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In This Issue

• Forever Remember, or Else
• 8 Bits of Subliminal NES Perversion
• Letters to the Editor
• $$$ for Golden Showers
• Caliente Cab: Giving Your Stomach the Bad Touch
• My Date with the Fed: So Hot it Set 620 on Fire
• The Absolute Worst of First-Year Quotations
• Get Your Smack At the SmackTastic Supa-Store
• Sleep with Your Professors
• Tired of the Same Old Masturbation Techniques?
• Hentai: Your Mother Is Crying up in Heaven
• Beefcake! Beefcaaaake!
• NSOP Uber Alles

About a year ago, I was working as a lifeguard at a summer camp when I found myself engaged in a conversation with a third grader about Nintendo. "I'm Zelda," proclaimed the boy who both looked and talked like a beaver. At first I was angered by his ignorance. I argued with him, trying to explain that Zelda was the princess and Link was the hero who he thought himself to be. He would hear none of it. When I told him that I still have the original Zelda, he responded, "Oh, you mean Zelda 64?" It then became apparent to me that I was trying to talk through a vast generational void, and no amount of explaining on my behalf could possibly convey to the poor child the joys of playing games with unidentifiable graphics, nonsensical dialog, and the odd lack of a third dimension. Suddenly, I pitied him.

As a child who grew up on Nintendo, I never questioned why you could jump up through floors and not fall back down through them (how many of us didn't try that as kids?), or possess multiple lives (fortunately I never tested that particular tenet of Nintendo mythology). Like most children, I simply accepted these peculiarities, much like a religion. However, when you really start to analyze just what you wasted the better part of your youth doing (no, before you discovered masturbation), you suddenly realize how thoroughly fucked up everything involving Nintendo and the twisted culture surrounding it really was.

When Nintendo wasn't busy setting back my reading skills with impossibly poor grammar, their games would often bring to light the controversial issues of the day. An actual quote from the Super Mario Bros. 2 game manual, under the explanation of an enemy known as Birdo, reads, "He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called ‘Birdetta.'" Birdo, who proudly donned a pink ribbon and thick mascaraed eyelashes, may have been the first transvestite to appear in youth culture in an otherwise conservative decade. And who can forget sexy Samus Aran of Metroid fame who surprised everyone when she took off her suit at the game's conclusion to reveal her true gender?

When Nintendo wasn't touching upon groundbreaking gender issues, they were encouraging drug use. Zelda taught us that drinking red potions restores life, while green ones give you magic powers. In Bubble Bobble we discovered that the best way of dealing with our enemies is to entrap them in large bubbles and then pop them, turning them into bits of edible fruit. And while Mario taught us that eating something referred to in the instruction manual as "Magic Mushrooms" would make us grow taller and that "Flower Power" would enable us to shoot balls of fire, did anyone stop to think that just maybe the Japanese were making fun of us? Mario was an obese, Italian-American plumber from Queens with a penchant for psychedelic substances who spent his free time running about sewer pipes and stomping on fat little dark-skinned things known as "goombas" (an Italian term of endearment).

In the eighties, Nintendo was more than a game system, it was a way of life. If you happen to be one of those freaks like me who saved all his old editions of Nintendo Power, go back some day and read the fan mail sections. They're chock full of pathetic 30-year-olds that were so proud of their video game scores that they sent them in so everyone in the world would know about their social dysfunction. And this is exactly what made Nintendo so great. You ate the cereal, you wore the underwear, you bought every ridiculous accessory (including that utterly useless robot thing), you knew (and still know) the Konami code that would give you thirty lives in Contra, and most of all, you played until your fingers developed callouses and your dreams were filled with pixilated 8-bit graphics.

Fast forward to the new millennium. Games are prettier. They're 3D. They're NOT fun. Recently, while watching my friends play Madden NFL 2002 at a friend's house I noticed that they had actually managed to simulate the jiggling of ass-fat as players pile on one another for a tackle. Is this a level of detail we really need in order to enjoy our games? I want more games entitled Bible Adventures, or Rex Ronan - Experimental Surgeon. I crave trashy-corporate sponsored titles like 7-Up's Cool Spot. And most importantly, lose the third dimension. If I wanted my games to have anything to do with reality, I'd step outside.