PixlBit

The GameCube was the last home console that completely held my attention. It was, after all, the final "coming of age" console of my life, that pivotal moment when the dying boy inside of me grew a healthy beard and discovered the fabled real world. Drunken late-night Soul Caliber II tournaments with my roommates; going on a vacation every time I played Super Mario Sunshine; being sucked in to the intoxicating gameplay of Metroid Prime. If the Nintendo 64 lost my interest, the GameCube begged for it....but it also made me all the more aware of a problem that was bigger than Nintendo: a dearth of quality, third-party software.

a boss in Bloodborne!!!! I feel UNSTOPPABLE.....until the next boss.

December of 1987. It was cloudy, a thin layer of snow painted the dead grass of every lawn and every park. It's funny how we can remember the minor details of a single day. My parents took my brother and I to the Sears that overlooked the murky waters of the Illinois River in downtown Peoria. I recall my parents looking at VCR's, while my brother checked out the baseball gloves. I, at six years old, was at the first of many mid-life crises. A mid-child crisis? At six? Anyway, the video game industry was nothing more than that fun toy that my mom brought home so she could play a shitty game of Donkey Kong, something called Pitfall, and a weird game that consisted of playing as a bug that shot cardboard boxes at other cardboard boxes to get to the gooey swastika center. When Atari became a mainstay of the gated discount bin, I took up.....shitting the bed and drinking orange Kool-Aid. Come to think of it, maybe it was more an identity crisis than anything else.

At one time in my life, my gaming collection took up a rather large portion of my bedroom wall. I had the mediocrities, the "products of their time (i.e. Combat, Battle Arena Toshinden, Zero Tolerance, etc.), the unplayable horrors of the digital age (2600 Pac Man, snes Pit Fighter, Cosmic Carnage, Deadly Towers), the misunderstood masterpieces, and the certified classics. I was unhappy with my life, and that shelf filled me with minutes of the artificial sweetener that I thought that I needed.