takgoti

Favorite Photo of the Moment

I can remember when N64’s used to be hot shit. We weren’t allowed to have game consoles [my brother and I], so whenever my friends had them I would always try and get as much face time in as possible when I was staying over. The day when one of my best friends in elementary school introduced me to the original Super Mario Bros. was the day when she realized we were never going to play with Barbies again.

In the case of my brother, he grew up never really caring about video games and continues to maintain minimal contact with technology, aside from watching the visualizer on iTunes whilst placing his music on shuffle. [I will cop to this being addicitively mesmerizing. I recommend both the iTunes Visualizer, and Jelly.] In the case of me, I currently own a Wii, an XBOX 360, and a PS3. Apparently, about 19 years of video game squelching could not squelch the gamer out of me.

Anyhow, the N64 is a system that was released right about when all of my contemporaries and I were hitting puberty. This means that “hanging out” at boys’ houses suddenly became something that had connotations requiring double quotes. If a girl was going over to a boy’s house, she wasn’t just going over there to shoot the shit and play Ninja Turtles. She was going there to do something far more nefarious. Something that none of us yet fully understood.

I only had a handful of female friends who were in the possession of an N64 system [or the soon to follow Dreamcast system] and that was because they had male siblings. The girl geek had yet to become a “thing” in general society, and believe me when I say that other girls did not think it “cool” when you came over to sit around and read Teen Bop and discuss boys and you ended up playing Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart with their brothers. It’s not that I didn’t find reading articles about Jonathan Taylor Thomas appealing. I mean, let’s be real, I was a teenage girl during the height of his popularity and to this day the initials JTT make me shriek internally just a little bit. He was our Bieber. Our Pattinson. Just better looking and far more justified as a teen-girl crush, in my opinion. But I digress…

What? Sorry, I was watching the iTunes visualizer.

Anyhow, all I really remember playing a lot of on the N64 were Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat, and even those I didn’t get to play that much. So, when we were over at Cyrus’ friend Charles’ house and he had this bounty of games strewn across the floor in his room, the adolescent geek girl inside me squee’d just a little bit. I don’t remember why Charles had all these N64 games. I think he’d gotten them off eBay or Craiglist or something? Regardless, I was a little excited to see what I’d been missing during my teenage non-gaming days.

The answer? Apparently not much. You know how the original 8 bit Super Mario Bros. remains cool in a charming, retro sort of way? I guess that if I had ties to most of these games they would retain more of a nostalgia for me, but man. The N64 holds weird control schemes, some poorly thought out games, touchy camera controls that started to make me sick after a bit, and graphics that make the Wii look like blu-ray. I did get a laugh from having to blow out one of the cartridges to get it to work, and there was a rather heated debate about whether Slippy Toad is a boy or a girl. [That is one confused amphibian.]

I took a picture of the pile of games, partially for posterity’s sake, and partially because it was just cool looking. In a burst of trite inspiration, I decided to doctor it up in Photoshop a bit to give it that sepia’d, fuzzy, vignette’d look we equate with oldness.

So the N64 gaming night wasn’t met with as many fond memories for me as it was for all the boys who had grown up with the systems. It was fun, though, and at the very least I went home with a new appreciation for our current generation of gaming.

And also, a new appreciation for just how terrible a game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was. We gave up on that one after approximately five minutes.