Raise your hand if you owned an original, boxy, Nintendo Entertainment System.

Keep your hand raised if your system came with a Duck Hunt cartridge that didn’t have Super Mario Brothers on it.

And if you not only know who R.O.B. is, but he came with your original set purchase?

Can’t speak for the rest of you but my hand is getting numb. Honestly I get a kick out of the number of people who are learning who and what R.O.B. is from the newer games and never had the privilege of playing his games with him. Unfortunately he wasn’t utilized as well as he could have been, but I loved Gyromite and Stack Up as a kid.

I was seven when the Nintendo hit the market. I didn’t do much with it other than shoot ducks, and try and blow up that damned laughing dog. As I grew older I started to play with R.O.B. and found enjoyment in those games as well. But for me, gathering around the Nintendo was a family thing. I remember hours and hours lost as my mom, dad and I would take turns playing Rygar just so we could beat it. Yes, this was before the time of saving on the cartridge, like could later be done with Final Fantasy and Zelda. Rygar didn’t even have passwords.

But how many of you had the joy of playing the original Metroid? You know - the one that didn’t include the first person point of view of blowing up things. Do you remember Pit from Kid Icarus as anything other than a player character from the newest Smash Brothers game? These password games were wonderful, because you could save it and quit when you needed to, but heaven forbid if you miswrote a character. There was nothing I hated more as a kid than seeing the words “Password Incorrect” flash on the screen when I was working my way through Kid Icarus.

All is not lost, especially for those who have acquired a Wii, but for us poorer church mice there are options. You can relive your 8-bit life through sites like VNES and Nintendo 8 or utilize the new FireNES widget in FireFox. True, there’s nothing like holding a rectangular controller in your hands and pounding in the Konami Code when playing Contra, but it’s a close second.

Speaking of the Konami Code, you can use it on Google Reader. Just make sure that you enter it when you’re on the Reader’s homepage. You’ll be hijacked by a little ninja who makes all your feeds look like they have 30 entries.

As modern and wonderful as the gaming systems and computers are today, some days I would trade it all to go back to my 8-bit days and the memories therein.