When it comes to gaming, a lot of my friends spend hours, effort and lots of money into the newest PlayStation, Computer with incredible hardware or just into the most wanted games from the market. I must admit, that I never owned a PlayStation in my life. Shame on me! But, to be honest, I never needed one either. The only gaming console (beside my average laptop to play stuff like solitaire or pinball) I ever owned and still do is the Nintendo GameCube.
Born in 1996, I experienced rise and fall of different gaming consoles. Once I was 7 years old, and in school everyone talked about the games the play at that time, I put a console on the wish list I sent to Santa that Christmas. And as we all know, Santa knows best and put that grey plastic cube under the Christmas tree. I was as happy as I could be, even though I have never heard of the game cube before. It came with two controllers and I still remember my dad and my staying up late for a couple of days to play the game, that came with the GameCube: Mario Kart Double Dash!
We invested lots of time and sweat into the fastest laps on all the tracks driving around as Peach, Bowser, Luigi or Mario himself. But when I bought another game, it became my new favourite immediately:
Need for Speed Underground 2
Who does not remember this freaking hot brown haired lady at the starting screen, telling you to always drive safely in real life?
Like almost every bit of course I was interested in cool, fast cars and spent whole nights tuning the cars. I drove around in the career mode for hours and hours, just enjoying the ride without finishing any tasks! Sometimes I took a race just to have money to buy new parts for my car...
The best 'gadget' I ever invested in was the small black box below the GameCube itself, it can be seen a little in this picture:
This black thing was an adapter to plug in any gameboy game and play it in a giant way on a TV screen. Isn't that amazing?! You just take your Pokemon, your Super Mario, Crash Bandicoot game or whatever, that you played on your "Gameboy Color" on a screen with a size of two stamps and play it on a big screen just with plugging it into your GameCube. I was amazed, I was caught, I played on and on and on.
But, as the time went by, I lost my interest in gaming with the nintendo. As I grew older and girls became much more interesting, as I did much more sports and the homework for school became longer, I almost forgot about my GameCube in the closet. It stayed hidden and forgotten for several years, until I found it again about 18 months ago while cleaning my room. I just plugged it into my 42" LED TV, hoped for the best and started that cube (full of dust):
After realizing it still worked I cleaned it a bit and sat there for hours and hours, playing Mario Cart and need for speed again, as if I have never stopped. Instead of studying, working or doing anything of that (semi-)adult stuff I had to do with the age of 19 years, I just sat there all though the night and played games with horrible graphic on a gaming console that worked louder than expensive vacuum cleaners do today. And now, whenever I need to recover and relax, whenever I need a break of being an adult, I just go back to choose Mario and Peach, a nice Cart and try not to fall down during that terrible rainbow track - and I can just feel like a Kid for as long as the GameCube stays plugged in - and I don't seem to have any duties, deadlines or tasks just as long as this small orange light on the Cube is shining...
