How are all of you fellow Hive Gamers doing? Today, I’m proud to share with you my gameplay of a classic NES game that took me 35 years to beat.
I recently had a lot of fun clearing the first Super Mario Bros. so I naturally moved on to Super Mario Bros 2. Can you guess which game I’ll clear next?
Super Mario Bros 2 was released in 1988, three years after the original. It was actually a completely different Japanese game, but they wanted a sequel to the OG Mario game so they adapted it by swapping out the characters with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach. I remember my next-door neighbor got it right when it came out and his parents were impressed with the graphics, lack of timer, and ability to go in any direction. Being pretty low on the totem pole I only had a few chances to play it, but it felt amazing compared to the original and a little bit weird at the same time. I thought it was awesome how you could jump up through clouds and hills without hitting your head.
I had a lot of fun playing Super Mario Bros. 2 again even though it was extremely frustrating at times. I forgot how hard games were back in the day. The game designers must be laughing in their graves at how much anger these old-school can still cause us. I wish I could’ve played this with the original controller or at least a Bluetooth controller, but I had to do it with the crappy on-screen controls on my phone which was why I died half the time. I could not have cleared this game without cheating. I used both savestates and the rewind time option a few thousand times. There’s no way in hell I would have had the patience to start all over after all three lives were gone like we had to back then.
It was a wise move for Nintendo to make the princess the best character in the game because it surely got a lot more girls interested in gaming. I wonder how many female gamers got sucked into the gaming world by the gateway character that was Princess Peach. Even though we boys knew the princess was the best character we would only secretly play her alone because things were different back then. I remember being called gay or a girl was the worst thing in the 80s and 90s and we guys would even overcompensate our “manhood” just to avoid being thought of as feminine.
Of course, the rewind time cheat came in handy anytime I fell down a pit or got reduced to a small princess, but it was also handy whenever looking for the mushroom in the alternate reality inverse dimension. You could also pull up coins by pulling up the plants, but I wasn’t able to hit the jackpot from the slot machine at the end of the level a single time. What was the trick to getting that? The turbo button was of no use.
Old-school games were notorious for horrible end-screens. I remember a lot of kids being greatly disappointed that Super Mario Bros. 2‘s ending revealed that the whole thing was just a dream, but it makes sense. Maybe Mario was a meh character, but it’s HIS game. Did you know that Nintendo of America didn’t have enough money to pay their rent one month back in the early 80s and their landlord was named Mario so they promised to name their main character after him if he gave them a break?
Happy Halloween everybody! It’s still a few hours before it gets dark so I decided to boot up my trusty Super Nintendo emulator and try something new. What are you dressing up as this year? Maybe you think you’re too old to dress up, but some of my best costumes and memories of Halloween are from my adult years. One year, a friend and I bought gorilla masks with hairy hands, rented tuxedos, and went downtown to San Diego. There was a contest for the best costume at the bar we were at, and we won first place.
I was driving up north to Seattle a few months later in the Redwood Forest when my wife was surprised at the size of the trees. I told her the huge trees are why the Sasquatch or the Bigfoot chooses to live there when I found one of the gorilla’s hands while trying to sleep in the backseat. I put the glove on and put it on her shoulder. When she reached over to hold my hand, she freaked the fuck out when she felt and saw the ape’s hand. I don’t remember how many times the car spun out, but I thought we were going to die for sure. It was a good thing it was in the middle of the night and there wasn’t anybody else on the road.
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest was released in 1995 so it isn’t exactly new, but it is to me. I posted about my gameplay of the original Donkey Kong Country about a month ago when someone commented that the sequel was even better so I gave it a try.
At first, I was wondering where Donkey Kong had gone, but then I could see that Nintendo wanted to try something new and introduce some different ideas. They used the same technique of rendering 3D graphics on I’m sure what was a supercomputer for the time then converting those into 2D sprites. I liked using Dixie Kong as a projectile and her ability to use her hair as a double jump.
The gameplay was fun, but it felt a bit of lesser quality to the original’s level design. It was good that they went away from just strolling left to right and had some vertical levels. It could get frustrating falling down to the start of the level when missing a jump or a barrel though.
Being a Nintendo fanboy it is amazing that I’ve never seen or heard about this game until now. It can be good to get away from the gaming scene for a while because when you come back you’ll have a lot of catching up to do and will have many games to choose from. I’ve been wanting a PlayStation 5 for years now, but when I finally do get one, I’ll have a good library to choose from. I don’t think I want one until GTA 6 comes out anyways. I love reaction videos. Has anyone done a video game reaction video for any gamers who’ve been in a coma for years? Imagine their shock when seeing what kind of games we have today. Thanks for reading about my Diddy Kong gameplay today. Have a fun and safe Halloween!
