather the UK has had over the last week or so.

My secondary objective, as my pirate search was looking to be coming up empty, was to try and find some arcades. Normally the British seaside is awash with arcades, especially old ones. I must have walked well over a mile in the pissing rain and stumbled across a single arcade.

I normally have a handful of games I generally expect to see when I go to an arcade, they are :

• Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles
• Simpson’s
• X-men
• Bubble Bobble or Snow Bros (if I’m lucky)

What did they have in there ? Sod all, I was most distraught. The seaside had let me down, the closes thing to an arcade experience they had was the T2 arcade and that’s pushing it, the game came out for the SNES Super scope FFS!

Through my entire week of hunting for arcades there was one shining light of a game that I didn’t even know existed and something I will write a bit more about in pt2.

After Burner : Climax