Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

Playing With Power
  
     It could have been me.
     This Sunday, to kick off this year's E3, Nintendo brought back the Nintendo World Championship for the first time in 25 years.
     Sure, if you want to be cynical, the championship is little more than a long advertisement for current and upcoming games. This was to be expected considering that the original contest back in 1990 was nothing more than a huge advertisement for "Super Mario Bros. 3."
     But that didn't stop it from being greatly entertaining, not to mention a refreshing change from the usual e-sports scene.
     Unlike professional e-sports, the Nintendo World Championship is a strictly amateur contest. There is no prize pool, the contestants aren't professional players, and the games played aren't balanced for competitive play.
     As part of the fun, none of the contestants even knew which games they would play from round to round. In fact, one of the games was a brand new title that had not been announced yet.
     Generally, the e-sports scene is dominated by people who know their game inside and out. The people at the top are the ones that spend hours perfecting their craft.
     But there's also something to be said about a gamer that can pick up a game that nobody has ever played before and just go with it, and those were the kind of gamers that made it to the championship.
     Well, half of them at least. Of the 16 contestants, eight were invited guests made up notable speed runners and YouTube personalities. The other eight contests were just regular gamers, selected from an open preliminary round that was held at Best Buy locations across the nation.
     I tried to convince my roommates to drive up to Minneapolis to give it a go, just for the fun of it. At the very least, it would have made for a fun road trip. Unfortunately, they showed little interest in the adventure and I didn't feel like making the trip alone.
     The odds of that any of us would have qualified for the contest were slim, but not unreasonable. A childhood, and adulthood, of gaming have left the mechanics of "Super Mario Bros" are hardwired into muscle memory. With a little practice, who knows what could have happened had we tried.
     Thankfully, Iowa did not go without representation. Among the eight players that earned their way to the big stage was Timothy H, otherwise known as "Timzy," from West Union.
     Timzy did us proud at first, surviving the first round by winning a game of "Splatoon."  Unfortunately, he was knocked out of the main competition after a 1-3 loss in "Blast Ball" and eliminated entirely when he narrowly lost a speed-run contest of "Super Metroid."
     I'm not saying I would have done better in Timzy's shoes, but I will say that one of my roommates would have annihilated that "Super Metroid" round without breaking a sweat.
     The disappointing loss of Timzy aside, the contest was still enjoyable to watch. Particularly the final round, where John Numbers, an otherwise ordinary gamer from New York, dominated a series of crazy Super Mario levels to win the championship.
     Not bad for a guy who made it to the contest by being really good at "NES Remix" and having time to stop at a Best Buy.
     Maybe next year I'll give it a try.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is going to practice his 8-bit reflexes.

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