The first memory I have of ever seeing any video game is of Pong so I guess that makes me an OG gamer, but I never owned or touched a Commodore 64 so that may disqualify my OG status. Back in the early 1980s, the video game industry was a mess. There were too many consoles and too many shit games. The whole video game industry almost came to an end by 1983 when a miracle happened and that miracle was Mario. Mario is still a major player today. That’s what I think will be Splinterlands fate. During this bear market with all the scammers and stars pushing NFT junk, it is the only game that I believe will still be around ten or twenty years from now. Nintendo has been around for over a hundred years and has enough cash reserves to last the next 300 years. Just imagine how much Alpha and Beta Splinterlands cards will be worth when you hand your keys down to your grandkids…
I started using Steemit or these days Koreanit back in 2018. I must have been blackout drunk when I bought my first Steemmonsters (Splinterlands) starter pack because I don’t remember playing it until 2019. Just like Bitcoin, I knew this was something special, but I screwed up on becoming a millionaire with both. I still have an ego problem, but it was really bad back then plus I was depressed so maybe it was a good thing I didn’t get a Lambo back then. I had just come back from living in Bangkok for 18 years. I love teaching English to adults, but hate kids so I quit or got fired from any job teaching little shits but excelled teaching business students. Since I can read, write, and speak Thai fluently I thought that my popularity with thousands of students over the years would instantly transfer to my new Steem account @teachinthai but, it did not so I abandoned the account and just started this account and only post in English. Maybe there just wasn’t enough of a Thai community. Maybe my posts sucked. Who cares it’s still a good idea to teach English to Thai people on HIVE. One day I may try it again, but when I met the girl of my dreams in Laos and saw that she loved Splinterlands, I gave the keys to her. She’s only been playing for a year, but I have her fight all my brawls and let her play until we make it to Diamond League because she’s a much more strategic player than I am.
I love that she’s a great player. The only thing I don’t like is that she doesn’t care what the ECR is. She’ll play until things go down to 1%. She couldn’t explain what decentralization or blockchain is, but she is the type of player that Splinterlands needs more of because she’s into it for the fun of the game.
When one of these weekly Splinterlands Share Your Battle posts comes along, I’ll kill my ranking or chances of victory over and over again just to win with the card of the week, but she has a different approach. She only cares about winning so I’ll show her a picture of the card and ask her to tell me when she uses that card and wins so I can post about it.
Her Battle Strategy:
I’ve never used Tusk the Wide ever. He’s not cool looking, has a weak attack, slow, and uses too much mana, but she put him to good use as a tank to absorb the enemy’s attacks while she smashed them from the rear with sneak attacks after taking out their taunting tank.
Once their tank was gone their healer was no match for two sneak attackers.
There really needs to be some kind of bonus for battles when you don’t lose a single card.
Thanks for reading about my better half’s Djinn Apprentice battle today. I really thought there would be a better play2earn game than Splinterlands after all these years, but nothing has come along yet. I was hoping for something like a VR GTA-like game that also rewards streaming your awesome moments of the Ready Player One like metaverse gameplay, but it also took me two decades to find the one, so like Diana Ross & The Supremes said,
Love don’t come easy It’s a game of give and take You can’t hurry love No, you just have to wait You gotta trust, give it time No matter how long it takes
How many games can be played offline these days? I doubt you can name one good modern one. (If you can, please do in the comments.) Whenever I find myself in the horrible situation of being without an internet connection I’ll usually turn to my trusty old Nintendo 64 emulator and find a few stars in Super Mario 64 or cruise a few laps on my jetski in Wave Race 64, but recently I’ve been going back a generation and playing some Super Nintendo games.
Games that survived the trash:
I know there are many great Super Nintendo games, but these are the only three I still enjoy playing. Which games do you think should be on the list? Even though every game ever made for the Super Nintendo only takes up about a gigabyte of storage, my phone is pretty low on memory and I didn’t want to waste space or time scrolling through a long list of games I’ll never play so these are the only three that made the cut.
I can’t believe this game is almost 30 years old! It still looks great and is fun to play today. Even though the Super Nintendo only had a 3.58 MHz CPU and 128 KB of RAM, Donkey Kong Country still looks better than some mobile games today.
The emulator for the OG Nintendo or the NES has a rewind time cheat that this Super Nintendo emulator lacks. It would sure come in handy during some of these barrel or roller coaster levels. Do you know of a Super Nintendo emulator that lets you rewind time?
