Once a gamer

Back when I was a teenager (that would be in the 20th century), I loved video games. As every teenager (and some adults) does. Back when I was a teenager, the hot thing was the Nintendo. And then the Super Nintendo (they had very creative marketing teams). After that came the Playstation, but I was in college by then, pretending to learn things.

I haven't played a proper video game in years (if you exclude the 2048's and Candy Crushes of this world), because a) I'm a grown up, b) I don't know where the video games are any more (they used to come in cartridges, for f**k's sake), c) I would thoroughly suck at them. Not just because I haven't played any of them in years, or because I (clearly) don't know what they are about, but more importantly because I actually always sucked at them. Such is my plight.

My brother, on the other hand, did not. The way I know this is we used to play together a fair bit. Any game we tried - Super Mario, Mortal Kombat, chess - he could whoop my ass while standing on one leg, blindfolded and playing with his left hand. Every time we got a new game, it was always the same: it would take me weeks to figure out how to make the character move forward, while my brother was already trying out all the special combos and stuff... I got so many fire balls thrown at me in Street Fighter II that I wanna live on an island now.

Last Friday, as my girlfriend had a sport-related gathering (she's so much into sports that she meets people just to talk about it), I met up with my brother for dinner. That's when he suggested something I didn't know was possible:

- Wanna play Rock n' Roll Racing afterwards?

- What do yo mean? The Super Nintendo video game? [Note: Rock n' Roll Racing is possibly the greatest video game ever made. You get to race cars from the future on moon-like planets with rock n' roll songs playing in 8-bit in the background. The next best thing is tiramisu]

- Yup.

- Did you get a Super Nintendo for your birthday?

- Don't need one.

- Did you get some sort of special 3D glasses then?

- Don't exist.

- So what then?

- You can emulate any Nintendo game on a computer now.

- OK, cool...

- So, wanna play?

- Of course I wanna play!

That night, I got my ass kicked by my brother so bad that my girlfriend had time to finish her thing, meet us at my brother's place and watch me get my ass kicked some more as he was chatting away with her over the sounds of rockets destroying my car (a fairly common occurrence).

Yesterday evening, my girlfriend had an (actual) sports training scheduled, so I texted my brother:

- You up for a rematch tonight?

- What do you mean?

- I mean, do you wanna play some more Rock n' Roll Racing?

- I got that. What I didn't get is the "rematch" part: do you honestly think you can beat me?

- Yup.

Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. And I'm so well adjusted.