Christmas was pretty good this year. I got some cool stuff. But, for the 31st Christmas in a row, I didn't get a time machine. I'm not gonna lie -- it's a little disappointing. I don't know what I have to do to get Santa to bring me one. I mean, this year I gave the equivalent of like 4 bucks to a British beggar in London. That should count for something with the big guy in the red suit, even if the only reason I coughed up such a large charitable donation is that I couldn't tell a 10 pence coin from a 2 pound coin.That's Savannah over there when she dressed up like a native American for Halloween. She pulled it off well, because she's a freaking amazing human being.
One year, when I was seven, I thought for sure I was going to get a time machine. But instead I got an Atari 7800, which was kind of like a time machine I guess, except it didn't really actually help you time travel. But it did have lots of wires, like a time machine would probably have. It had some sweet games like Food Fight and Asteroids. I'm not trying to bag on contemporary video games or anything, but I don't think any video game on Earth today is more awesome than Combat was. Does anyone remember Combat? I just remember sitting around playing Combat with my friend Lewis for like six hours at a time until the sound of those stupid tank bullets bouncing off the walls was permanently seared into my brain. I can actually hear them bouncing right now, and I'm having a seizure. Mario Kart is fun for 45 minutes, but it can't touch Combat. I don't think anything can touch Combat, except maybe Double Dragon.
See, this is exactly why I want a time machine and why I might take a semester off school to build one. A lot of people would want to go back in time and do really lame stuff, like work out more or hit on the girl at Baskin Robbins they were too chicken to hit on back in 1990. Not me man. I just want to go back in time and stand stupidly at the Double Dragon machine at Fred Meyer's, pumping in quarter after quarter, trying to get past the jacked shirtless black guy at the end of level one. And then, when I ran out of quarters, I'd just get back in my time machine, come back to the present, withdraw 20 bucks from my bank account replete with student loans, and then go back to Fred Meyer's in 1988 and play Double Dragon some more. It's a pretty awesome plan, you have to admit.
Here's what would be doubly cool though: playing two player Double Dragon where you're player one -- you know, the guy in the blue sleeveless vest and pants -- and your younger self is player two! Psychedelic, man! It could totally happen, because if you went back in time it's not as if the younger you would just disappear. He'd still be kicking it in like 5th grade. So you'd walk up to yourself and say something like, "I'm from the future, and I'm a bad-A at video games." I don't know about the 5th grade you, but the 5th grade me would respond pretty positively to that kind of swagger. Especially if the me from the future coughed up a bunch of quarters from subsidized student loans to share with the 5th grade me.
Imagine how killer that would be -- two me's playing Double Dragon at Fred Meyer's. The world would probably just implode from the sheer force of the awesomeness of two me's beating the holy crap out of an arcade game in 1988. Man, pleeeze I want a time machine for Christmas next year.