Breakdown

I'll not bore you with the details of my PlayStation 3's long, grueling journey toward health, except to note that I still haven't sent it in yet. This is going to take awhile.

I was in the middle of griping to myself about how they just don't make consoles like they used to, when I realized that hardware failures are just a fact of life. The Xbox 360 has gotten all the bad press, but my systems have historically had about a 50% failure rate, no matter who made them. A look back:

Console: Atari 2600
Year Acquired: 1984 (?)
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: A solid performer, although we never touched the damn thing once we got the NES, so who knows how long it might have lasted.

Console: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year Acquired: 1988
Serviced or Replaced: Replaced.
Reason: I can't recall the specific reason why our original NES bit the dust after only a couple years of service. It must have been that warranty-busting Game Genie. Damn you, Galoob!

Console: Sega Genesis
Year Acquired: 1992
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: The first star performer of any console I ever had. As of the last time I plugged it in, probably 2004 or so, it still worked. Can't say the same for the controllers, though. It's hard to play NBA Jam when you can't shoot.

Console: 32X
Year Acquired: 1994
Serviced or Replaced: Junked.
Diagnosis: I uninstalled the 32X to play Virtua Racing for the Genesis, which was incompatible, and after that the 32X never worked again. You may remember that hooking it up involved metal plates and about ten yards of cables, so I think this was actually for the best.

Console: Sega Saturn
Year Acquired: 1995
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: A simple lens error was easy to fix, although dealing with customer service was a nightmare. (Me: "I think it's a disc read error." Them: "Try wiping the memory." Me: "It says 'cannot read disc.'" Them: "Try placing it on the floor, lighting some incense, and dancing around it in a circle.")

Console: N64
Year Acquired: 1996
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Another solid performer, the N64 was in fine working order as of the last time I hooked it up, probably five years ago or so.

Console: PlayStation
Year Acquired: 1997
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: The first and last time Sony would not disappoint me.

Console: Super NES
Year Acquired: 1998
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: This was the smaller, redesigned SNES, which may have helped, but this thing even survived several weeks in the common room of a dorm, getting stuff spilled on it.

Console: PlayStation 2
Year Acquired: 2000
Serviced or Replaced: Replaced.
Diagnosis: Some kind of massive mechanical failure. The disc tray stopped working, and the whole system took to emitting a loud grinding noise. I attempted to fix it myself, following instructions on the Internet, and ripped an important-looking cable. Ended up buying the newer, smaller PS2.

Console: GameCube
Year Acquired: 2004
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Like the 2600, this one was obsolete before it had a chance to crap out. Still, a win's a win.

Console: Xbox 360
Year Acquired: 2006
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Knock on fucking wood.

Console: Wii
Year Acquired: 2006
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: The reason it went in for service was because it couldn't read Smash Bros, for which Nintendo tried to blame me, but was really because the system is cheap and dinky. At least it was free to fix. The bigger problem with the Wii is the graphical artificating, which occurred as a result of my leaving it in standby mode for six straight months, because there was nothing to play.

Console: PlayStation 3
Year Acquired: 2007
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: Pending. I'm not entirely sure what happened. It might just have overheated. Hopefully they'll say what the problem was when they return it.

There you go. 13 systems overall, and 6 died a premature death. I guess they make them exactly like they used to.

Note: This post has been updated since it was originally published, to include the GameCube.

A fond farewell

Above: It's so hard to say goodbye.

I carried them with me for years, through cramped dorm rooms and ratty apartments. Whenever I packed up to move again, along came the dog-eared New Balance shoebox, whose ragged corners I'd reinforced with electrical tape. Its contents were the best of the 16-bit era. A Link to the Past. Mega Man X. Super Castlevania IV. Donkey Kong Contry. Contra III. Super Mario World. F-Zero. And more and more.

Problem was, they weren't mine.

In my freshman year of college, I made friends with a guy whose passion for video games dwarfed that of anyone else I'd known. The man was an encyclopedia of game knowledge. No detail escaped his attention. He had a penchant for launching into impassioned monologues at the mention of almost any game. When he found out I had never played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, he all but forced me to go buy it. (He was right about it -- it's now one of my top-10 favorite games.) He extolled the virtues of Tenchu: Stealth Assasins. I picked that one up too, and when I said it seemed merely pretty good, he said, "Don't even talk to me until you've got 100% clearance on the first board." He seemed to mean it.*

Shortly before spring break, we found ourselves reminiscing about Super Metroid, and hatched a plan to play through it in one sitting. I'd bring the game and the system to school after the break. For his part, he brought that box full of classic games, most of which I had never played before. I hadn't even bought a SNES until well into the 32-bit era, and it was exclusively to get my hands on a copy of Super Metroid.

Beating Super Metroid took only a short evening -- it's easy to remember it as this massive game, but even if you're not doing a speed run you can polish it off in about 4 hours if you know what you're doing -- but we spent the rest of the semester, along with our neighbors, polishing off the rest of what he'd brought. Nothing unified the residents of that floor like the Super Nintendo. I have a memory of leaving the common room while one kid was deep into Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, only return hours later to find him in the same spot. He eventually beat it, somehow.

People have a habit of simply vanishing when the school year ends, which is how I found myself with custody of the games over the summer. Suddenly, no one was left in the dorm but me and the box of games. That was a tough summer -- I'd run out of money over the course of my freshman year, and my few attempts to find a summer job came up short. Sporadic temp work doing data entry was the best I found, so I had plenty of time to plow through that SNES library. It was like compressing the first half of the 1990s into three months.

I brought the games with me the next year, figuring I'd return them whenever I saw him. But somehow I just never reconnected with my friend. He was a senior by then, and spent half the year in L.A. I was dealing with my own problems, the usual post-adolescent stuff, too focused on my own gloom to look outward. He graduated and moved on, and I scraped through the next few years, always with the SNES games in tow. Over time, I started to think of them as mine, although I never forgot that they weren't.

Which is why, when my friend emailed me out of the blue a couple weeks ago, my first thought was: "Damn, I'm going to have to give those games back." Not that I would seriously consider keeping them -- there's no grandfather clause here. And the advent of services like the Virtual Console means that playing perfectly emulated versions of those games is always an option (not to mention that I'd actually be able to save my game if I downloaded A Link to the Past). Nor was he getting in touch just to get the games back -- he didn't even remember that I had them in the first place.

I met him for dinner, with the tattered New Balance box in tow. Letting go of the games was actually easier than I thought it would be. We tend to get attached to these physical objects, but they're really only symbols. I carted them around with me for eight years, even though I stopped playing them after one year. They were a reminder of what had seemed like a short-lived friendship, and the brightest spots in an otherwise dark period. And as we sat there last week, trading meticulous tales of our exploits in BioShock, Fallout 3, Resident Evil 4, Far Cry 2, and on and on, I was happy to realize I didn't need to carry those games with me anymore.

*Not that I ever pulled it off! Tenchu is impossible.

The best ending sequence in game history

For my money, it's this:



There's so much to love: the way the Hyper Beam causes Mother Brain's head to snap back, the option of saving your allies, and, of course, the last Metroid's noble sacrifice. If there's a better example of in-game storytelling out there, I don't know what it is.