Living Up To The Hype

I believe that everyone in this world has some kind of amazing gift or ability that makes them special and unique and separates them from everyone else in this world. For some people it's so ridiculously obvious. For example, Michael Jordan. The guy was/is one of the best basketball players to ever live (but definitely not the best baseball player). On the flip side of that, there are people who have these abilities to do small and random things that will probably go unnoticed by 99.99999% of the population, but is admired and appreciated by those who know that person intimately. For example, my sister Pam is a pretty fantastic gift wrapper. Every single gift that she wraps is colour coordinated and beautiful. Whereas my gifts are practically unwrapping themselves because the crappiness of my wrap job doesn't hold them together very well (this is why they created duct tape!). This is something that most people in this universe would never know about Pam, but we know it and appreciate it.

My weird little gift that was either bestowed on me from birth or drilled into me as a child, is my Super Mario skills. You may laugh now, but it's true! I am quite fantastic at it, especially Super Mario World. I hadn't played in years and years, and recently Chris downloaded a huge amount of old school Nintendo and Super Nintendo games onto his laptop, and as soon as I started playing, it was like I had never quit. I could remember the most outlandish little tricks and secrets which just astounded Chris (who is a self proclaimed mad-man at Mario). Now, I am obviously not the best player in the world, but I like to think that I'm fairly awesome.

So now the big dilemma here is that Chris has been playing a lot of this new Super Mario Wii game lately with his friends, and he somehow managed to tell a bunch of his buddies how great I am at Mario...so now the rumour is out amongst them all that I can beat everyone who wants to challenge me. Ugh. Yesterday I was at Kyle's house with a few people who were all playing Wii, and this guy who I didn't even know was talking about how good he is at Super Mario World, so I asked "how good?" and he said "well, apparently no where near as good as you...I've heard the stories." Ok, so now I am feeling this immense pressure to waaaaaayyyy up my skills so that when one of these dudes, who are basically strangers, wants to play against me, I had better be utterly amazing. Living up to the hype just may get me in the end. I am fairly good at not buckling under the pressure though.

I must admit that the new Wii Mario game is pretty damn cool. It came out way back in November, but I have been living under a rock for the past many months, so I'm just learning about the whole thing. I really like that it has a lot of the personality of the older games incorporated into (like the bad guys, music, worlds....), but with a cool new-age look and feel. Plus the new little gadgets are rockin' and I love how you can play with 4 people on the same screen at once. I'm quite sure that most people hate having so many players on one screen all bumping into each other and accidentally pushing each other off of cliffs (yeah, I did that a lot last night...sorry guys but it was my first time ever playing Wii), but I think it majorly ups the degree to difficulty and keeps you way more on edge when you're playing. I'm a die hard Super Nintendo lover to the end, but I give this game two thumbs up.