rickroyal

My inner geek speaks:

For my eight birthday, my parents got me a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), along with a few games (Kung Fu sticks out in my head; as does the Karate Kid game, though I seem to think we got that later), and a really swanky book that had walkthroughs and reviews of all ninety games that Nintendo had out at the time. My father set it up in my room, and the sibs and I played until we were forced to go to bed. Playing video games had a strange effect on my sister: it caused her to scream all manner of profanity at us. My brother had an amazing talent to be great at any game that came along. I was most comfortable just watching the others play.

For Christmas that year, I got a subscription to Nintendo Power, which had just started getting published. I hadn't asked for it; my mother just decided to get it for me, and we, my brother and I, liked it a lot. Like the game magazines they have today, it was filled with tips and tricks, but it also had its own style. I suppose being devoted solely to a single game system and being published by the company that owned said game system allowed them more freedom to cover more topics (or maybe it was merely a matter of filling space back then; i.e. there weren't a lot of games to review, so they had to devote pages to other things). For a while, they had celebrity interviews (Jay Leno and the rebel kid from Head of the Class stick out), and profiles of really good gamers. And the always enjoyable Howard and Nester comic strip. And a review of a theme park in Japan that was one giant maze has even since made me think that something like that would play great over here.

But what had been kicking around in my mind for the past couple weeks, was that the first few issues I got had fiction in them. First was the Adventures of Captain Nintendo, which, at the time, I thought was extremely cool, and which reading over it today makes me smile at all the wrong things. And then there was Friends, which was an idea that I'm sure my sister would've loved had she gotten around to reading it. Then there was no more fiction after that, and I've often wondered why.

I kept getting Nintendo Power long after it started going downhill. When the Super NES and Gameboy were introduced, most of the content of the magazine was jetisoned in favor of reviews and tips; whatever style the magazine had was lost. It even went to a shorter format, with a cheaper binding, by the time I decided not to renew my subscription. Surprisingly, it seems as though the magazine is still going strong. I wonder if I should give it a look.

Sometimes I feel sad when I think about the amount of stuff that was given to me as a youth; about the money that was spent on things that amounted to little more than expensive toys. And yet, I don't know why I feel this way. My parents had the money to spend on us, and they wanted to. Perhaps it's the unselfishness of loving a child that I don't understand; how they only wanted to make us happy, and that the time and money spent making us happy was worth it. I can't wrap my head around that concept, but I love them for being that way.