8 bits of entertainment

Shelbi had her book club this weekend which meant I had two options. 
1. Watch and feed Elliott while Shelbi got ready, bathe him, put him to bed with the hope that he would go down quickly and then sit in the house making as little noise as possible for the next five hours or
2. Convince my mother to do all of that while I met up with friends. Fortunately my mother rarely declines an invitation to watch Elliott and he is already competing to be both of his grandma's favorite grandchild forever by being utterly charming whenever they are around.

So Saturday night was spent at my friend Pete's house for a rousing Tecmo Super Bowl tournament. Tecmo Super Bowl is a video game for the original Nintendo system and was released nearly 20 years ago. Also, if I were to create a top-10 list of my best friends from the years 1992-1998, Tecmo Super Bowl is a no-brainer for the top-five. The game is still incredibly entertaining and now comes with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

As we were both nursing beers and switching back and forth between watching a game that was being played on a projection screen and another that was being played on a high definition big screen TV, my friend Mike turned to me and asked matter-of-factly: "Is this the exact opposite of what's going on at book club right now?" I spent five minutes trying to come up with a better example and couldn't do it. His wife and mine were discussing Haruki Murakami's critically acclaimed novel A Wild Sheep Chase over wine and sushi and I was playing in a highly organized (there are bylaws) and competitive video game tournament while dribbling beer and salsa down my shirt. And yet, I'm not even remotely ashamed. 

I love video games. Within two weeks of Shelbi and I getting married, I went out and bought a Playstation. To pacify Shelbi I will only say that, after bringing it home, it was the happiest I had been in at least two weeks. I never had a Nintendo growing up. It was the golden age of video games and I was resigned to playing parent-approved games on our home computer which had 256k of RAM. We had Lode Runner, a game called Crossfire which came in a bizarre cartridge that you plugged into the computer, and Karateka, a simplistic karate game that was quickly taken back to the store because it featured a pixelated blob kicking another pixelated blob and was thus deemed too violent.

Therefore, much of my childhood was spent crafting conversations in my head that I would later have with my friends which would hopefully get me invited over to their houses and, more importantly, to their video game systems. Dig-Dug for Atari was a revelation to me as a nine-year-old and sports games for Nintendo pretty much blew my mind. Part of me thinks that I wouldn't have loved video games so much if they had been readily accessible to me as a kid but that argument doesn't really work when applied to other vices. "Oh yeah, I'm not really a big cocaine guy because I did so much of it when I was a kid."

So my Playstation still acts as a nice way to zone out and relax after a particularly stressful day. Instead of a beer or a glass of scotch, I am soothed by hitting three home runs with Edgardo Alfonzo in a 13-0 drubbing of the Dodgers in a world where Alfonzo is a first ballot Hall-of-Famer instead of the slow and pudgy franchise killer that he was in real life. But, in a very short amount of time, I will be packing up my Playstation and putting it in a closet. I have come to appreciate my parents' refusal to buy me a Nintendo and, for Elliott, video games will likely just be a special treat in our house. The only problem I can foresee is coming up with a way for him and his friends to want to hang out at our house despite this obvious void. Maybe cocaine brownies. 



One of many shocking and grotesque images portrayed in the highly controversial
video game Karateka.


Posted by Matthew Sherman at 3/28/2010 8:18 PM
Categories: uncategorized

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