So this is pretty much just a gimmie entry. I had a pretty full day; sat at the park and fed the geese (getting a few snips to the fingers in the process, damn hungry Canadian freaking geese), ate at a pretty pricey Japanese buffet, Badayori, and then went out to pick up fixins for some Breakfast Tacos (from Robert Rodriguez’s 10 Minute Cooking School on the Sin City extended DVD), so I didn’t really have a bunch of ideas swimming inmy head to write about.
I decided that this would be a good time to cull the memory banks for the first bit of nostalgia that I could bring up and ↑,↑,↓,↓,?,→,?,→,B,A,Start the fabled and oft used Konami Code. I’m not sure if “start” is officially part of the code, but it’s what I always hit after typing it in, so it’s part of it in my memory.
I guess this entry really isn;t about the code as much as it’s about the NES game system and games in particular. I had an Atari 2600 that I bought from a garage sale growing up, but it never really hooked me like the NES did. Sure I loved Chopper Command, the horrible port of Pac-Man, Bezerk, and Combat, but it was the NES that had me so engulfed that I’d frequently find myself spitting out obsenetites at Koopa Troopas and that damn over-heat function in Excitebike. I remember playing Super Mario so much that I could baically not look at the screen when I played. Getting the 100+ lives was a snap (what the hell did the lives count thing turn into after 99, a key and crown, a melting ice-cube?) And I used the Zapper gun enough that something inside broke and you didn’t have to aim anymore. If you pulled the trigger and pointed at anything the damn ducks would be falling out of the sky in Duck Hunt.
What kills me is that even though I played a fair bit of games on the Nintendo 16-bit system and enough Golden Eye to make my trigger finger bleed on the N64, I pretty much fell out of love with Nintendo over the years. Mostly because the style of games that I love, side scrollers in particular, are a thing of the past. I was a kid at just the right time for the NES, and it pretty much fulfilled my every video game need. I am so not a fan of 1st person shooters, cut scenes and X-Station Play Boxes. I bought a Game Cube, mostly to play the ports of old NES games (my collection of games is pretty much limited to the Mega-Man collection, the Namco Museum and Animal Crossing for all the classic NES games you can get and play.)
I guess I’m sort of looking forward to the Wii, though only because I’ve heard rumors that you can access the entire Nintendo back log of games for free via the internet, but if that’s not the case, I guess this will be the first time I’m not growing with Nintendo. And let me tell you, the Wii system looks mighty scary to me, mainly because the game control looks really wiggy (a remote control and a weird thumb joystick/trigger thing with no wires.) Did Nintendo not learn fromthe Power Glove? Man my arm got so tired from using that thing that I thought I’d cry. It was torture. So now you have to weild the remote like a sword in Zelda? What if I move my hand to scratch my ass with the controller? Is Link going to freak out and try and cut off his pants?
