an aussie in austria

We have a tradition. Friday night is date night. We like to head out early – less crowds and more time to relax when we get home. But before we go, we convene on the couch at around 5pm to play a couple of rounds of Mario Kart.

That’s right… Mario Kart – the Nintendo game that first came to be back in 1992 – almost 30 years ago. Personally speaking, I never had a Nintendo. I grew up with the classic Commodore 64, but I got to know Mario Kart because my neighbour had one. Now I’ve enjoyed going back and playing many of the old C64 games as an adult. But I have to say, it’s usually a bit of an anti-climax. Because once you get over the nostalgia of years gone by, you realise that many of these basic, child-like games don’t hold as much appeal as they used to. We had a game called Decathlon – which took the players through the ten sports in a decathlon. For the 1500m race… you literally had to sit there wiggling the joystick back and forth as fast as you could… for what I can remember to be a very long time. Why did we do it? I also remember a soccer game, and the only reason I worked my way through the four quarters was so that I could watch the ceremony at the end where the beautiful girl presents the trophy to the team. Yeah… weird.

There seem to be a few exceptions to this rule as an adult – one of them is the old classic Bubble Bobble – and the other, of course, is Mario Kart. Now Mario Kart, even though its graphics were pretty good for its time, only has a total of 16 different tracks. Sure, once you get to a certain level you can unlock the special version and play them in reverse, but who does that? There is Battle and Vs mode, but for two players we generally stick to the classic Grand Prix. And we play these 16 tracks over and over. I’m always the dragon and hubby’s always the toad. And we’re always out to beat the princess. She’s just so self-righteous and irritating!

I keep wondering to myself, when am I going to get sick of playing Mario Kart? Because we don’t just limit it to Fridays before and after dinner. It extends into the weekend, and sometimes we play it on week nights too, if time allows. Sure, you might be thinking, these guys have too much time on their hands, but hey, if we enjoy doing it, that’s not a bad thing, even if it does cause the odd argument.

So I guess we’ll just keep playing, and hope that we’re still doing this on Friday nights when we’re 80!