skinnytie.com

As have we all, I have made mistakes in my youth the logical inclinations behind which seem unfathomable in these my few adult years.

There was that time I tried to show off to a couple of girls by taking my terribly over-expensive street bike over a ‘sweet jump’ and spent the next 20 yards of my life kissing asphalt face first. That cost me a week of summer and the stitches to put my ear back on.

There was the time I took my aunt’s crimson hair dye and sprayed it all over the toilet bowl and when asked what the hell was in the toilet bowl by my terror stricken mother replied, “Blood, Mommy; blood from my butt.”

Once I packed up a raft with crackers, pop and beef jerky and rode the Clinton River for 9 hrs. My trek ended with a call home under an overpass in Detroit with the Detroit River looming enormous before me, a glistening trash highway begging me to ride in and come out the other side like Emil from RoboCop.

One of the worst, though, was my decision to give in to social pressure and sell my Turbo Duo. This wasn’t social pressure from any one person, but from the whole of geekery. You see, the SNES was kicking everyone’s ass at the time and I seriously wanted mine kicked by its market success goodness. I failed to see the amazing technology my mother had bestowed upon me after what had to be months of incessant begging and pleading and making empty promises to take out the trash, get good grades and stop being such a smartass.

The thing is, I didn’t even ask for the Turbo Duo. I asked for the Turbo Graphx 16. My dumb ass didn’t even KNOW about the Duo until my mom bought one for me and changed my young life once again. To the Duo, the TG16 was a mere paramecium. That isn’t to say it wasn’t wholly badass – not at all. As Forgotten Realms teaches, you cannot stop me with paramecium alone.

You can, however, deliver a hell of a lot of coolness in what was, and still is, the best looking game system ever produced. Understand this: When my mother spent on my entertainment she did so with much research and consideration. The Duo was by far the most fun I have had with a system following the NES. It delivered 16bit graphics, CD quality sound and had a mass multiple processor that made the inadvertent bullet time created when the NES was crunching its numbers look absolutely Neanderthal.

When my friends were jumping goombas and feeding blobs jelly-beans, I was wrapped up in accompanied with professional soundtracks or trying to make my way through so many bullets that my screen looked like pixel puke.

Well, I am a bit older now, and a fair bit wiser and have done what most people in my state of historic stupidity have done. I looked it up on eBay.

You can’t get one for less than 2hundo these days. New and un-dirtied and you’re looking upwards of 5 bills. I’m lucky if I have one bill these days.

I search for the diamond I the rough – the sub ‘not way too much money for an old game system’ deal – every day. Every day another part of me dies. It is one of those things that will haunt me until it is made right. It is like a 16bit Samara with its 8bit math processor chugging a way to get me to tell the world the sordid story of its demise while actually attempting to infect all of humanity with its top-down scrolling goodness. I think I am going to make a video and send it to everyone I know in the hope that 7 days later they’ll send me a Turbo Duo.

Insult + Injury = SNES decks are a dime a dozen.

My cat is in heat (read: mrroowww, mrrooww, mrrooww), my one day weekend is almost over and I can’t get this damnable piece of black plastic and childhood dreams out of my head.

Time to go to the arcade. God bless skee-ball.