Let me take you back to a simpler time, where a humble baker named Salmo aimlessly wandered the cobblestone streets of Skingrad, yearning for the opportunity to taste bread and end the world.
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Moment of Zen – Not My Boba Fett
This was a Moment of Zen from late January, so you’ll have to trust that when I shared it with work, it was much more timely.
Disney really played us for fools with the new Boba Fett…
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Moment of Zen – Arcades and Dragons!
Everybody and their mom knows that Pac-Man was supposed to be called Puckman, and not because he looks like a hockey punk, but because it comes from the Japanese phrase “Paku-Paku” which means to flap one’s mouth open and closed. Of course, they adjusted his name because they were worried that kids would try to alter the P to an F on the arcade machine marquees.
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Moment of Zen – Pride Month!
Every Friday, when the clock hits 5:30 and signals the end of the work week for me and my associates, I wish everybody a good weekend and provide a Moment of Zen. It started out as just a funny picture or some cool photography I found online, and slowly evolved into short essays of a random topic that I either know a lot about, or spent time reading up on over the course of the week. Some are silly while others are heartwarming, although I usually try to cover topics in a way that will keep people up at night. I’m bad at introductions so this one is about Pride Month.
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Moment of Zen – IKEA!
When God of Thunder/Marvel Superhero played by Chris Hemsworth created Sweden, he laid the groundwork for a popular furniture store and place to get lost in for days.
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Asteroid (2021) is a Terrible Movie Starring Oneonta, NY
We all like a little camp, right? Right?
I grew up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. If you aren’t in the know, it’s a show where a man and a couple of plastic robot puppets watch low-budget science-fiction-adjacent films and riff on them. If this introduction has any takeaway at all, it is that I have a tolerance for bad movies and that I like to wax nostalgia.
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I Played a Bunch of Video Games So Far in the Pandemic
At the start of the pandemic, to prevent myself from worrying about the slow crumble of the world, I made a pact that I would focus on getting through my backlog of games. Okay, first of all, when I say “backlog,” I don’t just mean games I haven’t played before. My goal was to have a healthy mix of games that mean a lot to me, and games that have always been on the list but never got the time they deserved.
Also, I buy too many games.
When I tap on “All Software” on my Nintendo Switch, the fan roars to life. I just counted, and I currently have 313 games (not counting the fact that some of the games are collections, or the NES, SNES, Genesis, and N64 Online buckets). There are somewhere around 150 games on my Playstation 4, a solid 200 tied to my Xbox, and my Steam library clocks in at over 900.
I have a problem and I don’t know how to fix it, so the best thing I can do is chug through these games as best as I can. With that said, I mostly replayed retro games that came out years before these other platforms.
Nobody can tell me what to do, not even me.
Here’s a fairly complete list of what I did:
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Moment of Zen – Chicken Butts
Every Friday at the end of the day, I treat my coworkers with a ‘moment of zen.’ Analogous to Jon Stewart’s sign-off on the Daily Show, what started as just sharing a cool space photo or a funny animal picture turned into me doing what I do best – ruining peoples’ day with trivia that they didn’t ask to learn.
Last week, the moment of zen was especially fun, so I decided to share it here.
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Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (SNES – 1995)
Yesterday was my birthday. That means a lot of the games I loved as a kid that were released in November are celebrating 20 to 30 year anniversaries. It’s hard to think about, but I’ll wax nostalgic regardless. I spoke pretty highly of 1994’s Donkey Kong Country. Its sequel, released only a year later, is immeasurably better.
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Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES – 1989)
Often described as the definitive pinnacle of Super Mario 2D platforming, Super Mario Bros. 3 is another one of those games that needs no review. One of the highest-grossing non-bundled video games of all time, with 17 million copies sold, Super Mario Bros. 3 will forever be a monument and a testament to the rise of home video games.
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