A Link to the Past


As I was recovering from the nasty albeit short-lived bug that laid waste to my family this past week, I had a weird craving. It wasn’t a food craving — not that I was eating much of anything at the time — but a game craving. It is no surprise for me to say that I am not a gamer. I don’t play computer games despite spending a nauseating amount of time in front of one. But I used to play a lot of games — Super Nintendo games. I had a craving for Super Nintendo, more specifically Act Raiser. I’m not sure if anyone of you have ever played this game, but the gist of it is that you are this almighty being who has to fight monsters to clear lands for people to live on and then you continue to help solve their problems. Essentially it is a mix of action and simulation and you can I discovered beat the entire game — including maximizing the population of your villages — in one day.

Now I am in the middle of a game of Zelda III: A Link to the Past and it is a great little distraction when I don’t want to do anything else. If anyone is interested, the Snes9X emulator has a mac version that works great and I have ROMs for all of the games that we used to/still own so there is no legal issue. I went through a big list of ROMs online and when I had downloaded all of the games I thought I might ever want to play, my brother pointed out that we owned them all on cartridge. I guess my tastes haven’t changed much since those days — that or I only wanted to play games that were familiar for nostalgic purposes.

Written by Colin Bate