Blog Number 150

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Well the son and I went out and bought a Nintendo GameCube yesterday.  This is a very big deal to me actually as the last time I owned any kind of game system it was the ORIGINAL Nintendo Entertainment System (aka NES - circa 1985).  I had some extra cash left over from Christmas so we went to a local used game store and shopped.  It was truly a toss up between the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube.  I have friends that either own one or the other and since I have never played either, I had to rely on my 8 year old to give me his expert opinion.  He decided the GameCube was the way to go since he liked the controller better.  I have no idea what criteria he used to arrive at this decision.  He seemed happy that he was involved in the decision so we picked up a used GameCube for $59 and an extra controller ($8).  We then picked out 3 games (Metroid Prime $6, Batman $8 and Sonic Mega Collection $13 - 7 games in one!).  Throw in a 1 year warranty and tax and for about $110 we were on our way home happy with our purchase.

Once we got home however we decided to watch a movie we had borrowed from the apartment front office movie collection.  Superman Returns is this 2 1/2 hour monster of a movie and it ate up our entire afternoon but we did have about 15 minutes to try out Sonic before church.  Everything was set up without a hitch until I plugged in the extra controller that we bought.  It works fine but it appears to be stuck on vibrate all the time.  To me this is annoying, to my son this is cool so I guess we are going to keep it.  We played one game of classic Sonic the Hedgehog each and had a good time.  I seem to have lost some of my Sonic skills since I last played the game (10+ years ago on a friend's original PlayStation).  No matter, I have plenty of time to get back in practice.

I was actually discussing the fact with a friend of mine the other day that I felt bad that all my son's friends had some sort of game system and all that he had was a retro Atari 2600 (which he loves by the way).  My friend admitted this was why he bought his system as well since all of his son's friends (except my son) had game systems too.  What a lovely marketing ploy peer pressure is and it is not even the kids that are feeling it!  It is us parents (or probably just the dad's).  Anyway it is the wife's turn at bath duty tonight so I have a few minutes to sharpen my Hedgehog moves.  Until then...

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon