But once it did come out, while it did host some great games, none of them brought back that feeling of entering and exploring a new world.
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Luigi, my long-time favorite character, was going to have his own game. Ideas became rumors, rumors became facts, and Project Dolphin became the Nintendo Gamecube. I still remember the months before the next Nintendo launched. The last N64 that brought that sort of feeling was Paper Mario, which was by no means a realistic or groundbreaking game, but it clearly created its own unique world, with massive amounts of charm, and just enough throwbacks to the NES era to make me nostalgic for the games that made me a fan. Since I got the system after it had been out for a while, there seemed to be an endless supply of such games, but after I’d worked through the backlog that I had missed, it became clear that such great games, modern classics, were few and far between. While games like Mario Party and Super Smash Brothers were fun games to play with friends, it was the games like Mario 64 and Zelda 64 that felt like portals to real, living worlds to explore. It wasn’t until around the time that Mario Party came out that the concept of “polygons” (the flat shapes used to create 3D figures in video games) became apparent to me looking back, I’m not sure how I missed them, as they’re certainly apparent in Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. Finally being able to play Super Mario 64, it was like seeing the games I’d been playing in the past suddenly brought to life, as the transition to 3D was so perfect, it seemed at the time like the line between video games and reality had been crossed. I still remember getting the Nintendo 64 for Christmas. In the long run, that was okay, because as I alluded to earlier, the machine stopped working around that time anyway. At some point, I believe it was still before we got the N64, I think my Dad just gave away most of our Nintendo games, because I at least know that we don’t have most of them now. It was also during that time that green became my favorite color, after spending most games as Player 2. Still, it was during that ten years, apparently, that I became such a huge fan of video games, even though I wasn’t very good at them. As anyone can tell you, by the time an NES gets to be about ten years old, it works about half as often as it doesn’t. Aside from the already-old Atari, the NES was the only game system my family had until we got an N64 around 1997. The Nintendo Entertainment System came out in 1985, the year I was born, so naturally I have no idea whatsoever when it was that we got it.
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I remember some kind of tennis game, or more accurately, I remember a controller with a tennis racket icon stamped onto it, a controller featuring one button and a rotating dial, which even though I can’t remember using it in any game, my memory reveres it with more coolness than just about any other controller. I seem to remember a game labeled as “Popeye” even though the characters on the screen bore no real resemblance to those on the box. I distinctly remember owning an Atari, but I don’t remember much about it.
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My memory is foggy about chronology of things back then, particularly with computer games-I’m sure the eerie, atmospheric 3D-looking computer games must have been much more recent than the 4-bit jump-run-and-shoot games like Commander Keen, and we must have gone through several different computers over the course of several years, but it all really blurs together for me. He still does play things like online poker and “Literati,” and from time to time he’ll get a game like Max Payne, but back then, back in the late eighties and the early nineties, I remember him staying up all night playing Zelda 2 on the Nintendo, and later, games light Lighthouse on the computer. When I was a kid, my father would play video games. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit that such a conjecture is futile. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned.