Just When I Was Fully Recovered From Super Mario Thumb

I'm sort of a closet gamer. Seeing as I'm not 24 years old anymore, I don't experience overnight runs through Super Metroid anymore, but I've got my trusty Nintendo DS for my daily commute (and at least Brain Age 2 tells me I'm mentally 24 years old...Wait, that's good, right?).

When I talk about gaming with people in their twenties, though, their gaming experience is so much different than mine. Before I was 12, video games meant going to the local department store's basement arcade, between the escalator and the barber shop. Once the Atari 2600 came out for the '77 holiday season, all that changed (and the local department store closed a few years later, but probably not because I wasn't feeding quarters to Battle Tank). Trips to the malls that were opening up all around featured mandatory arcade visits, and the gap between arcade gaming and home gaming was wide. Those arcades are gone now that you can rock out Gears of War on your HDTV on your couch, and couch-based gaming is what these younger guys grew up with for the most part.

Now that I've been investigating which Blu-Ray player I want to get later in the year, I haven't been able to ignore the possibility that the Sony PS3 is the best way to go. Much has been made of the fact that the Blu-Ray player standard function profile wasn't nailed down before production began, a perceived weakness the HD-DVD camp was happy to trumpet loudly. Updating the profile should be no problem if you've got the player connected to the internet, but most players didn't have an ethernet connection. The PS3 has had that connection and has already updated to the current profile with the final profile expected by summer. Even with newer standalone players coming, most tech sites agree the PS3 is the best option for Blu-Ray in the home.

But probably not my home. The only game console that appeals to me is the Wii, and that's because it seems like a console the whole family can enjoy, even my non-gamer wife with the secret passion for Centipede and Ms. Pacman (sorry honey, but the first step to recovery is admitting the addiction). After that, I'd have to consider the XBox 360, mainly because some friends have been streaming HD programming through theirs from their computers, a practice that has me completely envious.

Of all these options, none of the popular games appeal that much to me (well, maybe Halo), so again the idea of a console for gaming seems superfluous. Games don't seem to have the charm they'd had back at the outset of home gaming. Warlords was a great multi-player game that pretty much ruled the 2600 at my house. Adventure looks like a third-grader's extra-credit project now, but chasing an ampersand dragon with a sword that looked like an arrow was loads of fun. There was one game for the Nintendo, an import from Japan that was mislabeled as 'Mario Baby' in the video store I managed years ago, that could not be resisted once sampled. This game was always out on rental once word got around the staff, and eventually a delinquent customer kited off with it. I've since found out that it was actually called "Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa". Have a look.