Nostalgia and Anger Management Issues

Greetings, my adoring public. I give you two things: 1. Much love, for you truly deserve it; 1. Fair warning that in two days you will be completely engulfed by the High Cheese's College Football Spectacular. Brace yourselves, this is powerful.

So I am wasting a few more hours of life the other day playing the brand new NCAA06 College Football video game on my PS2 the other day when I realized how much I missed the old school systems, especially the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Now I know that these have had no small resurgence in popularity--oddly enough among those who never experienced them the first time around--but I mean to tell you that I miss the little things that some throwback-jersey style rennaissance can't appreciate.

Sure, there were some amazing games. In RBI baseball, they little ball players were so slow going around the bases, but once they were out they could outrun the Flash to get back to the bench, regularly eliciting a "why the &$^@! can't he run like that to leg out a triple?" from a player struggling to check his anger (read: me, all the time. NES taught us all that the tongue really is a world of evil set on fire by hell.). And no one can question the power of Tecmobowl--still superior among video game football games. The programmers obviously loved the Raiders in that game--I mean, Howie Long, the 250 lb defensive lineman is the fastest player on the game, and can catch anyone, from any distance. Awesome. Who can forget the joy of Double Dragon, which taught us all that Ninjas do exist, in staggeringly large quantities, and they really do all want to kill you because you are walking down the street in a headband that matches your shirt? I will not hesitate to mention to the new generation of "gamers," who in my day were refered to by my father as "lazy @#!&%# dropout nerds," that Final Fantasy began on the NES. To this day, I have to give kudos to my brother for somehow selling me on the idea that weeks of watching him play the game while I was stuck holding a map and giving directions he didn't follow (read: being navigator) was considered fun for me. Ice to Eskimos, baby. Ice to Eskimos.


Mario: Before & After

Luigi recently offered, "Yeah...he may have had some work done, but, quite frankly, who hasn't these days."

Check out their latest project. Amazing. (click on view in another window on the right...well worth the wait)



Actually, though, what I miss most was that the original NES system was virtually indestructable--it was almost as good as the little black box on Airplanes today. I mean, every so often (read: all the time) you would put a game in and all you would get was the blinking screens of death--black, white, black, white... So how do you fix it? The obvious first solution was the "gale force blow" trick. First you took the game positioned the portion of the game that had the actual video programming card sticking out, and you mustered all of the force in your lungs, along with plenty of spit and moisture, and you sent a howling and punishing blast of air down into the small crevasse where this programming card was. Then, naturally, you grabbed the sleek and stylish big, grey box and repeated this aerobic effort only this time breathing/spewing/spitting directly into the most delicate circuitry that the NES had. Sure, the directions said swabbing with alcohol to clean, but we all knew that we simply had to generate enough wind friction to knock the residual filth and corrosion off of the circuitry and it would be fine. This amazingly solved the problem at least 80% of the time.

But, let's suppose you had mastered that maneuver and the game still wouldn't completely load--title scene, white, title scene, white... What next? Well, of course, you turn off the power, eject the game, replace it gently until the game is portruding just enough to not be able to close, and use your strength to cram the loader down with the game much more shallowly inserted than it was ever meant to be inserted. Then you powered back on. This amazingly solved another 15% of the problems.

Alas, at this point, if you weren't making progress, you had already cursed more at it than you would have actually playing game, so you simply retired. Unless of course you decided to beat the machine severely (as if you had not already). It had to learn its place. And learn its place, it did.

Once again, I am astounded by the stength and durability of the NES. I doubt my PS2 could handle any of the above "solutions." The NES put up with this being worked over daily in our house, and for many years. Never did it fail us or give up.

They don't make them like they used to.

Stay tuned for an appearance of yours truly as Mario. Pictures will undoubtedly surface. My physique does not lend me to much celebrity look-alike jazz, but when the shoe fits...Take care y'all.