I wish I had one of those Bluetooth controllers that also holds your phone, but I don’t. Even if I ordered one online it would take up to a year to arrive where I live if it even arrives at all. It’s not an option for me so I’ll have to make do with the touchscreen controls. I do like how the emulator stretches out the game to fill the screen though. The only problem I’ve had is that you can’t press both run and jump at the same time making some high places out of reach, but the game doesn’t rely on that as much as a Mario game would. I do have a USB controller for my computer and tried playing with that and it felt like heaven after trying to play on my phone.
Thanks for reading about my Donkey Kong Country nostalgic gameplay today. All of these images are screenshots of my gameplay and I merged a few with PhotoShop because I couldn’t figure out how to arrange square photos using the HTML code in Markdown.
I feel this is not only the best game to ever come out for the Super Nintendo but one of the greatest games of all time. I only made it to the first boss when I screwed up my save state and was too lazy to play through it again.
I don’t think I’ve ever cleared this game so I’ll have to give it a go again soon. I really enjoyed Donkey Kong Country back in the day and had fun trying to play it again today. What about you? Do you also have fond memories of the Kong?
I truly love my girlfriend. We have the same sense of humor and get along wonderfully, but she’s never watched anything that wasn’t on Facebook or YouTube before. She’s never even used a DVD or knows what a VHS or cassette tapes are. It’s not her fault because she’s a millennial and country girl who was born in 1998.
According to Google, Boomers were born after WWII, Generation X was before 1980, and Millennials grew up in the middle of the digital age and know nothing but digital entertainment. I was born in 1980, so I’m kinda a hybrid of a Gen Xer and a Millennial, but I would identify more as a Millennial. I do remember vinyl records and tape cassettes, but I loved my Gameboy and NES more. Since we had Apple IIs in every classroom when I was in kindergarten and elementary school I guess I fit the requirement of being a millennial.
I was in army basic training back in 1999 and the drill sergeant thought he would hurt my feelings by calling me a Nintendo generation. I corrected him and told him that I actually play Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and even N64. Everyone but him thought it was funny. I may have made my fellow soldiers laugh, but my arms were not amused by all the pushups he had me do.
I was a linguist in the military and one of the best ways I learned to get good at any language is through immersion. Back then I was learning Thai, so I bought a bunch of Thai CDs and cassettes from Thai Town in Hollywood and only watched Thai TV shows on VCDs. VCDs were like DVDs, but they were only 700 MBs so you had to have two discs to watch a movie and dozens of them to watch a full series.
After I got out of the military I became an English teacher and I had one student that was just too good. She spoke English with a perfect American accent and was lightyears beyond the other kids. When I told her that I thought she was wasting her time in our school and asked her if she was from the states, she told me that she’s never been. She said that her mom had only one serious rule in the house: All entertainment must be in English. Thinking this was a great idea I did the same with my 5-year-old stepdaughter who could only speak Thai. I bought her a cheap TV and a 64 GB Kingston USB stick with every Disney movie I could fit onto it. I had to put everything into one folder so it would play the next movie seamlessly, but it did the job.
My ultimate goal was to get my girlfriend to be a Star Wars fan, but I knew I couldn’t start with that so I went with Titanic as the first film. It has held up really well over the years and of course, she loved it. She has no idea who Leonardo DiCaprio is, but whenever she sees him in more modern films she’ll ask why Jack looks so old.
Do you know how many letters are in the English alphabet? If you answered twenty-six then you’d be wrong. There are now twenty-four letters in the English alphabet because E and T went home.
When I showed this movie to my daughter when she was eight, she fell asleep when E.T. was all pale and sick dying by the river. She had nightmares all night screaming for E.T. Was he alright? Did he die? Did he ever go home?
My girlfriend is a farmer from the countryside of Laos. When she showed me her hometown there was this super scary bridge that reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When I asked her if there were crocodiles below like in Indiana Jones she of course had no idea what I was talking about so we watched all three of the films. Yes, I know there is a fourth, but it sucks and I knew she wouldn’t have liked it.
Which Star Wars film do you think is best to bring in a new fan? I tried with the prequels, but she wasn’t into it so I jumped to Rogue One which my girlfriend liked very much. It also flows well into the original.
I know a lot of fans dislike the sequels, but I saw them with my son when he was young in an IMAX theater and cried at the beginning of The Force Awakens because I never thought I’d ever get to see a new Star Wars in a theater ever again. My girlfriend didn’t want anything to do with them though. She said she wanted to see Luke and Han, not this girl named Rey.
It was quite a pleasure to see the shock on her face when Darth Vader told Luke the truth about his father. Now that we’ve seen all of the Star Wars movies and TV shows I asked her what her favorite moment was and she said it was when the Ewoks help defeat the rebels in Return of the Jedi. I’m torn between the time Luke Skywalker helped save the day in the Mandalorian and when Obi-Wan kicked Vaders ass again. What’s your favorite moment from the Star Wars universe?
