Gamesugar

The Wii’s Virtual Console is one of the most versatile “selling points” of the three current generation consoles since it offers, as is my case, a gateway into one’s childhood at an affordable price and grants an opportunity to relive the 80’s and 90’s in all of its pixels to single shade polygons splendor. And don’t say an NES game is too expensive at 500 Wii points – remember the actual price of an original NES cartridge back in the day?

Now with an introductory paragraph in the usual review style out of the way, let me tell you a story about a young married couple that one day found themselves immersed in the claws of a harmless, even charming looking videogame.

We’d been married for about four months when my wife one day needed to go back to work during the afternoon to help organize an event. As she was to be gone for the next 2-3 hours I decided to turn on the Wii and see what I could download from the Virtual Console to kill some short amount of time, since we had made dinner plans for later. I started browsing games by console, starting with the NES, SNES and N64, because I figured since those were consoles I actually owned there were better odds of discovering a game I wouldn’t later regret buying.

Still, no such luck was to be had, I couldn’t find the type of game that would be easy to turn off when it was time to leave later – if you’re wondering exactly what I mean, I was at that time playing titles like Toki Tori on WiiWare at the Hard levels, which is definitely not a game you can stop thinking of on short notice, especially when you’ve found your intellect challenged again and again by the Slimy Sewer Hard 4 level.

Still searching through titles, I suddenly came upon one that grabbed my attention and seemed to cover all of my requirements, Devil’s Crush for the TurboGrafx (TG-16 among friends and relatives). Away went 600 Wii (soon to be called Nintendo) Points and in return a classic pinball game (a cult hit I might add) had been placed inside my Wii’s Channels (no SD Card Channel back then). Unfortunately my session was interrupted before it started when my boss called needing urgent information and a few hours of extra work.

To make a long story short, all of this led to me finally getting a chance to sit down with the game at the same time that my wife returned home. Without looking at the screen she asked about what I was playing, so I explained how virtual console worked, which was a new concept for her at the time, and mentioned the TurboGrafx, which she had never heard of. I commented on how great it was to be able to download one of the best games for said console and have fun with a legendary pinball game, at which point her eyes had widened and her only question was “a pinball game you say?”

She sat next to me and watched me play for a minute or two while I explained to her how the controls worked, and then out of nowhere the Wiimote left my hands and never returned. It was me now who was watching her play Devil’s Crush, over and over, while she learned to make her way through the bonus levels, change the face in the middle of the board while at the same time trying to get rid of all the skeletons dancing around it, and of course give the evil-eye to that skull on the right of the screen that laughs every time a ball is lost.

Three hours went by before I knew it.

It was almost like watching someone in a trance, or someone being absorbed by an inexplicable out of body experience. And maybe like witnessing a car crash, I was equally helpless to stop watching. I knew my wife played with an NES and SNES during her childhood, but it was mostly with Mario games and Tetris. I learned that day that pinball held a special place in her life – and that we apparently weren’t going out to dinner anymore, which would come in handy in the future when I was the one absorbed by a game and wasn’t ready for dinner.

This went on for a couple of weeks, an hour or two each day the Wii belonged to her, sometimes at night before she went to sleep since it helped her relax, which I can relate to. I was quite happy to see her embrace what is, most of the time, just MY hobby, but at the same time wondered when I would get a chance to take a shot at it again.

I want to download Alien Crush Returns on WiiWare, I really do. But it will either have to be during a day when I know she’ll have a lot of work and won’t come home until late at night, or risk being thanked for downloading the game and then sitting there watching her have a go for the rest of the day. Thankfully she hasn’t seemed to notice the Wii copy of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection in my games drawer yet.