You’ll be able to convince people that mythical creatures do exist with this Art Attack!

Did you know that mythical creatures like the abominable snowman and the yeti are thought to exist because someone has found a strange footprint in the snow or in the mud? Now you can make your own!

You will need:

* cereal box
* PVA glue
* tissue paper or kitchen roll
* sand
* paintbrush
* newspaper

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Here’s an Art Attack for a still life with a difference!

You will need:

* Tissue paper
* Cling film
* PVA glue
* Scissors

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10 Crossfire Junior Rollerball for trainee snipers There’s something about the sheer size of so many toys and games of the Cream era; they weren’t just played in the house, they took over the house. Nowadays, everything’s been reissued in petite “coffee table” versions on sale in the Gadget Shop. Back then, you needed French windows just to get the likes of Crossfire indoors. Basically a combination of pre-Pac Man arcade favourite Air Hockey and a fairground Rifle Range, this two-player combat game required the steady aim of an SAS-trained marksman and the ruthless determination to win of an American athletics coach. The object of each round? To score goals against your opponent by firing a constant stream of steel ball bearings – that’s steel ball bearings, folks – against a rolling puck (also steel) until it passed through his net (incidentally, once again made of steel). Any ball bearings which fell into your half became your next round of ammunition (to be loaded into the top of chunky red firing pistols at either end of the long chipboard playing area). Crossfire could be a fast and furious game (to paraphrase the advertising spiel) but, by crikey, it was certainly a noisy one. In addition to the endless chime of ricocheting steel on steel, the pistols themselves had a stiff and clunky trigger mechanism that not only discharged each ball with a loud crack but also had a tendency to jam mid-game (calling for a swift and strident blow to free the offending ammo). If nervous relatives felt the need to leave the room, who could blame them? In any case, the footprint required for both game and players to play in comfort (i.e. lying full stretch on the floor) meant that the settee had to be moved, so good riddance. As with all ball bearing dependent games, some would be lost over time. Had it been possible to detach the pistols from the field of play, however, and brandish them – airgun style – in the street, we concede that they would’ve gone missing a hell of a lot sooner.

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20 Star Bird Space transport in “contains electronic circuitry” unique selling point lunacy! A masterpiece of timely ‘70s toy design, proudly marrying X-Wing-influenced rear spoilers to a swanlike stem and detachable cockpit fighter, the first remarkable thing about Star Bird was its sheer size. Forget buzzing around the garden with Matchbox or Dinky toys clutched in your tiny paw, this monster was a serious piece of space hardware. Once assembled (a process in itself reminiscent of some gung-ho, AK-47 lock ‘n’ load film montage) and fully liveried with the enclosed stickers, the Star Bird Space Avenger (as it was later to be re-christened) weighed in at a couple of kilos and stood over a foot long. It was, however, perfectly balanced - meaning it could be cradled with one hand gripping the neck and rendering it simplicity itself to swoop and zoom into interstellar battle on the patio. Which is where the real unique selling point came in, because the second remarkable thing about Star Bird was that buried somewhere in its plastic hull was a motion-sensitive gizmo (we’re hoping something gyroscopic but possibly just a marble in a tube) that could tell whether or not the ship was in a “dive” or a “climb” (at least, whether you were pointing it up or down or not), and emit the appropriate rising or falling drone. The currency offered by such a feature in terms of playground hierarchy was almost immeasurable, marking a clear line in the sand between those who had the incessant hum of galactic ionic engines literally in their grasp and those who had to resort to oral simulation of same. MB later introduced the Star Bird Space Intruder to the range (a smaller, blacker and therefore evil iteration of the toy) which added insult to injury for kids who weren’t even lucky enough to own the Avenger and moved the pleasure even further from reach (insofar as no child would consider owning the latter without the former). The Ying/Yang relationship of the two ships extended to combat scenarios, with each being able to “react” to the LED laser cannon attacks of the other. Totally minted kids could also get the cardboard Space Command Centre but, seriously, by this point it was just rampant consumerism.