I figured I’d call it quits and end with Star Wars, but before I did, I asked Wan, my girlfriend, if I’d covered all of the movies that she remembered and she asked how I could’ve forgotten to mention Top Gun. I didn’t think she’d like it because she never liked any other military movies, but I just wanted her to see it before we saw the new one. I guess it took her breath away. What did you think of the new one? I’ve seen it five times now. It’s truly amazing.
OK, I lied. There was one other military movie that she liked a lot and it was Predator. To me, it’s more of a horror film, but it’s one of Arnold’s best. I wonder why he’s never come back to save the franchise.
I was just four years old when my stepdad took me to see the original Terminator, but I clearly remember him making me promise I wasn’t going to tell my mom that he took me to see it and it made me love it and remember it well, but it hasn’t aged as well as Judgment Day so I just showed her some key scenes from the original and explained what Skynet and T-800s were before we watched the legendary sequel. I’ve never bothered showing her any of the other films because they are all just disappointments.
Wan didn’t even like Pulp Fiction so I was surprised that it’s the movie she quotes the most often. Can you guess which scene I’m talking about?
Thanks for reading. What did you think of my approach? Which films do you think I should show her next? How would or did you break in a Hollywood virgin?
This game definitely was a rip-off of Top Gun, but it’s a major improvement. I remember watching Top Gun in the theater with my Granddad. It was awesome. During the film, he leaned over to tell me that I was sitting next to a fighter pilot. I was a bit confused because I was just seven years old and didn’t understand how you could be a fighter while in the cockpit of a plane but by the time the film was over I understood what he meant. He was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and flew some jets, but the F-14 came after his time and he was in the Air Force.
After the movie, we went to a store called Best. They went bankrupt in the 90s, but they were the shit back in the 80s. They had a ton of Nintendo Entertainment System games and I wanted to own them all, but since we had just watched Top Gun, he bought the game with the same name for me. I thought the game was going to be like a VR simulation and just as awesome as the movie was. Then we got home and played it. It sucked. It was boring and it was way too hard. It wasn’t fun then and isn’t fun now.
Captain SkyHawk came late in the game for the NES so they had plenty of time to perfect an 8-bit F-14 game.
I clearly remember playing it on my NES Advantage controller. It had an arcade-style d-pad, turbo A and B buttons, and it could cheat with slow-motion by it pressing the start bottom repeatedly. As long as your game didn’t go into some menu when you pressed the start button you could slow down time. The only problem was it could get mixed up between players one and two or your friend or sibling could switch it on you when you weren’t looking to make you die.
Are you ready for take-off captain? This may look lame now, but before I had a Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, PlayStation, or N64, this was amazing.
I love those memes where they say that you can’t hear a picture, but if you remember this game then you can hear this right?
It’s time to take out some enemy fighters. You could either try to be an ace and shoot down as many as you could, or you could be a coward and play it safe avoiding their missiles.
How many F-14s were capable of going up to space? Captain Skyhawk’s could. I don’t remember what happened if you failed to dock with the space station. It was pretty easy every time.
Since it was over two decades since I played this game I wasn’t sure which weapon system was the most important to upgrade so I went with maxing out the gun first. I don’t think I used but two or three missiles or bombs this time around, but I eventually maxed them all out too.
I hate playing games on my phone with the stupid non-tactile touchscreen, but playing these old games are worth it now with the ability to play offline ad-free, the save state options, and of course the ability to REWIND time!
This scene probably took a month to create in Microsoft Paint and isn’t very impressive today, but it had a real 3-D let’s fly into space feeling back then.
It took me forever to figure out how to drop the supplies down to our allies back then and it did again this go around. It also reminds me of the only time my Grandad ever yelled at me. We were performing at an airshow in a Piper Cub dropping “bombs”. They were balloons full of washable paint we had to drop on targets on the runway. He told me to drop the balloon on three. One, two, three! “Do I drop it right when he says three or a second after three or was there a four?” was what I remember thinking when he turned back angrily and growled, “I’ve been doing this for 22 years! When I say 3!, you DROP the bomb!” (We still got first place, so my one bad bomb drop was OK competing against our civilian pilot competitors.)
Playing this again on my phone with the rewind and save state ability was a lot of fun, but I wish my emulator had a slow-motion option like back in the day. When Captain Skyhawk’s F-14 wings go back, things go fast!
Alright! We’ve made it to the alien enemy space station with the big eye. Let’s do this!
I did beat this back in the day, but the slow-motion button was on so the game thought I was pressing the start button over and over again, so I never got to see the ending until now.
What is this? Game of Thrones? It’s like they didn’t care at all about good endings to games back in the day. At least Doom II and Super Mario 64 did a good job. Do you remember this game too? Thanks for reading. Now let’s all go watch Top Gun Maverick! May the need for speed be with you!
