A Writer Appears! Michael Enters the Fray!

Then again, couldn’t we all just be friends? Y’know, like Kirby and Ribbon over there? Or you could just give me chocolates, and we’ll call it a day. Mmm…chocolates.

Er, let’s start over. Michael Fletcher’s my name, and by the look of things I’m going to be writing here every now and then. Which is pretty sweet, considering I live for games of the video variety – especially if there’s a big “Nintendo” logo on their boxes. I grew up playing Mario, Mario, and more Mario, and admittedly a little Sonic the Hedgehog (ok, a lot of Sonic). That’s literally all I played as a youngster, and I missed out on a lot of great games at the time. Then came that fateful Christmas morning when I received my own Nintendo 64 and a copy of Banjo-Kazooie…and everything changed. I suddenly realized what games could be – their unlimited potential, and I realized I had missed out on years of valuable playtime (having devoted all of it to a hedgehog and a man with an aptitude for jumping). Since then, I’ve thankfully explored the massive backlog of Nintendo masterpieces and made up for lost time. In doing so, a burning passion for gaming grew inside me.

These weren’t casual ways to pass the time – they were epic tales of good vs. evil, light vs. darkness, plumber vs. turtles! And those characters, those captivating, diverse characters: an intergalactic bounty hunter with a gun for an arm; herds of egg-laying, multicolored dinosaurs who can carry you wherever you need to go; anthropomorphic animal mercenaries flying the coolest spaceships you’ve ever seen; a floaty, pink creampuff with an insatiable appetite and a black hole for a stomach; a green-clad hero wielding a mighty blade; a plumber with the finest moustache anyone could ever hope to see and which few could ever hope to possess – and that’s only a handful of them! To think that we, the players, get to be these characters. How lucky are we to be able to sit in the comfort of our own homes and embark on adventures the likes of which should only exist in our dreams? Slap a controller in our hands, and suddenly not even the sky is our limit. Save the princess! Find the Triforce! Escape a crumbling planet! Do a barrel roll! To escape reality for a few (or many, many more) glorious hours a week, and be something more than reality allows – that’s gaming.

And I love every second of it. I look forward to writing here and sharing my passion for Nintendo with you all. Live to play, play to live, and may the Triforce be with you all.

Name's Michael Fletcher. I'm a college graduate, and I earned a Bachelor's Degree in English with a focus on professional writing. Programming never clicked for me, so the only realistic way for this lad to make a career out of playing games is to write about 'em. Luckily, this is something I enjoy doing anyway. Live to play, play to live.