This week we're shopping for our must-have items to fill our recently finished bomb shelters and panic rooms.
Every week I'll be here to reveal and review some of my favorite moments from the internet. Whether it be binge-ing television shows, streaming sports or simply getting lost in a YouTube rabbit hole, I'm here to give you my top picks every Friday, as well as the perfect pairing to get into an optimal headspace for them.
This week, we're skipping the politics and focusing on what to do with our time in the bomb shelter for the next few years.
Nintendo's Power
Recommended Pairing: A bag of mushrooms and some of that Mario 2 Red Drank.
The Nintendo Entertainment System, an 8-bit gaming console that was released in the early 1980s, changed the way the world played. Three generations of eager gamers have fallen in love with the system.
When I was a kid, one of the first real milestone decisions my parents asked me was, "Do you want a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis for Christmas." What a glorious first world problem, right?
All of my friends had just gotten the SNES when it came out, so despite being a four-foot-nothing Nintendo fanboy, I chose the Genesis with no regrets. I loved that Sega console, but for as much time as I spent with the little blue hedgehog or Joe Montana's Sports Talk Football, twice that amount of time was spent flying Mario around in his cape or Tokyo drifting Luigi around a go-cart racetrack at a friend's house.
As Golden Eye and the proliferation of first person shooters came to dominate the video game industry, I gracefully bowed out. I haven't owned a console since. I still managed to log millions of hours playing video games, while strewn about like a drunk house cat at a friend's apartment late at night.
Modern video games just don't grab me like the old ones did. "So... In this level, I'm supposed to just crouch behind a box for ten minutes waiting to shoot someone in the face with a rifle? ...I don't want to do that."
To this day I play more 8-bit games than modern ones. There's too many buttons. There, I said it. You happy? Whatever happened to just running and jumping? I just wanna hit A, maybe B occasionally when things really heat up. I know, I'm the worst.
This past week we got our first deep look into the newest Nintendo console and a peek at some of the games. This might very well be the first console I buy in my entire life. Everything looks great. It's a system built around how I want to play: late at night on my big screen and handheld in the back of an Uber.
The only thing I'm concerned about is the tone of the new Mario. I get that the idea is that he lives in the real world for this one, but I think the mature themes are a big swing and a miss for me.