I purchased a Wii about a week ago. This is my first Nintendo console since my original Nintendo Entertainment System. I was a devoted fan of the NES back in the day. I wasted countless after-school hours mastering Super Mario Bros. or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out (which I beat, thank you very much), when I could have or should have been doing something more productive with my time, such as dating girls or training to become a ninja. Alas, youth is wasted on the young.
Halfway through high school I put away my NES for good once I discovered the wonders of the PC. In fact, the PC was the whole of my gaming universe until I bought an Xbox 360 a couple of years ago in order to play Rock Band. Besides occasionally playing Halo 3 - which my roommate bought - as well, until now I just had not considering console gaming to be an option. It's like switching from Windows to Mac - sure, you can do it, but you're still getting basically the same thing in slightly different packaging. Plus, you're a slave to the Man either way, so why bother?
So what brought me back into the world of Nintendo? The Virtual Console. The Virtual Console is the invention of some infernal genius at Nintendo designed to lure people into purchasing the Wii by letting them hit the rewind button on their lives. You see, the Virtual Console lets people play games from previous Nintendo consoles - the NES, SNES, and N64 (as well as some others like the Sega Master System, but seriously, who had one of those? That kid in your 5th grade class whom everybody shunned because he was different in some undefinable but definitely creepy way, that's who). And since the Wii will play Gamecube games directly, you now have one system that will play games from every generation of Nintendo console.
So there I am hanging out at my friend's house. He's showing me his Wii, we're playing a few games, and I'm totally not expecting that I'm about to get walloped upside the head by my subconscious. Then he shows me that he's downloaded The Legend of Zelda for the Virtual Console. He hands me the controller, I press the start button, and suddenly it's New Year's Eve 1987 all over again.
That's right ladies and gentlemen, it's time for a tour down Memory Lane. All aboard, and please keep your arms inside the bus at all times, as touching objects outside will cause a temporal paradox.
I got my original NES for Christmas in 1987. It was the only thing I truly cared about getting that year. I don't think I even asked for anything else - I went all-in on this one request, hoping it would impress on my parent's just how much I wanted this thing, as well as overcoming their price-reluctance (it was $200, which was not chump-change 20+ years ago). I know I got other things that Christmas, but I'm sure I don't remember them. It could have been the proverbial socks and underwear and I would still have been happy, because I got my NES.
My parents resorted to a bit of trickeration which was very uncharacteristic of them. You see, I had memorized the exact dimensions of the box the NES came in, as well as it's weight, so I could determine in a moment whether a given wrapped present could possibly contain one ("Too long, not heavy enough, wrong girth" - apparently I knew what girth was as a 10 year old). Come Christmas Eve, no box had the magical right measurements, and I despaired that I had dared to reach for the stars only to come up short. But of course my parents had gotten me one, and simply waited until I had gone to bed before putting it out. As I came out of my room Christmas morning and saw a new gift had appeared, my heart leaped inside me - 22" x 14" x 6", THAT MUST BE IT!
I spent the next week doing little else but playing Super Mario Bros. But come New Year's Eve, my mother tore me away from it while she did some shopping errands. Thus it was I found myself at Wal-Mart, and we happened to pass near the aisle that had Nintendo games. I'm not sure how, but somehow, only a week removed from the celebration of consumer debt that is Christmas, I convinced my mother to get me another game. I'm pretty sure I didn't even cry or beg either. And when the moment came to choose, my hand, as if moved by Destiny, went for The Legend of Zelda. I knew precious little about the game, except for that really weird commercial with the guy who sounds like he's had a mental breakdown, and that the cartridge was gold, which was cool.
My friend Marshall had invited me to spend the night at his place. It was Marshall who had introduced me to the NES. He had gotten his the previous September, and I discovered this game called Super Mario Bros. which made Combat seem like garbage, and Combat was awesome.
I took this new game to his house, and we rang in 1988 by staying up all night playing it. We didn't get very far - the non-linear, adventure-style game was new and foreign to both of us, and we were largely at a loss for what to do. But yet we still knew we had entered into something magical. The game drew us in in a way that not even SMB could. To this day it's one of those special childhood memories that has always stayed with me. Some remember their first kiss; I remember The Legend of Zelda.
This ends our tour down Memory Lane. Please exit the bus at the front. Keep you tickets, as they are good for future tours, but only those given by this particular blog.
Thus it was that as I played this game of yesteryear on my friend's Wii, a sea of memories from my misspent youth came rushing up from the far depths of my mind to flood my thoughts, carrying with them currents of emotion long forgotten. Since that day, I knew it was only a matter of time before I yielded and purchased my own Wii. Now, the deed is done. I, like my parents before me, have spent $200 to play 8-bit games. The circle is complete.
Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate the Wii's modern features just as much as the Virtual Console. The whole motion-sensitive controller idea is nothing short of brilliant. Wii Sports is just the right combination of fun and frustrating to keep me coming back for more.
I have to hand it to Nintendo - it took some seriously large brass spheroids to release the Wii. They were blown out of the water the previous two console generations. Had they produced another flop this generation, many might have started suggesting that they go the way of Sega and give up consoles to focus solely on producing games. So what do they do? Go for broke with a game-changing (no pun intended) concept of a what a console should be.
The Wii is graphically underpowered compared to the Xbox 360 or PS3, being little better than a souped-up Gamecube. This allowed Nintendo to produce units at a price point far below that of the competition, but risked alienating both developers and gamers by giving them a system that could be perceived as not up to par. That was risk enough, but then they decide to eschew the modern game controller with its two or three dozen buttons for the Wii Remote with its handful of buttons and motion-based control system. Has it worked? A 2-1 lead over the Xbox 360 and PS3 says yes.
So thus it is that I am now enjoying the best of the old and the new. Join me in future articles as I play more Virtual Console games and tread the ever-so-narrow path between enjoying childhood memories and avoiding the traumatizing regrets that come with them.
God bless,
AJ
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