The Jerkstore...: Humbled

Current mood:

calm
Category: Games

This past week or so, I haven't been able to really keep up with either of my blogs. Work has been kicking my ass and I'm helping out my manager because of a billing statement sanfu at work. It's long, complicated and boring. The bottom line is that I haven't been able to write anything because I worked almost 60 hours last week. Here are some things that happened since the last time I posted.

1. I worked a lot.
2. Stephanie's car broke down (ignition switch/tumbler issues) in a really bad neighborhood while picking up a cake Saturday.
3. Stephanie's Dad had his 50th birthday party Saturday.
4. Boston dropped their second strait series to the New York Yankees.

I want to talk about something else tonight. Video games. That's right, video games. I don't want to talk about anything new, even though I did buy Mario Party 8 for my Nintendo Wii last week. The games I'm playing are games from my past when I was a kid. We're talking single digits here. The games I've downloaded to my Wii are from when I was say seven, eight and nine. For those that don't know much about the cultural phenomenon that is the Wii, you can play brand new releases and you can download old school Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and Turbografx-16 games to the Wii and play them. Even with all the orginal slowdown and glitches.

To filter this beyond the premise of Virtual Console, I played two games from this service just tonight that I used to flat out own. The first was Ninja Gaiden from Tecmo. If you missed it, I posted a big feature on this blog and on my 1up.com page regarding the entire Ninja Gaiden franchise and how much I love it. In my youth when I was still playing this game on my old Nintendo, I could beat it blindfolded. Now, I suck about as bad as I would have expected an adult to suck at it when I was nine. I can't even get to the final stage any longer, I am that old school video game impared.

What's worse is that I decided to move on to another classic that I could have beaten with one hand tied behind my back, Castlevania by Konomi. I couldn't even make past the second level in a game that doesn't even really get challenging until level four. "What the hell happened?" I thought to myself. Has it really been that long? Then I thought, yeah, it has been that long. I probably first played this game 20 years ago. When I was that age I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to be 20 years old, let alone 20 years in the rear view mirror after my first experience with it. Then between my walk of shame from my couch into my office in my apartment something occured to me. Nintendo has plagued my life.

Don't get me wrong, video games contributed to my will to do well and succeed. It taught me not to quit and to see things through until I accomplished them. Passing a difficult video game was very gratifying to me when I was young. Here lies the quandary. How could you see Nintendo ruining aspects of your life when you say that passing a game taught you important life lessons on not giving up and gave you a sense of accomplishment? Some games, like the games I listed above, took a lot of time, a lot of controller tossing, and mountains of frustraition. I was so willing to not quit and give up that I nearly gave myself a heart attack several times while in elementary school. I was willing to put up with a huge amount of bullshit, much to my own detrament as a child and later in life.

I carried this willingness to accept bad situations over in to adolescence and then in to adulthood. It's affected me in a negative way in relationships (both romantic and friendly), with my family and internally. I've put up with a lot of BS from a lot of people that didn't deserve my time and energy. So, I blame you Nintendo, just as the cancer ridden 65 year old blames Phillip-Morris for his or her lung ailment and ultimate date with death. I can't say that it hasn't been fun, because it has. I'm not even really going to quit you, even though some days I wish I could. Somewhere down the road (soon) I will have a family, and Dad will still be trying to act cool by keeping up with the latest technology. I guess that's not all bad, at least I'll have something to relate to my kids with, and I think that will be important if video games is something they pursue as a hobby.

In the end, I still do credit some of my tenacity in life to playing video games in my youth. Some credit must also go to organized sports. Then again, I also still blame some of my faults to be too subborn and not setting people or issues aside for good or at least to catch my breath and reassess cetain situations. Then there is the nestalga factor. I still love the memories of sitting around with kids from my neighborhood when Nintendo made it to middle America circa 1986, and later with my crew from Sioux Falls I still keep in touch with. We all spent hours upon hours beating as many games under the sun and as many as reasonable (and sometimes unreasonable) time would allow. I remember staying up all night at Travis Jamison's 10th birthday party taking turns trying to beat Double Dragon II and Mega Man 2. I remember staying up all night again at Derek Snelling's 13th birthday party trying to beat The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past before the sun came up. I remember riding my bike downtown at the age of twelve to pop quarters out of my allowence to play Street Fighter II: Champion Edition at 7-11.

They were all fun times, even if they did contribute to a lot of situations I stuck around in for too long because of the person they molded me in to. Now that I've come to this realization, maybe I can avoid repeating some of the same mistakes and not travel down the same roads as I did in the past. Here's to progress in life and hoping that Nintendo gets the Mega Man franchise up on Virtual Console soon.