Dear Nintendo My Life is a Goddamn Mess Part II

Welcome back, 1-900-HOTDOG readers! We now rejoin my responses to Nintendo Power’s reader mail responses already in progress.

Oh, here’s a fun letter sent to Nintendo Power from a Wisconsin boy named Joe Harrison who lost his home to a stove fire!

When your job is working in a Nintendo building with Nintendo employees on a Nintendo magazine reading letters sent to you from Nintendo fans, I imagine it’s hard to maintain perspective on the importance of Nintendo. But when you get a letter from a little boy who refers to a burnt Super NES as the “death of a family member,” you shouldn’t think, “Yes, of course an affordable piece of consumer electronics is exactly this important; praise Father Mario, The Tanooki-Suited.”

If you sent this letter to the child who assembled that Super NES, whose fingers would have been removed and mailed COD to their parents if they misaligned a Game Pak contact, they would have said, “Kid, take it easy. It’s just a Nintendo.” 

Joe praises and thanks God for not forsaking two of his games, and “Hala Luya” for He was listening when Actraiser called His name from the flames. I’m not super religious, so maybe it’s normal to thank the thing you worship for destroying only your copy of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball and your home. But at the end of the letter, Joe asks the game enthusiast magazine, “do you think that my Super Nintendo and games went to heaven? I hope so.” This is sadder and dumber than a human should be capable of being. This is what you would get if you asked a brilliant writer to work backwards from the prompt, “The one question that would make Jesus Himself tell you to fuck off.”

The editorial staff at Nintendo Power would sometimes try to bend the Player’s Pulse section to its will by asking for specific types of letters. Here they asked readers to send in wacky humiliations they would endure to get a Super NES, and oh boy did they disappoint! Jamie Overstreet from Mobile said he would, get this, dress up like a chicken and sing a royalty free song!? Ha ha ha, can you imagine!? I get there’s no reason for anyone to expect this part of the magazine to be good, but try to think of any single way this could be less entertaining. I wouldn’t give you a wet sack of used Billy Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball ashes for this idea, Jamie. I mean, someone had to have told Nintendo Power, “I’d kidnap children from the park until I found one whose parents had $199. Then I’d suck off the dad for 67 of those dollars and repeat the process two more times. Pilotwings looks fresh!”

As you can see from the other response, many readers had the same knee jerk idea of “silly costume + patriotic song” because we’ve apparently always known in our hearts that being American was one of the more embarrassing things a person can be. Nintendo Power probably received 7000 variations of these exact responses, but I like how revealing Jason Destroismaison from Tynsboro’s answer was. When he thought about what he’d do for a SNES, the first thing that popped into his head was “Wear my sister’s clothes WEAR MY SISTER’S CLOTHES AND LET FISH FUCK ME IN THE EARS! USA! USA! U!S!A!!!” I hope you got that Super Nintendo, Jason.

Let’s change things up from letters about things that might happen to letters about things that fucking absolutely didn’t happen:

So let me understand this situation, David Landers from Richmond. It was 2am and you were about to ritually drive over Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy with your 18 wheeler. And “this guy” runs up to you, at 2am, who recognizes exactly what you’re doing. And this guy spying on people in a truck stop parking lot had all the maps and secrets of Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy either memorized or with him. And then he sat there waiting, at 2am, for you to load up your save game and implement his strategies? David. Come on, David. Maybe your wife and Nintendo Power believe this excuse for why a strange man got into the cab of your truck at 2am, stayed there for half an hour, and then left a hero, but come on, David.

The less fun among you might be saying, “How do you know this is a lie? How do you know he has a wife?” Because duh and I found his obituary. He died 25 years after he told Nintendo Power this unlikely story and if his wife ever figured out what he really meant when he said he was “Heading out for some Final Fantasy Legend with the boys,” it was not brought up alongside his surviving family and final resting place.

I’ve mentioned this before, Nintendo Power, but you can just not print some of these letters. This idiot kid invented the idea of going door-to-door and asking for free money. In a state where people spend their days digging meat out of crabs and, maybe partly because of that, murdering. And Nintendo Power didn’t say, “Stop this, Nick. You idiot fuck.” They were like, “Giggle, you’re quite the card!” He might have done this. There’s a decent chance Nintendo Power killed Nick Fulton of Maryland. That may sound like a crazy thing for me to say; however, look at it like this: I am strongly against murder, but ask me again if there’s a knock on my door and it’s some asshole asking me to buy him a Nintendo game. He’ll probably be okay, but I walk away from that less against murder.

Okay, this entire concept has jumped the shark. Masando Jenson from Port Orchard wrote to Nintendo Power to tell them their envelopes taste like carrot juice, nothing else, and they printed it without a response. The Nintendo Power letters section just opens these windows into worlds where a lunatic might be somewhere in Washington sucking off envelopes like a Final Fantasy Legend expert in a truck stop men’s room. Who benefits from knowing this? What need, what fetish does it fulfill? If you lived in Sarasota, screamed “Bayou Billy” into a jar, and told Nintendo Power it had no effect on the mayonnaise would it have any less meaning? Could it help you understand what’s wrong with Masando, this monster searching for the tastiest glue? I don’t know if my mind can take another letter like this, so the rest of the article will be reviews of cakes sent in by readers.

Jason of Corfu, this looks like the last act of someone who died from being terrible at making cakes. “Happy Birthday, kid. It’s a lopsided Mario, but I didn’t have time to draw it all so you have to imagine that’s not a skeleton hand waving a dildo.”

Jason of Corfu, your friend’s mom decorates cakes so badly her ex husband brings it up during family court. And speaking of the law, if you asked a grocery store for a Mario cake and they made you this, they would legally have to sell it to you as dog food.

Happy 41st birthday, Phillip! Are you the cake being held by this 60-year-old sexual solicitation suspect?

You’ve lost control of your life, Phillip J. Vanover from Mesa, Arizona!

I hope you were ready for MORE BAKERY A C T I O N ! Joshua Blalack, named after me trying to explain which Joshua I’m talking about when the other one is white, celebrated in action with this soggy tangle of shapes. Hey, Joshua’s mom, when you’re making a novelty cake, how do you fuck up the rectangle part?

Happy birthday, Jose from Lufkin. Nice Street Fighter II cake you got. Fucking piece of shit looks like a courtroom sketch of Chun Li on trial for trafficking counterfeit cakes. This is a Fightin’ Spirit or World Heroes cake at best, two expertly selected references you can’t even look up because your cake was so dull you fell asleep swallowing it and choked to death.

Hey, Matt Smith of Dayton, did your mom bake this on the engine of a moving tractor? This looks like you’d cut it open and find old pets that went missing. It looks like something the President would use to call an airstrike in a Ghanaian action movie. Anyone who gets a cake like this should be proud their mother was able to overcome so many security measures meant to keep her out of her psychiatric hospital’s kitchen.

You really came close to making frantically smeared infant shit look like a Game Boy screen, Matt’s mom. Fun fact: this 2.0 score is out of a possible 150.5. This is an autopsy photo of a Game Boy corpse found in a swamp, Matt’s mom!

I was making fun of that kid earlier for asking if his fire-damaged Super Nintendo went to Heaven, but seeing Bread Boy makes me think there should be an afterlife where vengeful gods can punish game consoles for crimes against humanity. Giorgio and Daniele, your terrible baking has spawned a thing not bread nor boy, but an abomination violating the laws of both.