What’s up fellow gamers? I finally did it! I defeated Bowser in Super Mario Bros. 3 from the old-school Nintendo Entertainment System or the Famicom if you had the Japanese version. It just took me 34 years to do it. This is part two of my journey to defeat the evil princess kidnapping dinosaur. You can read the first part here.
I quit after making it to world 4 for part one which I figured was halfway, but things go so hard after that point that it was more like a quarter of the way through even though I was cheating using save states and the rewind time cheat.
I never used the frog suit or the hammer brothers’ power-ups. I think I’ll play this game again just to have the experience of using those powers. This damn fish ate me at least a hundred times. I would rewind time, try again, and again, and again. Sometimes I got so frustrated that I wouldn’t play the game for days.
What a great super-power rewinding time would be. Even if it was just for a 24-hour period. We could check CoinMarketCap, see which shit-coins made the biggest gains, then do the same thing again the next day like we were Biff from Back to the Future. If you could rewind time and change just one event from your past what would it be? For me, it would be not selling all of my cards. I got greedy and thought selling all of my Splinterlands maxed-out Beta cards would be a good idea because DeFi was all the rage last year. If I had just held on to those cards, I wouldn’t have to worry about money today. Everything happens for a reason. I just hope I get another chance to grow my crypto wallet.
Super Mario Bros. 3 has to be the best 8-bit game ever made. I wonder if this had been the first game to come out what kind of games would’ve come after it. If I were the CEO of Nintendo I would’ve never stopped making games for the NES. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense to continue making games when you’re trying to sell Super Nintendos, but making just one game a year would be a great way to say thank you to customers and it would also guarantee that your system never becomes obsolete. It would also be interesting seeing how they could innovate and be creative given the technological limits.
This game was just way too hard. There is no way I would’ve made it to giant world without an endless supply of quarters or a Game Genie when I was a kid, but I sure would’ve enjoyed seeing this back then. Speaking of endless quarters, I remember when I was a kid in a casino in Deadwood, South Dakota back in the 80s, we noticed that they didn’t lock the quarter collection box for the video games. Back then I thought it was just because grown-ups were stupid and didn’t think that we kids would steal quarters, but looking back it makes sense now. They were using the video game machines as virtual babysitters while our parents were losing serious cash on the slot machines and blackjack tables. Even if they did empty out the quarters, we just needed one. We would drop it down, catch it so it didn’t make a sound, then re-drop it so we’d have as many lives as we wanted.
These hammer brothers used to give me grief, but playing through the game this time, I learned that the best thing to do is to approach them right away before they start raining down hammers. It’s like if someone intends to hurt you with a sword or a bat, the best thing to do is to get up close to them. It doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, but they can do less damage if you’re closer.
Another thing I didn’t realize until this run-through is how easy it is to get the star at the end of the level. You don’t have to think about it, run, or time it. Just walk over without stopping and jump up to the box and you will get the star every time. By the time I made it to Bowser, I think I had about 70 lives. This really was a genius way of ending a level. It looks and feels like you broke the game. It’s like an early version of The Matrix as you pass from the colorful world to the inverse digital one.
How many times did this stupid king get changed into some animal? They all still knew and respected him as king so he should have stayed in bird form. If he really cared about his kingdom this would’ve been best. He could’ve served as an eye in the sky warning his people whenever Bowser and his gumbas were approaching.
There were a couple of spots where I felt it was just impossible to continue and I wish I hadn’t wasted my infinite flying ability power. Did any of these spots ever trip you up too?
This evil angry sun even comes after you in the dark? Come on man!
I’m no fan of mazes. They are truly cruel. I quit playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild because I got stuck in the stupid haunted forest maze and couldn’t get out even with YouTube’s help.
I had so much fun playing the third Mario game that I went back to play the original, but it was too easy and there is a maze at the end. I didn’t even bother looking up how to beat it on YouTube or care to beat it because I’ve done it many times before and it’s a lame ending. I never liked the second Mario so I didn’t play that at all. Besides, it’s not even a real Mario game. It’s a completely different game that Nintendo converted into a Mario game at the last minute because they knew that the American audience wasn’t going to like the Japanese version of Mario 2. It was exactly like the first one, just super difficult.
This is it! The final level, Bowser’s castle. Are they just going to let me walk up to it without some hand pulling me away? OK, let’s do this!
Just wonderful! There are Bowser laser-shooting gargoyles!
You can’t just jump on Bowser’s head like one of his kids.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for…
If your enemy is stupid enough to destroy or kill themself, then don’t get in their way.
Later alligator, I mean, Bowser.
