I’m in the 4th grade, Mario has been around forever at this point but even so I’m getting my first taste. I head over to a friends house to discover the so-called greatness that is Super Mario World and learn one of the biggest lessons I’d ever get.

Just because everything loves something doesn’t mean you have to.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Mario, but holy fuck is this a boring game. So I can run and jump? Neat. I can ride a green homosexual dinosaur? Neat. Yawn. This is what paved the way for me to be a sony fan-boy through my teen years. In my opinion I’ve never claimed to be a Nintendo gamer. I didn’t like Donkey Kong, I didn’t like Metroid, I didn’t like Smash Bros. Why? I wish I knew. It was at times alienating but I had to go with my gut. So many of the core franchises of Nintendo are just painful at this point. Why has Mario never gotten any deeper than a moustached creep show who is trying to cock-block a turtle shelled dinosaur? I don’t associate myself with any of these characters.

Fast forward to present day and Nintendo still doesn’t get it. Yeah sure, they’re making a shit ton of cash. But ask a real gamer about the Wii and they’ll laugh at you. It’s a joke. Wii-Fit? Really? Wii-Sports was fun for a few drunken nights but its accessibility is its downfall. In a market where so much focus is (unfortunately) being placed on how many 1080s you can pee or 720s you can eye, there is simply no room for ugliness.

Granted Nintendo produced two gems back in the days of the N64, GoldenEye and Ocarina of Time, which aside from having the hardest title I’ve ever pronounced, (Oh-car-nia anyone?) managed to draw me into its world completely. An illusion that was shattered when they brought the game to the Wii. Why the fuck do I want to play as a Wolf? I want to be Link. Duh. Look what Hideo Kojima did to MGS with Madonna, sorry, Raiden. Epic fail Hideo.

Oh well Nintendo, maybe one day we’ll be friends. Till then, my Wii attracts all the dust in my house and ensures other consoles receive the playing time. Great job Nintendo.

Oh Cloud, how many battles have we shared? The first RPG I picked up for my Playstation was Final Fantasy 7 and to this day it remains one of my favorite games. From the unforgettable soundtrack to the size of Tifa’s eyes (snicker) this game had you from beginning to end.

But what did it teach me?

1) Patience. From the first boss fight in the game (“Don’t attack while its tail is up!”) this game taught me that sometimes you should hold onto your load and think about things a bit. That lesson followed me all the way through puberty and I can honestly say it’s kept me out of prison a few times. Imagine how World War 2 could have been prevented had Poland put its tail up? Hitler would have been forced to furiously press triangle and skip his turn until he was able to attack. Prevention.

2) Frugality. Shinra Inc. once wrote that GIl makes the world go round. And you know what? They were right. Imagine yourself a youngster in Wall Market, you’ve just saved your first 1000 Gil and you’re ready to buy your Megalixir, a get-out-of-jail-free card that will restore all of your party’s hp and mp to full. That is, until you burn one on yourself to give you back the precious 1 HP you lost from a papercut you took braiding Aeris’ (ith?) hair. Don’t waste things.

3) Unique hair means you are important. Just like MGS, the hairstyle of the four key players in the story (Arguably Zack, Cloud, Sephiroth and Aeris) are designed with purpose. Cloud essentially mirrors Zack’s personality the entire game down to his haircut. When Sephiroth kills Aeris (SPOLIER ZOMG) and her hair falls down you realize her and Sephiroth have the same haircut. This is the result of either a) Midgar hairstyle trends or b) Careful planning by the people at Squaresoft. Either way, your hair is critical to the role you will play in a videogame.

4) The bigger your sword the better it looks on your back.

My palms are sweaty, my pupils are dilated and quite honestly if I get called to empty the dishwasher I am going to be pissed. Let me set the stage, on an island known ominously as Shadow Moses (Henceforth referred to as Dark Jesus) a curiously named group named FOXHOUND have seized control of a not-so-secret Military Base in Alaska’s Fox Archipelago. What’s going through my head?

1) WTF is a FOXHOUND? Charles Darwin would contest that when a Fox and a Hound love each other very much (Didn’t Walt Disney?…nvm.) the result is a team of highly trained special forces with ridiculous names and backstories so intense you will shit yourself.

2) The trend that the longer your hair, the more important you are to the story. Solid Snake: starts with long hair. Revolver Ocelot and Liquid Snake: Mullet city. All three are main protagonists in the games that would follow and all three at some point have hair so appallingly mullet like that the party makes its way from the back to the front.

3) WHERE IS THE CD CASE??? WHAT IS MERYL’S CODEC??? HIDEO YOU FU-…

I realize writing this that MGS as a series is something I can explore and discuss for years and not run out of things to talk about, however I’m going to pull out the biggest and most obvious lesson this game taught me as a youth.

Lesson One: If you are a man, and your heart is beating, you can be the most important force on the planet (Well that and don’t piss yourself in the arctic because you will literally freeze your balls off).

Whether I’m facing down a 50 gigantic metal robot that has a rail gun strapped to its shoulder or when I’m taking on a pissed of Navajo Indian with a Vulcan gatling gun I always feel like I’m going to make the game winning play. “But wait!” you cry, it’s easy for Snake because he awesome weapons like the Stinger and the Nikita! Well he was put into enemy territory without those weapons and through his own determination and diligence managed to procure them. When confronted with tall odds, get creative and get resourceful!

Therefore Lesson Two: When God gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If not. Then it’s weapons and supplies OSP (on-site-procurement).

Thanks Colnel Campbell for teaching me the value of a dollar.

Remembers those moments in your life when your parents told you to turn off the Nintendo and go outside? I don’t. That’s because I grew up with the only word that mattered to me in those days, Playstation. Well that and the fact my parents didn’t insist on the closely inverted relationship between health and time spent indoors. During that time I spent several hundred hours sat firmly in front of the television lost in a world outside of my own.

One day I’d be a brave member of the OSS gunning down Nazi’s with my trusty M1 Garand, other days a member of FOXHOUND infiltrating an island in Alaska’s Fox Archipelago to save the world from metal dinosaurs. It used to be in the days of Plato back in ancient Greece that children were taught several pieces of key knowledge referred to as the Trivium that was the foundation of their education. Today we know the Trivium as trivia, nothing more than random facts and knowledge, however back then it was a thorough course on grammar, rhetoric and logic.

Well friends, the times have changed and instead of logical discourse and lessons on grammar, my Trivium took the form of EXP and headshots. I learned how to negotiate hostage situations, how to save princess, how to take down a HIND using a Stinger missle launcher. Videogames were the basis of my knowledge, and with this blog as my weapon, I’ll attempt to cross the bridge between the lessons we learn through this medium and extract lessons we can apply in our daily lives. I’ll explore the modern textbook and how the best way to read it is using a Dualshock Analog control with Rumble support.