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GoNintendo 'End of Day' thought - Week of Nintendo Love with GameXplain's Andre Segers

by rawmeatcowboy
11 December 2013
GN Version 4.0


Seems like you guys really enjoyed the feature from yesterday. I'm very happy to bring part 2, featuring a close friend of the site. See you in a few, short hours!


Very happy to see that you guys liked the start of our 'Week of Nintendo Love' feature! We have people lined up for the entire week, and today brings us our second feature. This time around we have Andre Segers, the brains behind GameXplain. Obviously, we feature a lot of their content here, so it's our pleasure to have Andre drop in and share some of his Nintendo fondness with us all!


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The following comes from GameXplain's Andre Segers.


I realize this may come as a bit of a shock to some of you...but I’m a pretty big Nintendo fan.

I mean, Nintendo’s been a part of my life basically since I was born--the NES and I do share a birth year after all. So singling out just one experience from the myriad that Nintendo’s provided me with is sort of like choosing your first starter Pokemon (hey, I told you the Nintendo-love runs deep!)

Okay, so Nintendo’s a big part of my life--we covered that. But it was never really a part of my parents’ life. Sure, they had played Pac-Man back in the day, but modern games were well beyond them. And that gulf only widened as games and their input devices grew more advanced. So though my parents fully supported my interests, they were never interested in my interest.

Then something strange happened. My Dad came home from work one day and took a seat as I was battling El Gigante in Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube. But here’s the weird part: he didn't move from his chair. After confirming he wasn't dead, we ventured deeper into the game. Hours melted into days, and days into weeks, as my dad continued to join me, night after night. It got to the point where he wouldn't allow me to play until he got home from work and could watch--he was hooked. Hell, he would even point out things in the game that I had missed. It was legitimately one of the best “co-op” experiences I’ve had.

But though he enjoyed watching me play it, he unfortunately knew he’d never be able to play it himself. Too many buttons and “stick things.”

Fast forward to 2006. The Wii had just came out and I took it home for the Holidays, hoping its simplicity might be enough to engage my parents. Well, I was right--both of my parents (emphases on "both") had a blast taking turns rolling swinging the controller at virtual golf balls and knocking down virtual pins. It was something I hadn’t seen before: my parents enjoying a video game--that we were all playing together, no less! It was dumbfounding. And they enjoyed it so much, then even bought a Wii of their own.

But Wii Sports is one thing, Resident Evil 4 is another. And I knew, even with his new-found motor-controls, that Resident Evil 4 was still well beyond my dad’s grasp.

That is until it was re-released for the Wii. Instead of aiming a laser sight with presses of an analog stick, you now merely pointed the controller at what you wanted to shoot, swing the controller to slash the knife, and reload with a flick of the wrist. In short, it was dad-proof, or so I hoped.

So when I returned home that Thanksgiving, I made sure to pack my copy of Resident Evil 4: Wii edition. Thinking that the simplified controls would offer my father a more intuitive means of control, I was eager to see how well he took to it.

We started off with a few basic lessons--things you and I take for granted were completely foreign to my father. Sort of like if you were thrown into a plane’s cockpit and instructed only to "not die." It was awkward, to put it kindly. I had him run back and forth, swing the knife, aim the gun, you know, typical game things. To say he was clumsy would be an understatement, but he was having fun. By the time I had to head back home, he even managed to finish a chapter or two, and I of course left the game with him to play at his leisure.

So imagine my surprise when I found out just a couple of weeks later that he--miraculously--managed to finish the game. All by himself! This is a man who hadn’t played a videogame outside of Wii Sports since Pac-Man, and he completed what is probably one of the most “hardcore” games of its time. It was remarkable.

I’m not going to sit here and say something disgustingly sweet like Nintendo brought my family closer together. It didn’t (thankfully, we’ve always been a very close family!). But their “revolutionary” system did allow us to mutually share in an activity that was once something only I could enjoy. And not only that, but allowed my dad to play what is widely considered to be one of the games games ever made. And that’s pretty damn cool.

Oh, and if you’re curious, my Dad not only still plays Resident Evil 4 to this day--on Pro mode no less (and is far better at it than me!)--but he’s grown rather attached to the Professor Layton series as well. Yeah, it may not be quite as “hardcore” as Resident Evil 4, but it’s still a video game, and that fact alone still amazes me to this day.