You Have To Blow on the Games To Make Them Work

Every few months, always on a Sunday in an hour when I am only barely awake, my parentals will unexpectedly show up on my doorstep bearing gifts. The gifts I speak of are not of the store purchased, birthday or Christmas variety, although the items in question were most certainly, at some point time, bought in a store and very likely for a birthday or for Christmas. The gifts are the result of a tri-annual cleanout of my parents' basement, garage, storage room, or closets in which they will inevitably come across a box or two of my (or my brother's) toys, books, school papers and the like. For some reason, our family knows how to hold onto its crap. Pack ratting is a family tradition. It's a defined art form. And best of all, how can you beat getting your hands back on new, old crap?

Of late I have been nostalgic for my old, original Nintendo game system. After the last bearing of gifts yielded only a shitty collection of old candles and macaroni art work from the 2nd grade, I made a special request to the parents to be on the look out for the old fun box (not to be confused with the other fun box). This, coupled with the fact that as a tech nerd who must have the latest new electronic crap and who scoured the city for a week and a half before leaving work early to buy a Nintendo Wii from some guy at a Wal Mart who promised to hold one for "only 20 minutes," I was curious to see if it still holds up to what I remembered it was. Well, they found it, they brought it to me last Sunday, and it's kinda terrible.

First, it works like it did when it was brand new. That is to say, it doesn't work worth a fuck. I blow on the games, I hit the power button really quick, I reset, I took it apart and cleaned it thoroughly, and still the red light blinks at me. Mocking me. When it finally does come on, I play the games, games which if you recall, you cannot save. Remember? You get no saves, you get "continues." And you only get like three of those, so you have to beat the game in one sitting. Assholes.

Also, my state of the art, flatscreen, HD, huge ass TV thinks I'm just fucking with it, hooking up a 22 year old (that's right f'ers, who's feeling old?) video game system. The TV can't get the picture just right, but that's probably because my TV's obviously a snob and a jerk. I can almost hear it saying in perfect douchebag pitch, "I'm sorry. Did you say you wanted that...thing...plugged in me?" It's Japanese, so you figure they would get along, but they don't. At any rate, I played Baseball, Top Gun, Contra (still kinda cool), Double Dragon II, Karate Champ, Ghosts and Goblins, Gauntlet, and Paperboy (still hard as fuck). You may be wondering about the obvious, Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. Ask my goofy ass brother who probably pawned them for weed in the summer of 1990. Just kidding...jerk.