BENGARLAND!com

I haven’t played video games in forever. Really, not since Super Mario World. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and nothing since then has impressed me. I guess when it’s the 80’s, and you grew up playing on an Intellivision, the upgrade to an NES was nothing short of spectacular (I still kept the Intellivision though, and it survived with a few games — Burgertime being the best — until the early 1990’s when my grandparents got a new house and it disappeared in the process).

As a kid it was always a big deal when my mom drove us up to Macon to the Toys-R-Us store. Back in the day, that was pretty much the only place to buy video games (the game stores in the mall didn’t exist yet). I remember they had walls of games for the NES, and later, the Gameboy, and even after that the Sega Genesis. I would look at the cases hanging there, beg and plead with my mother to shell out $40 for a game, grab a purchase ticket and head to the front register. A few minutes later I would have the shiny new cartridge packaging in my hands (I was the older brother, after all) as I bounced off the walls with anticipation.

The 30 minute ride home would consist of drooling over the case graphics while I waited to get home and try out my new treasure. Or if it was a Gameboy game, I would, undoubtedly, drive my mom crazy for half an hour as I sat in the backseat and convinced the Gameboy to produce an unending sequence of “Bleep!s” and “Blonk!s” and “Zap!s”.

As the years went by, game systems came and went at that Toys-R-Us. NEC Turbo Grafx 16. Panasonic 3DO. Sega Saturn. Neo-Geo. Atari Jaguar. Etc. And still, the NES remained, followed by the Super NES.

The other systems arguably had more power and better looking games. But I never got them (literally and figuratively) because they were too complicated, too expensive, and generally the games sucked. Eventually, sometime around 1994 I stopped playing video games altogether (well, sometimes my friends and I would play HappyWeed on my Mac in high school but that was a different story).

I knew friends who had Playstation and Nintendo 64 and GameCube and Dreamcast and even X-Box. But no matter how many times I tried to play these games, I just didn’t get it. They depended on too many arcane button presses and joystick movements just to get started (some controllers had 4 primary buttons, 4 secondary buttons, 1 trigger button, and two or three separate joysticks!). Sure, the graphics were great, but I always had a hell of a lot more fun playing RC Pro-Am versus Grand Theft Auto anyway. Call me old fashioned.

And then I read the news the other day. Oh boy.

Nintendo is coming out with a new game system called the Wii (pronounced ‘We’) that looks like it will change the face of gaming. The games aren’t the fanciest or flashiest or most advanced graphically. The controllers don’t have 12 buttons. In fact, they use gyroscopic motion sensors so the required movements are natural, like swinging a baseball bat. And this is a good thing. Check out the website.

The Wii is supposed to retail for around $200, significantly cheaper than the Playstation 3 ($600) or Xbox 360 ($300). If I can figure out how to hook it up to the screen on my 20″ iMac, I just might get one when I return to the States. It looks like it’s going to be that good.

The best part? It’s backwards-compatible with the NES, Super-NES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Sega Genesis, and TurboGraphx 16!