Nintendo Power!

He will break you.

Saturday, after Chrissty and I gorged ourselves on Sonny's breakfast buffet, she had the ingenious idea to check out the Lake Park Flea Market. I highly recommend checking it out as we found a ton of great stuff, including a shop that buys and sells used video games. My inner seven year old laughed with delight as the store featured original Nintendo and Super Nintendo games among its wares.

I gazed at the numerous titles and salivated when my view happened upon Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, the best boxing game ever created. At $17.99 it was a more than I wanted to spend, so we headed home to pick up some games I had not played in a while and traded them in. Being used to the Scrooge-like corporate video game retailers who toss out a few pennies for your trouble, I expected very little value for my games. However, shockingly, the guy running the store gave me $25. We purchased Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Tetris, A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia, and another NES controller. Unfortunately, when we got home we found out the down arrow doesn't work. CURSES!

The thing about playing old games that I find so fascinating is how much I still remember from when I was a kid. For example, I still remember how to get half the star punches in Punch-Out. Was I just smarter back then, or am I really going through early Alzheimer's in my present state? I'm not surprised when people say it is easier for young kids to learn foreign languages then their adult counterparts. My once endless sponge of a brain now feels saturated.

So, I spent pretty much half of my Saturday afternoon playing as Little Mac against Nintendo's fearsome lineup of contenders. I still have not reached Tyson, but, hopefully, I will fare better than Boston's own Peter McNelly.

We will return next week for Metroid. Hopefully he has Paperboy and Ninja Gaiden II by then too.