This one is a bit odd, even for me.  But a few months ago I realized that my Dreamcast, packed away in watertight storage, could still be useful to me (even though the two DC games I own I also have on other systems).  That is, through delicious internet downloads.

I already had an SNES emulator on there, and that for several years now, but for some reason it just slipped my mnd that I could be getting old DC games and other emulators on there.  I picked up a second controller at a thrift store in Memphis and first tried a Genesis emulator.  My roommate, my girlfriend, and I all trawled our way through Mortal Kombat 1 & 2, as well as a few others, but overall that didn’t work out.  Then I had the sense to get an NES emulator, and oh my.  We stayed up way too late, several times, trying to get the Ghosts N Goblins guy’s goddamned girlfriend back.  After a few false starts with crappy emulators, I found one that would run Castlevania 3, and we spend a solid four hours, maybe five, trucking through there, only to have our save state crap out on us while I battled through the epic three-coffin fight, featuring mummies, a hammer-wielding giant, and the mother-fucking devil himself.

I don’t like to give in to the hue and cry about how games are easier nowadays.  They might actually be, but my memories of gaming during the actual heyday of the NES involve being incredibly frustrated.  People look at me funny when I say this, and maybe I’m mis-remembering — but I used to rent the original Legend of Zelda every so often, and I couldn’t find the sword.  It probably didn’t help that I didn’t have a copy of the manual.

Anyway, what I’m trying to talk about here is the sheer joy of, with a group of friends, throwing yourself against a wall of agony in an attempt to best it, to use your own shattered body parts to make a little hill to climb.  One thing about modern games that does irritate me is the assumption that I don’t want to be in the same room as my friends when I play games with them.  Look, all the X-Box live stuff is great, sure, whatever, but some games are apparently coming out now with co-op modes that don’t support a second controller.  That is, you are required to play co-op with your friend through X-Box live, rather than sit in the same room with him or her.  This seems to defeat the purpose.  The only reason that hill of body parts is possible is that your friend is sitting on the couch with you, screaming when you do and passing the controller off like burn-outs with a well-rotated joint (I just had to stop and think to remember a term for marijuana rolled into cigarrete paper — you kids and your drug culture).

This requirement to use the internet is, simply, bullshit.  Look, game industry:  the only reason we started gaming online with computers is that we were far away from each other.  My friends in undergrad. and I, we took every opportunity to drag our immense computers to my dorm’s basement, spent hours setting up the damnable router that never fucking worked, all to play really cool computer games in the same room as one another.  Have you stopped to think that some of us, at least, bought your fucking console because console games are about having your friends in the same room?  That’s the fucking point.  Every time I see people saying the Wii doesn’t have any games on it yet that aren’t just gimmicks, first I wonder if they missed the Mario and Zelda games, and second I assume if I could look into their houses I would see an X-Box flickering with the steady glow of anonymous people online screaming obscenities.  Why do that when I can scream obscenities at people who are right there with me?

This, uh, turned into something else entirely, didn’t it?  Oh well.  So, moment 7:  playing retro games with my friends, in the same room.