Fond Memories of the Stick

Mario Kart makes me want to break things. I have had more juvenile outbursts playing this game than I have in a very, very long time. The funny thing is that when I go online, I can actually hold my own against the real people around the country (despite the game’s lack of any good online interaction…Nintendo, please add a “PWN3D!” message button that you can just hit during the race. Mua ha ha). My problems with the game arise when playing against the computer. It’s freakishly frustrating.

Last night I was about to finish a grand prix and got so angry at the system that I just shut the power off. A similar occurrence happened very often back in the days…of the Casbah.

Let’s drift off into memory. It’s story time, kiddies! My Sophomore year in college, I lived at a house in Morris, MN that my geek roommates and I had lovingly named “The Casbah”. It was not a party house, as we lived right next to the Sherriff. We participated in our share of shenanigans, though, and had a lot of hazy, delightful, drunken old times. There were a total of five of us that lived in the house. Of the five, I still talk to two on a regular basis. Of the five, three went on to law school. These are just factoids, not really terribly important details.

This was the fall of 1996. It was a happy time. I was a strapping young lad of twenty summers. Almost every night, we would shirk our homework duties and gather around the magic box: The Super Nintendo. See, the N64 came out that fall, but none of us could afford one. So we played oldschool games on one roomie’s SNES, and it was a ton of fun. One of these games was the original Mario Kart, and as it supported not one but two people playing at the same time, that was often our game of choice.

The SNES didn’t have a remote control like modern consoles. Oh, no. It had two big purple sliders on top of the box, one marked “power” and one marked “reset”. Frustration with @#$%@ Mario Kart became the mother of invention, and the owner of the SNES (in his mighty wisdom) came up with a brilliant device that stayed by our couch for the duration of the year: The Reset Stick.

The Reset Stick was…a stick. It was a broom handle, actually. However, it was a wonderful way for us to remain comfortably seated on the couch whilst resetting the SNES in our frustration. It was amazing. In fact, I like to think that it was the Reset Stick (and other similar methods likely concocted all over the gaming dens of the world) that led to this bold new renaissance of remote console. I thoroughly enjoy being able to turn off the power to the Wii whilst comfortably seated on my couch, turning purple with rage. Stupid Mario Kart. Why must I love you so?

1 comment:

areabassist said...

That's some masterful linking, sir.

There really is nothing that beats the level of frustration of a CPU controlled opponent pulling some bullshit move in a console game. For me, most of my rage has been pointed at the freaking cheating team in video hockey games.