man-doing-backflip phase
A couple days ago, my stepbrother and I sat down with a vintage Nintendo to appreciate the classics. He’s twenty, five years younger than me, which might explain why he gave up on it before I did–he couldn’t forgive the old games for punishing the player’s mistakes with replay time (go back to the beginning of the level when you die, and begin all over again when you lose).
It occurred to me–that trick, handy for extending the life of a product, was leaning pretty heavily on the games’ late-eighties novelty. What I took as a fact of life, my stepbrother considers as appealing as a malfunctioning VCR. Er, DVD player.