Wednesday, November 1, 2006

A Song for the Dead
A list of the first batch of Virtual Console games was recently released by Nintendo.

The Nintendo front is pretty barren for me. I've already got Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, and the only other titles I'd maybe be interested in buying on either system are Ice Hockey and SimCity (and that's a big maybe for $5 and $8 respectively). Hopefully there will be a few more interesting Nintendo games that I actually don't own/can't play anymore released in the next batch of Virtual Console games (Super Metroid, Kirby Super Star, Earthbound, etc.).

There are some Genesis games I might be interested in buying though. Sonic the Hedgehog is borderline, as is Golden Axe, and I am leaning toward buying Gunstar Heroes and Toe Jam & Earl. The $8 price tag makes me somewhat hesitant, however; I wish the games were available for a bit less.

As for the TurboGrafx-16, I'm not sure what I want to buy there, but I can always check out Tony's guides to the TurboGrafx-16's games.

In other news, I went out for Halloween last night and had some fun. Pictures of my siblings and me in our costumes are available on OB if anyone is interested in seeing them. It was nice to be able to completely forget school and projects and essays and exams and be a little kid again. At the same time, however, it's kind of sad to see how much Halloween has degenerated where I live.

I'm not entirely sure when it started. Maybe it was after 9/11 when people started feeling less safe in general, or perhaps it started earlier than that and I'm just plucking the 9/11 date out of thin air because it seems like a plausible cause because people enjoy rampant paranoia. Who knows? At any rate, where plenty of people used to pack the streets to trick or treat for Halloween, it's now disquietingly empty. Each year, the number of people who went out and who gave out candy trickled down slowly, until last year when my dad told us that not a single person had knocked at our door.

Even before then, we'd long since stopped trick or treating in our housing complex - maybe five people or so had actually been giving out candy the last year my siblings and I bothered to walk around there. We went to a close neighborhood for a couple of years, but not that many people were giving out candy there, either, and when we looked around this year, we saw maybe one or two isolated groups of kids and parents walking around. They were just so... barren, as if it were any other night in the year. That did not bode well at all for us, so we actually decided to go to an entirely different town (West Covina) for Halloween. There were quite a few people there giving out candy, and we saw a few costumed groups wandering about, but not nearly as many as years past.

These developments really make me curious. I mean, it's not as though we're lacking in children here, and I'm sure that the number of people who have celebrated Halloween the majority of their lives outnumbers those who haven't. Maybe people just don't see the point anymore? That would be sad. Halloween is a fun way to connect a bit more with the community, especially in towns like La Puente. It's nice to see little kids having fun, dragging around their parents, knocking at strangers' doors and yelling, "Trick or treat!" in chorus, and it's just as nice to be the person giving out the candy to them. It's fun to dress up in costume and assume some totally different character for the night. It's a blast to do it with friends, whether you're outside or you're at a party.

Most important, though, I think it's good to keep up the spirit, because it allows us to remember that life doesn't always have to be so serious. You can be anybody you want to be. You can have fun with people you've never met before and might not even see again for another year. You can be a little kid again.

I think it'd be sad to see that die.
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