Are you kidding me? This is the ending? A lame joke? Not cool Nintendo. Oh wait, you’re going to play some cool music and flashback to all the worlds I defeated along the way?
Thanks for reading about my old-school gaming adventure today. Have any of you beat this game without cheating?
Technically, MTV was a product of the 1980s, but it was still relevant and watched by young people up until the 2000s. The biggest complaint I remember most of us had was that they used to only play music videos and moved too much to reality TV shows, but as a young person at the time, it felt refreshing to have shows and a whole TV channel geared towards us. My fondest memory of MTV was when we’d stay up all night watching the top 500 videos of all time. The number one video would always belong to Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Guns N’ Roses but we’d have fun arguing which music video would come out on top. Today, we have YouTube and a fairly good algorithm that predicts pretty well which song to play next, but it just isn’t the same as watching MTV back in the day. You can show your kids the videos you used to watch, but can’t recreate the fun of watching MTV with your friends while your parents were asleep. What was your favorite music video? What was your favorite show on MTV?
I had a hard time restricting this post to just nine things. Feel free to copy my title and make your own post about nine things you miss about that decade. I think I’ll make another post called 8 things I miss about the 1980s too. I don’t think it’s wrong to steal someone else’s title as long as your post is original.
It was fun to remember all the quirks and unique things from the decade of the 1990s. As far as music formats, it was either going to be Boomboxes, Walkman, Minidiscs, CDs, the radio, or even the few of us who still used records in the 1990s, but in the end, I chose cassettes. I used Wikipedia for all of my image resources so some of my decisions were defined by the quality of the picture they provided. I thought restricting my image sources to Wikipedia would be good in case anybody wanted to read more about what I wrote below. I would’ve gone with Sony Walkman for this item, but without the cassette, there wouldn’t be a Walkman.
Minidiscs were really cool too. I am a person who rarely feels jealousy. If I see a handsome young man with a good body, I think good for him, and feel sorry for him at the same time for all the pain he must put himself through to look that way. If I see someone who’s rich, I know that material items don’t bring happiness, but one time in 1999, I was at a dance club and I saw a DJ with a clear plastic box full of MiniDiscs and I remember feeling so jealous of him. I loved MiniDiscs for many reasons. First of all, they looked like something from the future. They had the benefits of both CDs and cassettes and were really small too. I think they would’ve been a lot more popular and widely used if MP3 technology had never come along.
Now some of you may be wondering where are CDs? I actually started off this part with MiniDiscs, then remembered that only tech nerds used them. CDs were definitely a big part of the 1990s, but they suck in my opinion. For one thing, they’re still with us today and still suck. The names may have changed to DVD or Blu-ray, but they are still easily stolen and scratched. Although I still have a fond memory of seeing a CD for the first time and seeing its rainbow in the sunlight, I would grow to hate the technology in no time. I do remember that my first CD was The Lion King soundtrack. And the first CD I purchased with my own money was Queen Greatest Hits I & II. I thought it was such a great deal to get my first two CDs for the price of one at Fred Meyer. The first DVD I purchased was Army of Darkness with Bruce Campbell. Do you remember your first CD?
Cassettes are another technology that was around before the 1990s that we all associate with that decade. The technology goes back to WWII and the compact cassettes we all remember came out in the 1960s. Speaking of the 60s, I’d really like to read a post about 6 things you miss from the 60s. I can only guess since I was born in 1980, but ask anybody who was alive back then about that decade and I can guarantee you that their face will light up and they will most likely remember Rock and Roll, NASA, and really cool cars.
For me, I remember getting in arguments with girlfriends in my car about silly things and them ejecting my CD then throwing it out the window. I’d of course stop and search for it only to find it never works again even if I bought one of those fancy CD repairers, but if you did the same to a cassette tape, it would be just fine. I also remember being useful to friends because I was one of the few people who could fix a cassette with just a pencil and some scotch tape.
Why were movies from the 1990s the best? I was shocked when my girlfriend had never seen a Hollywood movie in her life. She has only watched crappy Thai dramas on Facebook and YouTube, so when it was time to introduce her, I of course showed her Terminator 2, but I started her off with Titanic. I just showed her a few scenes from 1984’s Terminator on YouTube just to introduce her to Sarah Conner and T-800s. I’m not saying all modern movies are horrible. I really wanted to get her into Star Wars so I showed her Rogue One before episodes IV, V, and VI, but she doesn’t even know the prequels exist. She was really shocked to hear what Darth Vader had to say to Luke in Cloud City. How would you break in a Hollywood virgin? So far she’s seen Titanic, E.T., Terminator 2, Rogue One, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Army of Darkness, GoldenEye, and Red Notice.
