Dunny Turns 30

Nadia got me an awesome cake, a nice new blue dress shirt shirt, a great watch, a pac-man t-shirt and a cool laptop bag. Lots of great loot from my great and wonderful girl.

Awesome Cake is Awesome

We had lunch together at [Insert Name of Restaurant Here], nice little Japanese place with great food, and later that night we had dinner with my folks at Tommy Bahamas, followed by watching The Vampires Apprentice – a surprisingly good movie.

The following morning we went to GameWorks with Rosenberg and Coldiron, and stayed there pretty much the whole day playing games, drinking beer, and harassing Sonic. We followed that up with a trip to The Yard House, for more beer, some shots, and good eats. Then we hit Borders, did some wandering and coffee drinking, and headed back home.

All told, it was a darn good birthday.

Eventually, I decided to give the second one in the series (Zelda II – The Adventure of Link) another go. It is one of two Zelda related titles that I have played, but not actually completed. I figured I should probably rectify this, and maybe get the Zelda bug out of my system at the same time.

In what I occasionally refer to as my “den”, I have pretty much all of the classic (NES era onwards) consoles, and along with them some of my favorite games. Among those treasures is my copy of Zelda II. And, to make NES gaming easier, I happen to have both the front loader NES (big, boxy VCR looking thing) and the sleeker top-loader NES (with the dog-bone controller). Personally, I do prefer the front-load, but the top-load is better for when you actually want to play without having to fight the console first.

Yet, when it came time to actually start playing the game, I didn’t move to the den, nor did I turn to any of the classic systems: I fired up an emulator on my Mac, plugged in a USB controller, and started playing.

I’m not even really sure why I did this – I’m normally very opposed to emulation. I thought I preferred the feel of the old controller in my hand, and the slight fuzziness caused by the CRT. Yet, there I was, attempting to play (poorly, I might add) Zelda II and kind of enjoying it.

Does this mean that, maybe, it’s time to pack away the old systems and just keep going with the emulation and roms? Are they, really, superior to how I’ve been playing before? Should I just move the big ass CRT out, and plop a computer in, and just run everything off of that from now on?

And, if I do – what games should I play? Should I limit myself to only those that I’ve bought, only those that I own… Or has that statute of limitations played out, and it’s now time to just grab anything I want, and play it? The original creators aren’t making any money off these games anymore anyway, so what harm would it be to pirate them? Who would have to know? I mean, other than the four or five people who read this blog, of course.

As of right now, I’m not sure… I’m, honestly, torn. On the one hand, I really do enjoy owning and playing with the older systems, but on the other I don’t use them often enough to justify having them out all the time – and when I do play, I’d rather play right now, not “as soon as I can get the NES to stop blinking” or even “If the Dreamcast decides to load Slave Zero this time”.

Either way, I’ll probably just keep walking that fine line – hoarding the older stuff like pirate gold, and playing it on a fancy computer because I’m lazy.

But how?

The object of this “game” – such as it is – was to survive by not touching the floor. Maybe you had to get out of the room (volcano/jungle/spaceship), maybe you just had to stay put for rescue (a lonely prospect for only children), and the only way to move about the floor was via climbing furniture, jumping from thrown cushion to cushion, or even stepping on stuffed animals that might be cluttering up the room.

I probably didn’t have to go into so much detail – this game seems pretty universal, but I wanted to be sure terms were clear before I got to the meat of this post: How, and where, did this game start?

It seems odd to me that something so simple, with the same basic rules and the same basic guidelines, should manifest itself in a large number of children without outside influence. Regardless of race, age, class or national origin – everyone knows this game, most have played it, and most deny “learning” about it – it just occurred to them that it might be fun.

And, it was fun… But why does it occur so commonly? Is it some throw back to some ancient time, so prehistoric survival skills buried deeply in our DNA? Is this one of the few strong ties to our genetic forebears that we just won’t understand?

If so – do the primates “play” in such a way, or is this something unique to humans (cats, too I suppose. Watch them run around the house – they, too, know the dangers of the floor)?

This is something that would make for an amazing study, and although it might not cure anything or even make the world a much better, brighter place to be in, it’d give us a much greater insight into our own species, the collective psyche.

And, maybe, help us figure out where that damn lava keeps coming from anyway.

Dunny0.net Code Thing

Or maybe it just contains a secret message for those clever enough to snap a picture…

This one? It just has the URL for this blog in it… I thought it was kind of neat. There’s a site that makes these into patches, but the patches are kind of lame in that they redirect to the guys own site, not to your pre-chosen URL. So… I thought I’d make my own.

Now I just gotta figure out how to make a patch with it. Ideas?

Honestly, if you like music, and you liked the 80′s, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

At least consume the video to Sweep The Leg.