Nintendo 64

One of the funniest videos of all time has got to be the “Nintendo 64 Kid” video that went viral several years ago. In it, a young boy absolutely loses his mind over an N64 console that he got from Santa Claus. (Here is the video, if you haven’t seen it. It is hilarious.) Now, I’ve never been as excited about the N64 as this kid (or as excited about anything else, for that matter), but in many ways the N64 is my favorite video game console of all time.

Obviously, to some of you, this might be a weird choice for a favorite, since there are obvious drawbacks to the system; even for the time it came out, the graphics were pretty chunky and the sound was tinny and minimal, especially when compared to the original Playstation, and the controllers were, honestly, ungainly, heavy chunks of plastic that looked like what an XBox 360 controller would look like if it were made in the 1950s by NASA scientists on LSD, especially when you plugged in the Rumble Pak and the memory card into it, and it transformed in your hands into a 30-pound behemoth that almost needed its own tripod. The console itself was also ungainly, basically a stylized muffin-topped brick with a slot in the top and two capsule-shaped buttons flanking it. It was a dowdy old thing. You could build a decent house out of N64s, if you had enough of them. And, while the rest of gaming was moving to CDs as a medium for games, which were honestly way cheaper, the N64 kept things nice and retro by having its games on cartridges, the last viable system to do so. And even those were little round-top bricks of their own, the last games that would hurt if they were thrown at you.

But, you see, as with so many things, the little quirks end up being the reason you fall in love. That chunkiness that Nintendo hasn’t completely lost to this day is one of the best things about the system. N64s were hearty specimens, as ugly as a Russian tractor, but as reliable and as durable as well. Nintendo is pretty legendary when it comes to this durability, and even today I would bet on a thousand XBox 360s failing before one Wii fails. Oh, how gamers complain about the “little kid” systems that Nintendo makes, but go drop an N64 over a cliff and go fetch it and plug it in, and that sucker will still run. Mario may be cute, but he is a man, and his systems have the strength of a man, of many men!

This is why you can buy old Nintendo carts without testing them. They run. Don’t worry: all Nintendo carts work. I have an N64 baseball game that I swear somebody, in a fit of Ken Griffey Jr. reverie, took a Louisville Slugger to, and I still bought it, because I knew it worked. And voila! It worked. Zero doubt. I found one N64, poor bugger, that was used as an ashtray, and then, apparently, as third base. Did it work, you ask? Don’t ask such silly questions.

In contrast, I coughed once in the direction of my PS2 and it stopped working.

But, you ask, isn’t this a silly reason to like a console? Sure, the N64 is durable, but so what? What about the games? Well, I could just mention Goldeneye, and in my mind that would be enough. Okay, so all the characters look like the moving men in Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” video, nothing but a bunch of polygons taped together to try to fool us that that pink wedge there is James Bond’s face. Yes, I know Master Chief looks cooler. Yes, I know the bad guys are dumb and they roll slowly on the ground so that you can easily shoot them. But go get a bunch of dudes and hook up some four-player head-to-head, and fun is guaranteed to be had: pure, extreme, 90s, Surge-fueled fun. It is still the best multi-player game that I have ever played, and I’ll fight anyone who argues with me (slappers only, of course).

And that’s not to mention Super Mario 64, which was a revolutionary updating of classic platformer logic into 3D gaming, or Super Smash Brothers, still one of the greatest fighting games of all time, or Ocarina of Time, which is still listed whenever people are enumerating lists of top games of all time. There are almost too many good games on the system to give a convincing list here, but if you are reading this, you know what they are, and odds are you still play them.

And I thank you, fellow brotherhood of N64, and I wish you nothing but the best. May DK Mode be be forever turned on, and many Oddjob forever be banned from multi-player. Set Tremor Paks to high, and keep reaching for those stars, especially those hard-to-get ones on that damn sunken-ship level.

PS: Nintendo SIXTY FOOOOOOOOOUURRR!

Copyright 2013 Brian Stacy Sweat