A Slice of Orange

by Sara Black

When my eighteen year old brother waxes nostalgic it goes something like this:

He turns on the ipod and hands me the headphones. “Listen to this, do you remember this?”

It takes me only a second, the sounds are so ingrained into my psyche. “Yeah, it’s music from Final Fantasy III.”

“Right! Remember when we used to play that?” He asks, as though there were any way I could forget the hours spent with the cartridge plugged into the Super Nintendo, the repetitive theme songs playing on endless loop when we got stuck, the hints found on the internet.

Luckily for Video Game Nostalgics like my brother and I the Nintendo Wii game system has an on-line system where you can download retro video games. They play on a “virtual console” which emulates all the previous game machines nintendo has sold us over the years. These games, most of them at least ten years old, have almost gotten more use from us than the new Wii games.

Unfortunately none of the Final Fantasy’s are available, but we’ve got both Toe Jam and Earl’s, Sonic Pinball, Mario 64, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Dr. Robotnik’s Bean Machine. The boyfriend, who is a little older than me, downloaded some of the games from before my time, like R-Type, Xevious, Ghouls and Ghosts, games he used to play in the coin arcades.

Nintendo updates their shop every monday with four new-old games so there are dozens of old favorites that we haven’t downloaded yet, like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Legend of Zelda and Lode-Runner.

Thank you Nintendo, for selling my childhood back to me.

Sara Black has a degree in Cinema/Television from USC. She watches far too much television, eats way too much sushi and is always writing a romance novel. This is the eighth in a series of posts on Pop Culture.

Her absolute favorite Nintendo game, Dragon Warrior IV, is unfortunately not to be found on the Wi virtual console.