Ah, how I miss the old days of gaming.  Games were simple, more challenging, and the focus was on fun, not fanservice. For this week, I will share with you my trip down memory lane.  Well, sort of.  You will hear the rediscovery of the ancient console that shaped my video gaming past: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

My journey started when my mom started playing with Wii Fit, one of the presents that she got for her 50th birthday.  In contrasting that game, I thought of the Power Pad, and how I used to play on that when I was younger. With that, I went out to the big garage and unearthed the old Power Pad.  I got out the NES and hooked it up.  I put in Athletic World and chose Expert mode.

Amazingly, after all these years, the pad was still working pretty well. I completed two rounds of that game.  One round was during the day, the other at night.  When I saw round 3,  I didn’t want to go on, seeing that the two rounds just keep repeating over and over.

Continuing on my journey, I played World Class Track Meet.  I played through the Olympics mode, but it wasn’t what I wanted.  I then played Tournament mode and realized that this was what I was going after.  This mode consisted of two events: 100m dash and 110m hurdles.

In the tournament, there were six opponents: Turtle, Bear, Horse, Rabbit, Bobcat, and Cheetah. All the opponents were a cinch to beat in the 100m dash.  None of them were any match against my 6.3 second time.  Not even Cheetah, who clocked in at 10 seconds.  The hurdles were the challenging part.

In a Michael Phelps victory, I beat Cheetah in the 110 hurdles.  His time was 13.90 seconds.  My time was 13.84 seconds.  I beat him by 0.06 seconds and got the gold trophy.  What an epic victory.

For the next leg of my journey, I put in Super Mario Bros. 3.  For this game, I took the fast track and got all three warp whistles: the first two in Grass Land and the third one in Desert Land.  With the whistles, I warped to Dark Land.  Using the limited resources I had, I got past all the levels and beat Bowser.

I then played a second game.  This time, I played the whole way through, with 28 P-Wings at my disposal.  Using them and collecting other resources along the way, they were more than enough for me to complete the game for a second time.  Quite the classic and still fun to play.

My last part of my journey brings me to Wizards & Warriors III – Kuros: Visions of Power.  This was a game that I took from my friend, since he didn’t want it anymore.  Frustrated, he threw the game in the dew saturated grass, saying that he didn’t want to play it anymore.  Since then, the game has been mine and I began my journey through the city of Piedup.

Having played through the whole game, I lost to the final boss.   I had to start all over from the beginning.   Determined to beat the game (as I had before in the past), I played through again and got to the final boss.  It was an epic battle.  I was on my last life and had only one unit of life left in my life bar.  One hit away from death.

Nonetheless, I hacked away at the last few units of Malkil’s life bar with my level 3 knight.  Suddenly, he died and I won.  Definitely one of the most epic battles I’ve had in gaming.

Thus ends my journey through the video games of yesteryear.  For those of you that missed out (all you younger people out there), some of those games can be bought for the Virtual Console on the Wii.  Play them, and enjoy all the classics that you missed.  Granted they’re not 3D, but are foundational in the games of the later generations.

Having finished this journey, I can say that it was an exciting one and I know one thing for certain. It definitely will not be the last one.