Topic: Finally got an NES

[Ian Sane]

So at least 20 years after I first asked my parents to get me one, I now finally own an NES.  We were celebrating my friend's birthday on Saturday and before I left for his place I stopped at my favourite videogame store (Willow Video, a local chain in the Vancouver area) to get him Gran Turismo 5 as a gift.  They had an NES for sale, plus A/V cables, a zapper and some extra controllers sold seperately.  My brother suggested I get it but I was unsure.  I get thrown off by unexpected purchases.  I came into the store specifically to buy my friend a game for his birthday.  I had not mentally budgetted buying a whole new videogame system for myself as part of it.  The NES is also notorious for being unreliable which had soured my interest somewhat in buying one.
 
So I didn't get it and felt like an idiot about two steps after I left the store.  I knew I would be in the area on Monday so I decided I would come back then and if they still had it, I would take it as a sign to buy it.  At my friend's party I ended up mentioning the NES to him and he said "well I have a spare NES.  You could always just buy mine."  I had totally forgotten that a friend of his had given him his spare NES and all his games years ago.  We had talked at times about me buying the spare but it never ended up happening.  So I bought it.  It didn't have the zapper though and the second controller was busted, coaxial only, but he threw in SMB/Duck Hunt and SMB3 because they were duplicates.
 
So on Monday I popped by Willow Video and the NES was gone!  Had I not bought my friend's I would have been **** out of luck.  Unfortunately whoever bought it also bought the A/V cables so I'll have to get those at a later time.  But I got the zapper and a controller to replace the broken one.  I also got Jackal and Code Name: Viper which are my brother's two favourite NES games.  I figured if I didn't get those when I had the chance he would never forgive me.
 
My brother also took the NES apart and bent back all the pins.  We knew this was the reason for the NES's unreliability.  And it works pretty damn well!  SMB works a good 95% of the time.  Some of the other games were a little more dirty so we had to work on them a bit more.  Code Name: Viper is really giving us a rough time.  We had the game outright crash only a few minutes into playing so I might have to return that one.
 
I used to collect SNES games, and I guess I still do, but I have pretty much every title I want.  Only some really hard-to-find titles remain.  It's exciting to have a new system to collect games for!  And having an NES just feels right!  My brother and I were playing it last night at our parents' house and it was like, yeah, this is how things should have been 20 years ago.  It always felt kind of... wrong that our parents never got us one.  I feel a certain fulfillment almost in now having one and us "kids" all enjoying it together.

[Chozo Ghost]

Check this out: http://www.amazon.com/Retro-Twin-Video-System-Nintendo-DS/dp/B001VDZN3O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297192135&sr=8-1

[BlackNMild2k1]

^That's awesome. I'd get one if I still had, or played any NES/SNES games.

@Ian, now you need to get a power mat and track down a copy of Track & Field.

[Nemo]

Sweet.

It's like a mid-life crisis, only you didn't have to buy a Porsche.

Someday, I hope to fulfill my teenage dream of owning my own Neo*Geo arcade cabinet. :B

[Ian Sane]

Nemo, the Neo-Geo would be my future mid-life crisis purchase.

So Code Name: Viper is working good now.  I few days after I made that first post I bought three more games: Blades of Steel, Mega Man 2 and The Guardian Legend.  Mega Man 2 is a classic of course.  I had never played Guardian Legend but had heard good things about it.  It's like a Zelda game where the dungeons are shmup levels.  It's really cool but I REALLY suck at it.  One personal problem is that I'm quite good at Zelda style games but I'm really unskilled at shmups.  Fortunately it has passwords so I can use those to explore later parts of the game.

Unfortunately Blades of Steel didn't work so I had to return it.  That's one my absolute favourite NES games so I was quite peeved about that.  One thing we noticed is that, even though all the games have needed some cleaning, if you look at the bottom of the cartridges the connector is white in colour.  Blades of Steel was a rusty brown.  Obviously the connector had rusted over time which makes it nearly impossible to get a good connection (the best I could get was full of lines).

So I exchanged it for Baseball Stars which is made by SNK and had sequels on the Neo-Geo.  It's a great game but I can NEVER beat the computer.  Plus it has a pretty big problem in that once a runner has made it to a base he cannot go back.  So if the defending team catches a fly ball and your runners have already made it to the next base, they're all out for sure.  The first time I encounter this my inning ended on a triple play.  They can go back if they have not made it to the next base yet so you have to keep this in mind.  But aside from that it is lots of fun and it's unreal the amount of extra modes and details this game has for an NES game.

[Chozo Ghost]

I want an Atari Jaguar.