Will has been playing a lot of Mario lately. Another development around is that he got a blog, agreed to a domain name and let me customize it! I’ll put a link at the bottom of the post** so that I don’t lose you quite yet.
In other news, the Guster is considering secondary education:
And has been for quite some time. I told him that school already started and he needs to get there if he’s actually going to go (he’s been threatening it for years), but he keeps claiming mono or other such sleep-related illnesses.
But that’s neither here nor there, and this post is about Super Mario World, and its annual presence in my life. Will claims that after a year he loses his skill so it’s fun to play yet again, which probably ought to be some sort of gold standard for video games everywhere.
It’s a good activity for him to do while we have visitors (it’s actually really fun to watch), and my favorite activity is chiming in if I remember a hidden secret, as annoying as that probably is.
It’s worth noting here, that we own two Super Nintendos* and no other gaming system which helps to explain the repetitive Mario playing. Spending more than $20 on a game is unheard of around here, though we will replace a broken controller if need be.
Every time I watch a lot of Mario, the whole world starts to feel like playing a video game. Invoicing at the end of the month is like a dreaded boss; taxes are the worst world of the year. Doing laundry, vacuuming and earning money are coins I collect to live longer or increase my health. Each day is like getting that transient invincible star…move quickly and knock off all the days to-dos.
This ghost car is not only a ghost car, but it's also driving the WRONG WAY DOWN THE STREET. Beware.
It’s no wonder, then, that today I wondered while making an unprotected left turn, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be so hard to drive if cars were like the ghosts in the ghost houses of Mario and they kept disappearing and reappearing??”
Wouldn’t, it though. Wouldn’t it.
*Why do we have TWO Super Nintendos? In short, we still haven’t completed Donkey Kong Country 2. The Donky Kong series is a really good couples game because there is a partner mode and two different characters with different skills to choose from. It’s almost romantic at times.)
It turns out that each SNES game has a tiny battery in it that keeps the hard drive alive. (I say hard drive, but I mean memory chip. Memory chip.) The battery in our copy it turns out must be dead which had the devastating effect that we cannot save our games! We discovered that if we left it in the console, regardless of whether the console was on, our progress was saved. It turns out that you can even unplug it briefly without losing the game!
With the ability to only play that one game, Will was really bored. We don’t play Donkey Kong Country games without each other (it’s a partner game!) and I have a much lower threshold for video gaming. It stresses out my repetitive stress syndrome and there are other things I like to do like paint pet portraits and felt small animals which detracts from my availability for Donkey Kong Country time.
So last Christmas I bought an old Super Nintendo off of Craigslist. It was a pretty good deal cause it came with a lot games. Honestly, it was the only thing I could think of to get him. But he likes it, and he’s using it as I type, so it worked out well. And as soon as we beat Donkey Kong Country 2 we can sell the second Nintendo on Craiglist (or to that awesome video game store 4 Jays in Antioch) and recoup some of my initial investment. It’s just that that lost boss is so intimidating.
Update: We still have both NES consoles and now they don’t really work with the smart tv and the picture is in b&w. Since this post we have also acquired both a used Wii and a used XBox 360.