Jared Rea

Now that we’re fully entrenched in the HD era of gaming, it’s become quite difficult to go back and play games on older consoles. That is of course, unless you’ve got the right setup. Unfortunately, we don’t. We, being Miss Shelby and I, have a monstrous Sony Bravia that makes anything prior to the Xbox 360 look like garbage and a standard set in the bedroom that’s recently been taxed by everything from the generation before it.

So what are we to do with our Sega Genesis? And what of her poor Nintendo 64 collection? Surprisingly, Ikea had the answer.

Let it be known that the Swedes are the best at two things: delicious meatballs and cheap furniture. Shelby has adopted something of a nesting instinct as of late, so we’ve been making plenty of trips to the promised land (some assembly required). Most recently were the new DVD shelves we picked up in order to replace the smaller ones we moved in with that no longer matched the decor. Once assembled, we noticed a problem.

One of them leaned backwards. We couldn’t just press them against the wall since the cable jack was in the way, so we figured it was time to get creative. Shelby noticed something that didn’t immediately stand out when we decided on these at the store: they weren’t completely flat. A pair of grooves could be found on the backside which were the cause of our problem. We figured that all we had to do to fix this was to put something behind these grooves that could balance out the shelf. The answer was clear.

A Nintendo 64 cartridge. Not only were the cartridges the perfect size, but they’re extremely dense and sturdy enough to survive a day on the LA highways. Shelby’s collection is small, but respectable, so picking the unfortunate soldier made for a tough decision. Star Wars: Pod Racer? Too good. Pokemon Snap? Too awesome. After shuffling through the potentials, a front runner was found.

The Nintendo 64 wasn’t known for having any decent fighters and Natsume’s Flying Dragon definitely didn’t help. Really, what can be said for it? It’s a crummy 3D fighter based on an equally crummy 2D series from the 16-bit era. I remember reading their four-page advertisements in ancient issues of EGM, touting that it was “six fighting games in one” or some other nonsense, wondering who actually fell for this sort of stuff. And so, behind the shelf it went.

Just like I said, the N64 cartridges were the perfect size for the job and they’re sturdy enough to hold up a shelf loaded with Xbox 360 games and DVDs. But did it pay off?

Mission accomplished. Next time, how we used the remaining N64 cartridges on the old DVD shelves.