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GAMEBOY: The First Zombie Maker

I remember in 2011, I was feeling so sick of Thai people being glued to their crappy phones until I went back to the States and realized it was a global problem. While it may be normal to see someone hunched over zombified by a small screen today, we old school gamers were the first to ruin our posture with Nintendo’s Gameboy.

You can’t understand how cool it was to have one of these when it first came out. It would have been like the only person to have an iPhone when everyone else was still using Nokias and flip-phones. One of my wealthier friends was the first kid in our class to have it and we all huddled around him like he had just found the one ring to rule them all.

Indestructible, but Hungry:

Did you know that a Gameboy once survived a bomb in the first Gulf War? I remember seeing this story on the news and it just made me want one even more. It was great to finally have one of my own until I realized how much power it consumed. It would drain 4 AA batteries in just a few hours.

I tried my best to destroy my Gameboy many times in fits of rage and anger, but it would still always boot up with that red LED light and signature Nintendo ding.

It came with Tetris and that’s the game must of us will remember the original Gameboy for. What was your favorite Gameboy memory?

Resources:

This Unstoppable Game Boy Survived a Gulf War Bombing

Super Mario 64

Nothing has ever been a bigger deal or more revolutionary for gaming than adding truly 3-D graphics like Nintendo did a quarter of a century ago. There were some very crude 3D games like Wolfenstein and Doom, but they were just turn left or right mazes with 2D sprites. Going from Super Nintendo to the N64 was like upgrading from a PSP to a PS4. It was magical. Nothing has ever been more exciting or fresh since.

I rode my bike very far to the “Super Mall” in 1996 to get my hands on a new Nintendo 64 and had to purchase the Mario 64 cartridge separately. They were giving the game away for free if you could slide down the Princess’s Secret Slide in under 21 seconds, but they only gave you one try. The graphics may seem crude today, but it felt like something from the future back then. On a funny side note, my son saw me playing it on an emulator which he imagined was a Chinese ripoff and laughed at what he thought was a pathetic attempt to copy what he was used to on the Switch.

I didn’t go to swimming practice or Karate and even played hooky a few times in our 17 day marathon of collecting all 120 stars. I was kind of a late bloomer. I was 16 in 1996 and while my best friend was busy mackin’ on babes, me and his younger brother escaped reality completely and hooked my N64 up to his giant (at the time) 50 inch screen TV. People who weren’t even into gaming were blown away by it’s awesomeness. I remember feeling proud that I had a processor way more powerful than any of my school’s computers. I didn’t want my mom to know I had spent over $300 on everything, so I hid it in a bottom drawer and drilled holes in the back for the power and AV cables.

Emulators

I would love to hook up an original Nintendo 64 to an old TV along with a Super Nintendo an Sega Genesis while I rap that when I was dead broke that I could never picture this, but emulators are what most of us have now. I was super happy when I was able to get it to work on my PSP back in the day. Thanks to Project 64, it looks great on PC and if you have a Bluetooth controller, you can play it on your phone too. I’ve had some problems with Linux. They have Mupen64 Plus which is inferior to Project 64, so I ran Project 64 through Wine which slowed down the PC making it unplayable. Good job Nintendo! You made the game so different that it can still be difficult to emulate even today. I fully expect to play this game in VR in future versions. Some people have redone some levels in Unreal Engine. You can see one example here:

Thank you for reminiscing about MARIO 64 with me today. I’m going to ask my mammamia for some spaghetti now. Have a great day. If you want to emulate N64, check out Project 64:
https://www.pj64-emu.com/

The Orginal Xbox

I despise ~~Microsoft~~. I think Bill Gates is creepy and I decided to boycott all ~~Microsoft~~ products for life back in 2008. I remember what a big deal it was erasing Windows and running only Linux. I asked my wife if she understood what it meant, but her only reply was that if she could keep watching YouTube, then it doesn’t matter.

The original Xbox came out before I felt that way and I still think it was one of the greatest gaming machines ever.

Hard Drive

Having a hard drive was something only for computers until the Xbox. ~~Microsoft~~ never really used it for anything other than letting you copy your CDs to it, but it made all the difference once you hacked it.

The Best Emulator

I remember showing my friends how the modded Xbox could play their favorite Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games. When asked which games it had, the answer was very Sarah Palin, all of them.

Orginal Nintendo and Sega games were punny as well as any Atari games. Every single Super Nintendo game including the Japanese games added up to a few gigabytes. It wasn’t until you got to the N64 where you needed to delete any games to save space.

Speaking of the Nintendo 64, I have not seen a better emulator than the Xbox. It could play any N64 game smoothly, something a PC still can’t do today. It was really fun to still play Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Golden Eye (The no Oddjob rule still was in effect.)

Movies and TV

A modded Xbox was way ahead of its time. The experience you had using XBMC (Xbox Media Center now called Kodi) was better than some paid services today. You could steam videos and podcasts as well as play any files downloaded from torrents. HD files at 720 hadn’t really come along yet, so you could store hundreds of TV shows and movies on the hard drive, making it a must whenever you visited a place without internet.

Xbox Games

You could download and burn games to a blank DVD, but it had to be a certain type and burned a certain way, so it was way easier just to download the ISO file then copy it to the hard drive.

What about you?

Do you agree with me that the orginal Xbox was the last great thing ~~Microsoft~~ did? Has anyone else removed ~~Microsoft~~ from their lives completely and forever? I think Sony is going to crush ~~Microsoft~~ in the next generation. I haven’t seen one person excited about the new Xbox, but everyone is talking about the new PlayStation.

LEADING: Splinterlands GUILD

Even if you sold our burned all your cards, you could still have fun leading a GUILD.

Here’s how I presented my GUILD, the MANDALORIANS:

Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of the women. Only those who have the hearts of true DEC warriors may become a foundling. Losers will only reduce their rank, while champions will rain in glory. Join us and learn the true nature of Beta victory. Rewards are to be ignored. Gold will replace them in time. Learn from your failures and superior enemies. Earn more monsters. Protect the rear and always be one step ahead of your enemies. We ALL need to contribute DEC or our DAILY QUESTS are earned in vain. If you don’t pay or play, then you won’t stay. We have spoken. This is the way.

Even though we’re three players short, we’re ranked pretty well for a level 4 GUILD. I’ll check top players without GUILDS and about one in five will accept the invitation.

I was lucky enough to take this snapshot when I was at the top. I don’t think the GUILD leader needs to be the best player. If you recruit a strong team and build loyalty, your team will pay DEC without you needing ask for it because everyone will want that extra percent of that DEC bonus.

Our GUILD is at level four.

It’s going to take forever to get to level ten, but we’re cruising along to level five now. If I understand correctly, this game is about to go digital Minecraft blockchain real estate soon. I really hope that GUILDS are are part of that.

Here’s what you get at level ten. I hope that if you’re someone who may have sold or burned everything, that you can still be a part of this revolution in gaming. If you want to join the MANDALORIANS leave a comment and I’ll invite three of you.