The Ritual

If you were like me when I was little, you must have spent a significant amount of time playing the good old Nintendo. I don't know about you, but when I hear Nintendo, or "famicon" as we call it over here, I think of: Super Mario Bros., cartridges that seem to quit working on every single Nintendo ever made, and the finicky power cable. Seriously, every last Nintendo owner I know, made it a ritual to blow into the cartridge in hopes to try to get that thing to start. Some people will just blow directly at the cartridge, while others got fancy and covered the cartridge with the part of their T-shirt, and then blow into it. I was cool, so I was the latter.

Anyways, this ritual performed by every avid gamers to appease to the gods of Nintendo, was probably a futile attempt at getting the game to start. If it did start, it was probably just luck. But we all want to believe it was due to individual's efforts and skills. At least I do.

Now, the power cable. I haven't seen a single machine that had a fully functioning power plug. Usually. when i had the machine setup in front of the TV, I had to tell people never to walk over it, but around the back behind me. As soon as someone tried to walk across the front, the god of Nintendo was infuriated by the act, punishing the gamer through the supernatural resetting action. So you get pissed off and try to get the thing to start again, but that was also pretty difficult. If you don't keep the cables at certain angle, it would reset again.

Last, but not least, if you were into games where it requires saving where you left off, you probably know about the ever increasing forgetfulness of the game cartridge. It wipes your saved data randomly at times. I was playing "Dragon Quest", or "Dragon Warrior" for those of you in the US, and it started to delete the data. Gradually increasing as time passed. At the end, it would delete it everytime, so I had to leave the thing on forever until I beat it. It sounds like a great idea(sort of, or at least it did back then), but that never worked. Then you had someone that would step over the wire and it would all be gone. It wasn't until much much later that I learned it was due to the dead battery back up. Genius idea.

Nintendo games were not only difficult inside the game, but also the struggle against the physical issues of the machine made some games impossible to beat. Of course, there were some games that was just impossible to beat. Maybe they set the difficultly level about 20 levels too high.

Anyways, all I wanted to say is that playing Nintendo wasn't just mental, but also a physical struggle between the man and the machine(?). I'm sure a lot of peope out there can sympathize with me.

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Song of the day: Champagne - Paul Gilbert