I feel OLD.

So, being back in Allgäu last week, I took plentiful advantage of one of my favourite Allgäu pastimes.

Hiking up Grünten, you ask?

No, of course not!

I was playing copious amounts of MarioKart on Wii, silly!

There's something you should know about me and video games -- I don't play a lot of them. I think it has something to do with the fact I hate losing. It's not just a matter of disliking being the loser. No, it goes so much further than that.

Take, for example, family game nights at my childhood home. There I was, Sunday evening after Sunday evening, storming off in a fit of rage after playing Uno-Rummy Up and losing to my sister.

Screaming, tears, red-faced frustration, the whole bit.

Naturally, my dislike for losing extended (and still extends) to video games. I was never a fan of games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros., or anything that required trying to beat some sort of boss. As a kid, I was much more of a SimCity 2000 kind of girl, especially with all the cheats in hand that I could find. (This, of course, ended up extending to The Sims, where I would live out magical fantasies for my Sims who didn't have to work since I graciously gave them one million Simoleans to live off of.) I also liked playing Donkey Kong's 1-3, but only the first couple of levels that I'd mastered. By the time I'd hit Mine Cart Carnage, I was a goner.

Anyhoo, back in the days of SuperNES (yeah, remember that?), I was a big fan of MarioKart. I always lost anyway, but for some reason it didn't bother me in that game. I was always jealous of friends who had the game on N64 when it came out, because I was not only still playing on SuperNES, but since my parents hadn't bought the game for me and my sister, we were still renting it whenever we could at the video store.

So, MarioKart has always been my favourite video game excepting the whole Sim-bit. So I love playing it when I go to Allgäu. Especially on the internet with those losers who are still playing it after umpteen years and have about 9000 points to their Mii's name. Losing (possibly partially because I still insist on playing Peach, though I've recently been testing out Toadette) still doesn't really faze me, and I've started to accept Rainbow Road as a beautiful thing rather than the subject of my (Mii's) demise.

But, yeah... My point about being old. On one particularly drunken evening, we decided to pull out N64 for a go on MarioKart.

WTF.

How in the world did we (as humans) play with graphics like that?! How in the world was this some sort of awesome step-up that was state-of-the-art in comparison to SuperNES ?!

As if Peach's "here we gooooo" wasn't enough to drive one silly, the graphics are ridiculous. In the back of my tipsy mind, I thought that there could perhaps be a problem with my vision, and the game was just as amazing as it was in my pre-teen memory. So, I tried again the next day in a more sober state of mind.

Alas, the graphics are just crap.

(In Nintendo's defence, it was 1996, after all. You know... Like before Titanic even came out the first time in theatres?)

Then I started thinking about other technologies I grew up with.

• I learned DOS to operate my family's first computer.
• The best thing about WordPerfect was getting to print out things on that paper you had to tear the sides off of.
• S., T. and I used to sit on dial-up forever so we could go in the official Hanson chat room. (Don't you judge! I hear you judging!)
• We used to play The Oregon Trail at school and save our progress from Number Munchers on a floppy.
• I used to love playing Dr. Mario on NES. Yeah. NES.
• We were using ICQ loooong before MSN even came along.
• My first laptop was bigger than most PCs, and definitely just as heavy.
• Back in high school, we used Nexopia and not Facebook. (Well, actually we used Enternexus. And who knew that the site was Canadian? Ahhh, maybe that had something to do with it?)
• And the list goes on...

I suppose it's worse for people who grew up without computers. Nevertheless, it's been interesting to go from my Motorola peanut phone, to wondering who the heck would text in the first place since "It's faster just to call", to wondering who the heck would need internet on their phone, to sleeping with my Blackberry.

Seeing the graphics on N64 made this rather clear to me, believe it or not. Otherwise, I've just been living in some sort of technology bubble without thinking how this all happened.

Anyhoo, not really any point to this all, except that I feel like a technology dinosaur. Also, I am torn between wanting to stick with MarioKart on Wii or better for the rest of my life and trying to get hold of a SuperNES copy to see how bad it really was.