The weekend of Oct. 5-7 was the worst weekend I have ever experienced in Madison. The Cardinal lost to the Herald in overtime. The Badgers were beaten like a rented mule by Indiana, of all teams. The Packers lost to Tampa Bay. And I had three midterms in three consecutive days to look forward to. I wandered around the Lodge and contemplated taking out my clown punching bag and beating it until it was crippled. However, I found my salvation in 'Goal.'
What is 'Goal'? Why, it's the greatest soccer game on Nintendo. After two and a half hours of playing with slow-moving pixelated images, I felt like a new man. I also realized that Nintendo was the greatest advancement in my lifetime. Screw the PS2, the Dreamcast and the upcoming GameCube and X-Box. We should all be thankful to have grown up in an age when Nintendo dominated the scene.
I feel like an old man talking about the value of Nintendo in our daily lives. But this is an important issue! Remember how we had to listen to our grandparents talk about taking a trolley for a nickel to Palookaville? It was important to understand where we came from in order to know where we were and where we could go. That is why every child today should play Nintendo. True, there was Atari, but do you honestly remember Atari? Seriously, that's like Pong, Pac-Man, Centipede and other crap.
We all remember Nintendo. Whether we are Republican or Democrat, gay or straight, Wisconsinite or ECB, we are all linked by Nintendo's awesome power. Seriously, you could lock me up with a crackhead from Long Island, but we can both remember that in order to get thirty guys for Contra, it was 'up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-B-A-start.'
You could walk down the street and meet your complete opposite in terms of personality but you both know that in order to beat King Hippo in Mike Tyson's Punchout, you gotta punch him in the gut with short jabs. Did we ever actually run on the power-pad for Track and Field? Hell no, we used our hands for optimal locomotion. We all remember the glove, and the first time we saw it in 'The Wizard,' the movie which displayed the wonderful acting of a young Fred Savage and also the vehicle for Super Mario Bros. 3.
Best football team ever? Tecmo Bowl's L.A. Raiders (yeah, that's right, kiddies, they were in L.A. once). How can you beat Jay Schroeder, Tim Brown, AND a backfield of Marcus Allen and Bo Jackson? You can't. And if you say you can, shut up, because we both know you are lying.
While there are many arguments over style (i.e. spread vs. machine gun in Contra, Bo Jackson vs. Christian Okoye in Super Tecmo, or clay pigeons vs. ducks in Duck Hunt), in the end, we all agree that the system was great.
We have all had the same experiences with the Nintendo system as well. We all know the fine art of blowing into the game, or jiggling the game inside the system to work it. We all have had that experience where you've played a new game all night and you must find that threshold on the system where you can play before it overheats.
Sadly, Super NES and Genesis entered the market and we all lost sight in the joy of games instead of which system was better. There will be four different systems by 2002, and younger generations will never appreciate a time when there was only one system. However, our generation will always remember the simpler times, when we knew that Leonardo was the best Ninja Turtle to use and Raphael was the worst.
