One of life’s biggest deceivers is memory. I fondly remember TV shows from my youth, like Alf. It was basically a shitty Rodney Dangerfield knock off, but in alien form and he tried to eat the cat all the time. When it came on TV Land when I was college, it was so bad my roommate called his dad and apologized for making him watch it on the one family television.
It was a terrible TV night the other night so I busted out the Wii and went through old games. I found Excitebite and eagerly purchased it. I drove through three boards and there was no excitement to be had. I tried Ninja Gaiden and couldn’t get past the second board. Finally, I went over Super Mario and had a game over in about 16 minutes. I realized while I’m doing this, I have a Playstation 3 in the basement shaking its virtual head.
OK, so maybe those weren’t as fun as I remember or I have lost the patience and skill I had as a ten year old. The more I thought on it, I remembered that I used to have about 28 hours of video game free time on an average weekend in the late 80’s. I was probably much worse back then, but it was either keep plugging away at video games or read my sister’s copy of Ramona and Beezus for the eighth time. No wonder I was better. I even beat Bible Adventures about six times. It was a game where you ran around as Noah and picked up cows and tossed them in an ark. I haven’t brushed up on Genesis for a minute, but I’m pretty sure Noah wasn’t military pressing livestock while jumping over a snake pit.