SLA

CUBED IN GAMING

I wanted a Nintendo GameCube simply for just one game, and I ended up getting it for plenty.  I wanted a Nintendo GameCube because while I was watching some shows on Kids WB a few years ago, I saw several commercials for a video game called Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.  The seeds of my interest in the Sonic universe were planted when we rented a video based on it at a movie rental shop called the Video Library when we tried to watch Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and it didn’t work on the VCR.  When it failed to work, we decided to rent and watch a video called Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie in its stead.  It was basically a movie where a short blue humanoid superhero hedgehog named Sonic, who can run really fast and curl up into a ball to attack enemies, and his friends, a yellow fox named Tails, who has two of them that he uses like helicopter propellers, and a red echidna named Knuckles, who can climb on walls, glide, and has spikes on his fists.  They are also humanoid superheroes.  They try to get to a deserted city called Robotropilos so they could deactivate an out-of-control generator before sunrise when the generator would start an apocalyptic explosion.  They turned it off, and then they had to stop an evil robot named Metal Sonic, who was created by Sonic’s arch nemesis, Dr. Robotnik, known in the current Sonic universe as Dr. Eggman.  I liked the movie and it bore my interest in the Sonic universe.  Ads for Sonic games I saw in magazines at PathMark, Blockbuster, and other retailers watered the seeds of my interest, and so did ads for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on TV.  That’s why I wanted the GameCube.  But, the GameCube was as expensive then as Nintendo’s new console, the Wii, is today.
My parents decided to have me earn the Nintendo GameCube when I entered middle school in 2002.  The school I went to before this one was Middle Years Alternative, or MYA for short.  Ever since I was five years old, I had tutors helping me with my progress in life.  In middle school, I was tutored by Joey Disamba, who was also there in fourth grade, the end of elementary school.  We did a little session where I did a little quiz on what happened during my classes in the morning and in the afternoon.  I did the morning class quizzes during lunchtime, and the afternoon ones after school.  If I aced those quizzes in thirty days, I would get the GameCube.  The progress was long, but I was cruising.  One weekend I was so close to completing the given task that my parents decided to buy me the GameCube and some things for it at GameStop before I finished what I needed to do.
When my parents bought me the GameCube, they also bought a second controller because they thought my sister, Ann, would like to do two-player in some games with me.  We also got the reason that I wanted a Nintendo GameCube in the first place: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.  That game expanded my interest in Sonic, and when more Sonic games went on the Nintendo GameCube, such as Shadow the Hedgehog, and Sonic Heroes, I wanted and got them too.  We also got a little chip helping the console remember the progress you made in certain games called a Memory Card.  The one we bought at GameStop held 251 blocks of memory.  On the Christmas of 2002, Ann got another GameCube game called Animal Crossing, which is about life and the way you live it, and it came with a free 59-block Memory Card.  Two years later, also during Christmas, Ann got The Sims: Busting Out, and our 251-block Memory Card didn’t have enough room for its data, so we bought a 1019-block Memory Card.
My parents had made plenty of rules and restrictions on the Nintendo GameCube.  I had to earn a certain amount of time in a certain way in order to gain the ability to play on the GameCube for the time I earn.  Now, I am pretty OK with having to earn reward time, but at first, I hated it.  And I still think that earning game time pays off.  At first I despised the restrictions put by my parents, but now I’m used to it.  I like weekend mornings because I don’t have any limits on playing on the GameCube until noon.  So, I play on weekend mornings a lot.  My parents let me use earned time also on a GameBoy Advance we bought a few years ago.  I can also use that time on the Internet or on an old Nintendo 64 that we bought a few years before the GameCube.  My parents let me earn time in certain ways and I neglect some of them, like what they always tell me to do: read!
I get more games for the Nintendo GameCube month by month.  I usually get them used from GameStop.  I have so many games for the GameCube, I’ll have to go up to them and count them in order to see how many I have.  An is interested in GameCube games too.  She mostly likes fantasy RPGs like Fire Emblem and Tales of Symphonia.
Playing video games makes my feel like I’m actually in the game and doing what my characters are doing.  I reflect on my gaming interests sometimes with my memories and sometimes with the Internet.  The restrictions on the GameCube frustrate me from time to time, and I am sometimes bored because of them.  The number of games I get is practically endless.  I sometimes have my friend, Roy, come over sometimes.  We play games that he brought over too.  We trade games and sometimes trade back.  I get Nintendo Power magazines to check out the latest news on my favorite upcoming video games.  I can’t wait to get Nintendo’s next console, the Wii.