I was a teenager in the 1990s, so I remember either straight up sneaking in the back door of the theater or buying just one ticket then sneaking into as many other films as we could. Another trick we would pull to stick it to the man was to have a little gang of friends. One would work at McDonald’s or KFC and sneak out free food. One would work at the grocery store and ignore a bit of shoplifting, and one friend would work at the movie theater and let us watch as many free movies as we wanted. We’d even have the movie ticket in case a company man with a flashlight showed up.
Speaking of movies, who can ever forget Blockbuster? I think they are a good example of how having a huge ego and thinking you’re king of the hill can lead to your own demise. Blockbuster could’ve bought out Netflix for nothing back in the day, but now they no longer exist.
Be kind and please rewind stickers were even put on DVD boxes by Blockbuster employees. Although I rented my fair share of DVDs and VHS tapes from Blockbuster, I would go there mostly to rent Nintendo games and also remember sneaking into the adult section just to sneak a peek at the adult videos. I always wished I had a pair of star-shaped screwdrivers so I could swap out whatever crappy NES, SNES, or N64 ROMs with the ones I was renting. Did any of you think or actually do that?
Today any game from the 1990s can be easily downloaded and emulated on a phone or PC, but the only ones I keep coming back to are the N64 games. Riding my bike to the “SuperMall” and buying an N64 and a Super Mario 64 cartridge will always be one of my favorite memories from any decade. It was September 29th, 1996, and the electronics mega-store which no longer exists and I can’t remember its name either had a contest on a huge screen. If you could get the secret castle star where you slide down in under 21 seconds, then you could win a free Mario game. It’s one of the moments in time I wish I could use my current gaming skills to go back to. I would also never open or damage that Mario game knowing that it could sell for a million dollars today. There were many great games for the N64, but the first one, Super Mario 64, was definitely my favorite. How many times has that happened in video gaming history? Where the first game was the best? Maybe only ever with the Gameboy and Tetris.
I never owned or even liked a Honda CR-X, but it seemed like everybody else did back then. My first car was a pickup truck, a Chevy Luv. It was a total piece of junk, but I drove that little guy to San Diego and even to Texas without it ever breaking down. The only reason I got rid of it was because the communist state of California made (and still makes it) almost impossible for any old car to pass emissions. I sold it to a Mexican friend for $500 and he told me it kept on going well into the 2000s. If I were to ask you for a lift today and handed you a one-dollar bill, it would be a total insult, but back in the 1990s, just a few friends handing you one-dollar bills could actually put some gas in the tank.
I didn’t get my first peak of pornography until I was 16 years old. I’m not a psychologist, but I think it’s perfectly healthy for a teenage boy to see some beautiful naked women. It was very exciting to see. I can’t see how it’s a good thing that kids can see porn so easily before they’re ready to see or even like it. If some boys want to see titties today, all they have to do is open Twitter or do a Google search. I had to bribe a bum to buy my first Playboy magazine at 7-11 and when I was 18 and old enough to buy it legally, I still felt so embarrassed to wait in line and ask the 7-11 clerk for it.
I grew up on a small airport in South Dakota, so aviation has always been interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, it felt like the technology had hit some kind of wall. When asking my grandfather why it was so, his answer was, “Because the god-damned lawyers ruined it.”
My grandfather had good reasons to hate lawyers and they very well may have ruined general aviation, but surely not military or commercial aviation. The F-16 still looks cool today. Flying on a jet has not changed at all since I was a kid. Well, maybe a bit. The cabin crew got a lot fatter and now there are TV screens, but the general look and feel of commercial aircraft are sadly exactly the same, only worse. How the hell did that happen? It’s stuff like that which fuel conspiracy theories. I don’t have a conspiracy theory, other than that it’s Generation X’s fault. Millennials may be a bunch of whiney-ass bitches, but Generation X was named appropriately. They did X. They did nothing. They definitely are the worst generation. Seriously what did they do besides continue using horrible banking and invent the iPhone? One thing I really miss about the 1990s and before that was the whole airport and airplane experience. I remember you could send your loved ones all the way to their seats and even meet the Captain and take a look at all the aircraft controls in the cockpit before 9-11.
Before making this post I asked my followers on Facebook and Noise.Cash what they miss about the 1990s. Nothing. I got nothing. What a bunch of like monkeys. I showed a few people my draft of this post and the only thing I got was how they miss landlines. What’s there to miss about that? OK, maybe a few things…
I remember if I wanted to eavesdrop on my parents’ phone conversations, I’d first remove the phone line so they wouldn’t hear me pick up the line, then slowly slide it back in without clicking it and covering the noise of my breathing. Sometimes I’d just break the little snap off and have an extra line I’d use just for listening in on them. There was also the fun of making prank calls before *69 or caller-ID came along. (I still like using the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard to prank call people today.)
