(It's alright to) Bow down to the NES

So I said I would post something on the CC blog when it went live. If I had had the realization that I had nothing to post about before promising to post, we wouldn’t be stuck here, you and I, but here we are. So I’ll talk about what I did this Thanksgiving weekend. This might get boring, but it’s not my fault your lives are all more interesting than mine. What I did was, on a weekend full of amazing deals on all the hot new systems and games, I bought a Yobo FC Game Console, an inexpensive and amazingly tiny Famiclone system that plays NES games - essentially an NES on a chip. And I bought a stack of NES games to go with it. This was the first time I had played actual NES games on my TV since the infamous Mass Purge of ’92, a devastating incident in which a very stupid 14 year old boy decided that the NES was a kid’s toy he didn’t have time for, now that he had his awesome new Sega Genesis, and sold off his library of 40+ games for chump change. Obviously we can assume that 15 years later, he feels pretty murderous and stabby towards his 14 year old self, and we need not speak further of this contretemps. The important thing is that I spent the weekend playing NES games, and re-established a number of facts:

• It turns out that the NES is still the best system ever made. It’s better than your Xbox 360. It’s way better than your PS3. It’s better than your Wii by the exact number of NES games that still aren’t available on the Virtual Console (so it’s like 200 times better). It’s better than ice cream. And it’s better than sex. I think. Because someone described it to me once, and it didn’t sound all that great.

• It turns out that when you put an NES game into the system and turn the power on, the title screen immediately appears. This is apparently not an error. The first time this happened, I turned the machine off and back on, just to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped the 15 minute pre-title cutscene. But I hadn’t.

• It turns out that if you hit start and go to the kitchen to get a drink while the 15 minute post-title cutscene and/or tutorial exegesis plays out, you’ll come back to find that there was no post-title cutscene and/or tutorial exegesis, and you’ve already died twice. This is apparently not an error. The first time this happened, I assumed the system was especially susceptible to relativity due to low manufacturing standards in China, and would age 15 minutes for every 30 seconds I spent in the kitchen. But it doesn't.
  

• It turns out that you have to know how to play NES games before you’ve ever played them, because the game isn’t going to give you any help. How do you jump? How do you fire? It could be any of these buttons. You’ll never know.
  

• It turns out that modern games all suck because, with their 15 minute pre-title cutscenes, 15 minute post-title cutscenes, 15 minute in-level cutscenes, post-grad dissertation length tutorial missions, and pedantic instructions on how to make your character do anything before he does them, none of the above is true for any of them.

• It turns out that I cannot get past the second level of Ghosts n’ Goblins, because I am a gimp.

Hopefully, the next post I make will have some point, and also not conclude with me admitting I'm a gimp.