- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Once upon a time I was 10 years old. It was 1990, and I owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. I'm not talking game cube, I'm not talking gameboy, and I'm not talking super NES. I'm talking about Duck Hunting with one of those 5 dollar laser guns, playing Super Mario where you could only be Luigi or Mario, and jumping over barrels with Donkey Kong. The golden age of Nintendo. So, back in the day, there was one thing that bothered me and still sticks in my mind. And, if you have ever owned the orginial NES you will know exactly what I'm about to describe. You sit down in front of your favorite game, whatever it was or may be, let's say Super Mario #1 just for old time's sake. You put in the cartridge (for those of you who are 10 or 12, game systems didn't have disks they weren't around untill the mid to late 1990s, so everything worked on cartidges just like your gameboy) and a black screen greeted you from the depths of your NES. Panic, outrage, disgust. You just wanted to play Mario. You didn't want to think about the fact that NES used copper cartidge connectors so they sometimes got cruddy and wouldn't hold a charge. You just wanted to play Mario. So, what did you do? You held the humungus cartridge in your hands, kinda like a penut butter sandwich, and blew into it. You blew your heart out. You swept back and fourth prayin that you would dislodge some dusk or gunk that was messing up the connectors. You would do this for 15 minutes sometimes before it would work. Personally I remember leaving and coming back to a game because it wouldn't turn on. This was 15 years ago. Today, I own an XBOX. I play Halo too much. I couldn't help but find it funny how a system that is light years ahead of the original NES, with internet capabilities, with a hard drive, with so much more processing power that it is laughable to think we even played on the original NES, can still have the same stupid problem. Xbox is a great system, Bill Gates is a smart guy, and Microsoft rules the world. So, why can't they make a disk drive that reads a stupid CD?
P.S. This post is a desperate cry in the hopes that some day I will never have to read the words "Your disk is dirty or damaged..." when I just bought the disk and cleaned it before I put it into my machine. Sorry if this post isn't really about Halo or Bungie. But, it had to be said.