Today, you can go out and buy the latest iPhone, but unless you truly need it for the camera, you just look like a cunt trying to look cool, but anybody who had a pager back in the day looked cool as fuck. You were either a soldier, doctor, businessman, or drug dealer if you had a pager. I never had a pager, but I felt they were the coolest tech at the time.
Thank you for reading about my 1990s nostalgia. I used Wikipedia for all these images and shared the links to the articles below. What do you miss about the 1990s? What did I forget to mention?
My life was perfect as a young kid. Everyone felt sorry for me being a bastard so it was like having many dads. My grandfather, I called him Granddad, was the best though. He was a fighter pilot in Vietnam and after retiring from the Air Force he opened his own general aviation airport in Spearfish, South Dakota. He was my first best friend. He would take me everywhere with him. He taught me how to fly when I was just two years old. I have so many fond memories of him teaching me about avionics, flying the pipeline, and proper radio etiquette.
My stupid-ass mom and step-dad forced me to move to shithole Seattle with them in 1984. I remember kicking and screaming and being forced into the truck for the two-day journey west on I-90. I still hate her for it. (I joined the US Army when I was 17 just to get away from her.) My dog and Granddad died when we were there. I fucking hate Seattle. All it does is rain. I would slit my wrists before I ever went back there again. If it got wiped out by a nuclear bomb I’d be so happy.
I remember my step-dad asking me how old I was on the way. I told him, then asked him how old he was. Nineteen was his answer. I remember thinking that was a really big number compared to my four. I also remember going to his uncle’s house on the way and getting bullied for the first time by his kids. It wasn’t that bad. They just said that the sucker they were eating was my soon-to-be-born baby sister. I knew they were joking, but I kind of wished it was true. If it weren’t for her, we’d still be in South Dakota with Granddad and my dog. They didn’t let me play, but I remember they had an Atari 2600. It may look lame today, but it was like a magical box then. They must’ve gotten a newer console because we brought that one with us. I remember playing Pong and some crappy racing game. They were really fun, but when the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, everyone had or wanted one. It was so amazing. I remember playing Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt for years. I didn’t clear Mario until 1989, but by then everyone was like, “Who cares?”
I’ve had every Nintendo system over the years, even the Virtual Boy. Nintendo never had the most powerful system (except for the Nintendo 64), that thing was on another level, but they always seemed to make the best games. Mario Kart is by far the best game franchise to have ever been made in my opinion. I’ve been playing it since the Super Nintendo days.
When I was a teacher in Bangkok I had it made. I owned my condo free and clear, had zero transportation costs because I rode a BMX everywhere, and seemed to have money and pussy falling from the sky. I was a single dad but didn’t start work until 5 pm, so I would bring my son with me to work every day after he got out of school. My teenage students would take him shopping and to restaurants while I was teaching. I also had a Nintendo Wii U and a Playstation 4. I earned the nickname “GTA Teacher” from my students because we had so much fun killing cops as Michael, Trevor, or Franklin. I would invite fellow teachers over to my crib after work and we’d BBQ, smoke weed, and drink lots of beer. We’d play a bit of the new PS4 games, but everyone always wanted to play Mario Kart 8 together. My two buddies, Danie, Jim, and I played it online so much that we memorized every track and were probably in the top thousandth players in the world at the time. We had a technique that would help us defeat the A.I. too. We would play two players against the A.I. and had a rule, whoever won first place on the first track was king. The second player would serve as a bodyguard and this was enough to overwhelm the A.I. even though it loved to cheat with the “Blue Shell of Death” on almost every track. If the bodyguard had it, they would only fire it if the king fell back from first place.
Living in Bangkok was wild. We would go to strip clubs and see hundreds of beautiful naked women on stage, go dancing all night long, or just enjoy the best food and vacations, but to this day we all still smile whenever anyone mentions Mario Kart 8. It took a few months of grinding through all the tracks to get perfect runs, but we eventually earned the golden wheels, then the golden hang glider, and eventually golden everything. It really was a superior vehicle. My son recently got the game on his Nintendo Switch and I had one question for him, “Have you earned the golden kart yet?”
This is a serious DIY project requiring a large squared 3D printer, the silicon guts of an old-school NES or Famicom, screen, and some serious soldering skills. Nintendo could’ve made this happen in the early 1990s . Hopefully, 3D printers get to the point where we can just straight-up print stuff like this soon.
Where does it end though? If you can encrypt, hide, go off-grid, or whatever we do in the future to avoid Big Brother, what’s going to stop us from printing advanced weapons? I want to print a bunch of T-800s to guard my house, play basketball with, and walk the dog. They will challenge everyone with the standard security question,