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30

Hangman Why play for free what you can pay a tenner for? “Kids these days are sharp,” people have always said. “You can’t fool ‘em. They know all the angles. Smarter than most adults, in fact.” This didn’t apply, necessarily, to the kids who were quizzed by the marketing department of Milton Bradley on the day Hangman was conceived. What point, we asked ourselves, is there of paying for a plastic version of a game you can easily do with two pencils and a bit of paper? Perhaps it was just us, because they sold in many and varied forms - Squares, Computer Battleship (which to be fair at least did the noises for you), any number of noughts and crosses variants, and Hangman. Advertised, weirdly, by a pair of senile bank tellers in the Old West, who thwarted a bank robber’s activities by becoming engrossed in its singular charms, Hangman consisted of two Battleship-style hidey-behindey units, behind which you had a range of plastic tiles with letters on, which you could either convert into an impromptu mini-variation on Domino Rally by lining up and knocking over or, more boringly, slot into the spaces in the word as you guessed them. The progress of the hangee was advanced by successive pre-drawn pictures on a dial, thus foiling the other pleasure of pre-pubescent wits - the endowment of the luckless individual with large primary sexual characteristics. It didn’t even make a choking noise when you won. We’ll take imagination over plastic any day.

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40 Game and Watch Liquid crystal thrills If the inventor of Game And Watch didn’t retire a multi-millionaire at the end of the ’80s to a luxury mansion in the Bahamas then there is no justice in the world. For what was this toy but a perfectly weighted and targeted marketing triumph? A small, portable game that could masquerade when required as a digital watch, meaning kids could persuade parents and teachers alike that it was a legitimate scholastic tool (”But Dad, don’t you want me to know what the time is?”). Seriously, though, who did Nintendo think they were fooling? 99% game and 1% watch, these credit-card sized consoles could be customised to appeal to almost any demographic (ersatz Donkey Kong for hardened arcadaholics, Snoopy Tennis for girly girls), with such simple-to-grasp gameplay that even the class Joey could be a high score king. Plus, the in-built LCD screens were so easily cracked that replacements had to be shipped in almost weekly. The boredom-novelty churn was managed by the ‘Tendo releasing an ever-increasing number of variations into the market (double-screen games, widescreen games, colour displays) until they resembled nothing more than a modern-day palmtop. The bubble burst with the arrival of home entertainment systems and the fully controllable “characters” which populated the games thereon. Ironically, of course, we’ve since produced a generation of kids who can download Java games onto their mobile phones, but who can’t actually tell the time.

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50 Rom The Space Knight Futuristically armoured action toy Our first exposure to Parker Brothers’ easy-to-spell Space Knight came courtesy of the Bullpen Bulletin page in Marvel Comics, bigging up the antics of this new cosmic character. We have to confess that at the time we thought him to be yet another also-ran from the pantheon of rubbish second-string comic characters like Ghost Rider, Ka-Zar, Deadlock or any of the other losers who’d appear for an issue in Spider-Man Team-Up, and we were totally unaware of his exciting action-figure origins. For some reason, we also had him mixed up with REM, the android one off of TV’s Logan’s Run series. Jam-packed with LEDs (two for his eyes, two in his chest, two in his rocket packs plus an extra one in his utility cable – whatever that was) Rom could also boast the essential additions of an Energy Analyzer, a Translator and a Neutralizer. All in all it made for high-octane action around the sandpit at lunchtimes. But better yet, Rom could also make electronic noises thanks to two buttons on his back; one of these being the sound of heavy breathing. We’re wondering if latter additions to the Rom kit included a space-age inhaler. The best thing about Rom The Space Knight, however, was that in UK he was marketed as part of the Action Man range. Cue hundreds of kids trying to pull his space head off to cop a look at the familiar Clayton Hickman-with-a-duelling-scar visage below.

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Fancy creating a fantasy castle, complete with turrets and towers?

You will need:

- Polystyrene Cup
- Paper
- Kitchen Roll Tubes
- Sticky Tape
- Loo Roll Tubes
- PVA Glue
- Tissue Paper or Kitchen Roll

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You will need:

- Wool
- Scissors
- Cardboard box card
- Mug or cup to draw around
- Loo roll inner tube
- Scissors
- Ping pong balls

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You will need:

- Cardboard
- Newspaper
- Sticky tape
- PVA glue
- Tissue paper
- Poster or acrylic paint
- An old glove

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