The Simple Life

No, not the program, although I’ve always been partial to watching rich bitch 20-somethings learn a lesson or two on life! No, I’m talking about the joys of simplicity: no complication; no over exaggeration; just the pure necessity of a moment. In our lives today we are constantly falling victim to snags and hitches; life has a funny way of making things far more complicated than they have to be and it’s often dished out in the name of ‘progress’.

Engineering works on your train line so you have to get three buses instead. Your Internet Service Provider’s 20mb broadband that runs at 3mb at best (that one is definitely a pain in the @ss!). A game that should have been ground breaking but had too much of what I would call ‘gunf’ in. Life in the 21st Century is definitely guilty of sometimes trying too hard.

The point of my inane ramble is that life doesn’t have to be ten steps ahead to be good or better. Sometimes the best lesson you can learn in life is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Of course, progress comes whether we like it or not, and although we would still be knitting by candlelight if it wasn’t for the industrial revolution, this doesn’t mean that we always need to be jumping to the next level as quickly as we think we do.

Some 16 years ago I got my Super Nintendo. It was a marvellous day and I won’t bore you with the details, but the darling little thing still works like a charm! Back to present day and my current count of replacement Xbox 360s is up to four, and I nearly lost another on Saturday. While the joys of an Xbox 360 are obviously amazing in comparison to that 16bit chunky monkey, when looking at the scheme of the past 16 years and the vast technological improvements that have happened, can we really argue that we have already seen and done it all?

I was recently incredibly impressed with a little Italian plumber from the same era as my dusty SNES. Recently I, like many poor sods, succumbed to the seasonal flu that was going around and spent far too great a proportion of my time off from work, laying in bed rather than eating, drinking… and laying in bed out of choice! As part of my recuperation I delved into the world of the fairly recent New Super Mario Brothers Wii… and thank GOD for it!

Sometimes it takes a game like this to come along and make everyone sit back and go “You know what!? You don’t need all this fancy stuff on top to make an amazing game”. Those of you that have watched the awesome Hell’s Kitchen USA will know that Chef Ramsay doesn’t tolerate fancy crap on his dishes, and if Gordon ‘F*cking’ Ramsay won’t stand for it, why should I when it comes to gaming!?

New Super Mario managed to combine the feeling of nostalgia and all too memorable frustration that I used to feel when playing Mario titles over the years, and yet still held its own against games that many would call more advanced. I spent hour upon hour jumping between platforms, trying to collect power ups or hidden coins and revelled in every single second of it! I didn’t need a super charged laser gun, an array of abilities as long as my arm, or even an internet connection to get pure gaming pleasure from Mario and Co, but that’s just how it should be sometimes.

It is such a breath of fresh air (now I can actually breathe without coughing again) to see companies such as Nintendo being an advert for the simpler approach. Their console might not be as fancy as anyone else’s but they still know how to chuck out a corker and thank god that they do! It’s not all about bigger, better, more… quality will always speak for itself.

The simple life is always something to be treasured!