My 25-year love affair

Like millions of others, I've been playing Mario and Zelda games for most of my life. As a innovation journalist, I've been accused of being either an Apple fanboy or a secret employee of Microsoft, depending on the article. To tell the truth, I am neither. I am a Nintendo fanboy, entirely devoted to the products of my favorite company since the mid-to-late-1980s. And during there are other great video game series on Nintendo and other platforms, I say with the certainty of semi-rational subjectivity that Mario and Zelda are the two greatest, end of story.

While Mario, at its best, is pure fun, and thoroughly nothing else, Zelda with its temples and puzzles is more like life: extreme frustration mixed with moments of awesomeness and an absurd sense of achievement. In 25 years, neither series has changed its basic premise. What's impressive is they give players the same feeling during pushing the bounds of new innovation. From 1985's side-scrolling, pixelated adventure, Mario now runs and jumps through 3D environments courtesy of Nintendo's innovative 3DS system. And 25 years afterwards kids controlled Link from the top-down perspective, like in a board game, the little guy in the green tunic now swings his sword not with the push of a button nevertheless with the swing of the player's hand through the wonders of motion control gaming.

Senior IT Reporter at Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin is a Senior IT Reporter at Ars Technica. Formerly, he wrote about Microsoft, Google, browsers, operating systems, smartphones, cloud computing, virtualization and a whole lot of other tech stuff for Network World. Follow him on Twitter @jbrodkin.

Are you frustrated with trying to eliminate admin rights and, together, allow end-users to run all required Windows' application, processes and ActiveX controls? We've got the quick fix... and that fix just got even better!

At-a-glance

InterMapper provides an at-a-glance, real-time view of your network devices, services, applications, connections, and traffic patterns. Drilling down on maps and charts uncovers details needed to fix performance problems and keep mission-critical networks up to service level requirements.