old video games, libraries, and xkcd

There’s a great xkcd strip (see below) about someone who always plays video games on a five-year lag because you get to enjoy all the good games with less of a hassle:

I love this strip for a few different reasons. First of all, I’ve never been a hardcore videogamer, so if I do ever play a big title, it usually is about five years after the fact. Second, I think there’s something about it that gets funnier (or else makes me feel older) over time: It’s funny to think of someone only discovering Portal in early 2013, but now that “five years late” is almost “ten years ago,” there’s something kind of absurd about the strip. At any rate, I wish that Portal were still supported by modern macOS, because even if that’s 15 years late, I would gladly play through the game again. In fact, I wanted to show it to kiddo a couple of months ago and was frustrated that I couldn’t!

That brings me to the reason I’ve recently been thinking about this xkcd strip, though. About a year ago, we wondered if kiddo would be interested in playing Mario Kart, so we absconded with the unused Wii that my parents had in their basement, purchased Mario Kart Wii for way too much from a Gamestop, and started a family tradition of playing a few minutes of Wii most nights. This has been a lot of fun, and it got even more fun when my wife realized that one of our local libraries has a vast collection of Wii games to check out. Some of them have been duds, but we’ve gotten a lot of kicks playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii—two games that, like Mario Kart, are substantially older than kiddo.

With the help of libraries, I think the xkcd “old games” model of gaming is even more fun. My parents aren’t using the Wii (to be honest, they never did, but the kids who did long moved out of the house), I never played any of these old Wii games (because I’d moved out of the house by the time my parents bought the Wii), and as much as I’m interested in the Switch, I think we’re getting just as much fun out of this library-supported exploration of Nintendo as we would by paying for a new console and new games.

• macro
• Relationships
• xkcd
• video games
• libraries
• parenting
• Portal
• Nintendo Wii
• macOS
• Mario Kart

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