Frustrations

Frustrations come in many forms. When they involve playing a game, they can normally be set aside as unimportant or irrelevant. Nevertheless....

There were only a handful of video games that ever interested me, and my favorite was Super Mario Brothers 3. When I owned it about 15 years ago, I got to be pretty good at it. I never got bored with it even after beating it became somewhat routine. A few months ago, I discovered that it had been re-released for the Wii. I tried playing against my daughter when visiting her once and discovered that I couldn't complete even a single level in world 1. So naturally, I had to download it onto my own Wii to practice.

While working at it over the past few months, I'm slowly getting better, but it frustrates me that it's taking so long. Granted, I'm not spending hours and hours doing it, but I can't be getting THAT old, that my reflexes have become so slow.

The two things that give me the most trouble are the note boxes and the sliding duck. For the most part, the note boxes are not vital to the game and I can do them well enough to at least get by. But the sliding duck is crucial at certain levels, and my inability to make it work more than once in every 15-20 tries (it's probably actually worse than that) is getting me down.

The second fortress in world 6 is one of those crucial places that I've been working on lately. There's a spot in there that if you can't make it through, then even if you do continue on and make it to Boom-Boom's hall, it will be as small Mario, and since he's one of the more trickier ones in the game, he's tough to beat when you're small.

Fond Baseball Memory

One of my fondest memories is of when I was 8 years old and my uncle took be to an Indians' game against the Yankees. I had been to one game with my father the previous year when I was 7, but that was a day game and the only thing I remember about it was that the Indians won against, I think, the Tigers. Because memory is such a tricky thing, I tried to research the game to see how much of my memory is trustworthy. Turns out I had a few things wrong. I thought it was on September 8th on a Wednesday, but it was actually on September 9th on a Tuesday. I also thought Billy Martin was on the Indians and was actually the last batter in the game, but he didn't actually play for the Indians until the following season. And I thought the Indians scored 10 runs in the fifth, but it was only 8.

Those minor things aside, my basic memory was correct. It was a night game. I got to see Mickey Mantle hit a home run, and I remembered that the Indians catcher Russ Nixon hit two home runs in that game. The Indians were behind 2-1 when they came up in the bottom of the fifth. They proceeded to score 8 runs. They had the bases loaded with 2 outs and whoever the batter was (I thought it was Martin, but I guess it couldn't have been) had a 2-2 count when it started pouring rain and the umpires stopped play.

We sat for exactly one hour until the game was officially ended due to the rain. This caused me to believe that there was a rule that if a game was stopped for rain, they would wait one hour, and then call it. Funny the conclusions you draw from experience as a kid. The Indians won since they were the home team and were ahead in the bottom of the fifth.

It seems as I get older, memories such as that become more precious.