Christmas Happened Last Year

Shortly after my wife and I started dating, I learned that she, too, had a hyper-nostalgic video gaming love: Donkey Kong 64 on her green Nintendo 64. She never beat it, but she got all the way to the end with those doors where you have to have collected a bunch of crap in the game (bananas, crowns, fairies, coins, whatever) but she didn't have an item she needed and she didn't have the internet back then (poor child) so she just never got it and that was the end of it. 

Moving forward in time, she didn't have the N64 anymore but she would still mention it from time to time. And from "time to time" I mean like once a month she would say something like, "Man, I used to just put on my [um...early 2000's cd...something like Blink 182] CD and just play Dr. Mario on endless for hours." Or, "I can't believe I never beat Donkey Kong for the 64. I loved that game. My whole family played!".

So guess what I decided to get her for Christmas this year. That's right! I got her a jungle green Nintendo 64 off eBay! I of course also got all of the requisite accessories: DK64 game, extra controller, rumble pak, memory expansion pak. Plus a copy of Dr. Mario 64 (because she loved that too) and The New Tetris (because Dr. Mario is horrible and Tetris is way better). I considered picking up Super Smash Bros, but I was already over budget and SSB is like $60 for some reason. It didn't even cost that much when it was new!

Anyway, start polishing up that #1 Awesome Husband award, because I was on the fast track to getting it. I didn't receive my gift epiphany until pretty late this year (about a week before Christmas) because I was in crunch time at work and was working like 60+ a week, day and night, so I was anxiously checking my phone several times a day waiting for packages to be delivered. And they were slowly trickling in. 

Three days before Christmas, it was all here.Green Nintendo with matching controller and expansion pak? Check. Games? Check. Rumbles? Check.

But then it occurred to me. What happened to Aubrey's old Nintendo? I was pretty sure it broke or her little brother sold it or something, but I didn't know for sure.... I decided to ask Aubrey's Mom to make sure it wasn't still just laying around her house or something. She said she hadn't seen it in years and was pretty sure it was gone. Then I decided to just ask Aubrey. 

We were cooking dinner and I said, "Hey, whatever happened to your old Nintendo? It would be pretty awesome to play Donkey Kong at Christmas."  

She replied, "OH MY GOSH that would be awesome! We'll have to dig it out when we're down there!".

"Are you sure it's there? I thought your brother sold it."

"Did he?? He better not have! It wasn't his to sell!"

"Well if it's still at your parents and no one's using it, why wouldn't we have it?"

"That's a good question, we should probably take it. We're the only ones that would use it."

"Are you sure your brother didn't sell it? I really thought he did."

"He sold all of his PlayStation games at some point, but I don't really know why."

None of this made me feel any better, so we decided she would check for it the next time she went to her parents' house.

Suspenseful story short, it totally was still there in a drawer under the tv in her parents' living room. It was all there, just as it had been! Just a little dustier. 

Crap.

On Christmas Eve Eve (get it?), I decided it was only fair that I tell Aubrey what happened. I spent like $150 on a bunch of stuff that she already had. She picked me up from work (at 9pm) and with utter defeat in my voice I told her there was something I needed to tell her. Apparently she thought I was going to say I was fired or that I had to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day because she was still ECSTATIC about the gift!! She's a totally sentimental sucker so she wasn't disappointed at all! 

Now we have two Nintendo 64's and all the fixin's and we've been playing through DK64 together. Still an awesome freaking game. Also, we sometimes break out into a chorus of the Monkey Rap when we're cooking or driving or whatever. It doesn't hold up.

What are you most nostalgic game playing memories? Do you have a game that you just get an itch to play on a certain day? 

  

The Pokemon Trading Card Game Video Game

Once upon a time, when I was growing up, I was a huge nerd. 

This will probably not come as a surprise to most. But I still wanted to preface this post because we're about to go pretty deep into my geekhood. And it's not even cute or awesome like my Starcraft History post. 

So yeah, I was in middle school and a huge nerd. This was during the period of time where Nintendo was basically printing its own money in the form of Pokemon cards for the trading card game. it's embarrassing to think about just how much money I spent on those cards. I'm pretty sure they're still in my parents' basement too. But before I had any money at all to burn on Pokemon cards, I discovered that there was such a thing as the Pokemon Trading Card Video Game for the Gameboy Color. Yes, it was a game where you would collect digital versions of the cards, build decks, and play the card game against NPC's. In Japanese. Only obtainable (as far as I was concerned) through the wilds of the internets. So I got an emulator and downloaded that sucker so I could play the TCG w/o having to buy the cards.

This worked for about as long as it took for me to get through the intro video when you turned the game on. Turns out not knowing any Japanese will make playing a text-heavy game pretty difficult. I was eventually able to remedy this with a fan-made translation patch to edit most of the text into English. Or at least something that resembled English. 

I played the crap out of this game. Then I showed it to a friend of mine and he also began to play it a ton. Then, after a couple weeks, we started having problems progressing as the translator hadn't really finished his project and we were having problems understanding what was going on in the game. So we gave it up in favor of becoming completely addicted to the actual cards and dropping pretty much every cent we could get our hands on to buy more cards. 

I had three of these. It was a big deal.

That, too, eventually died out. The English version of the gameboy game was eventually released (I just checked wikipedia, it was almost a two-year gap between the release of the Japanese and English versions of the game) but I never bothered with it.

Fast forward to this past Monday. I was listening to some Familyjules7x (as should you!) and came across the boss music from the Pokemon TCG video game! A couple hours later, I started to get "the itch." So I again turned to the wilds of the internets, found myself a copy of the game in English, and fired it up. 

The game HOLDS UP! Granted, the official translation actually isn't much better than the fan-made one I found forever ago, but I'm willing to bet it's at least complete. I played during my lunch hour and I had a blast! Each match seemed way shorter than I remembered too. I doubt this game will entertain me quite as much as it did before. But hey, maybe this will finally be the motivation I need to jailbreak my iPod.