Abs of Steel

...is what I'm gonna have if this cough lasts for much longer!  I tell yeah, there are certain advantages to getting the flu!

Speaking of steel, I got a free download for my Wii the other day.  Somewhere along the way, Nintendo decided to charge $5 to download their internet channel on the Wii.  But now they've changed their minds, made the download free again, and have given everyone who had to pay the $5 a rebate.  The rebate comes in the form of being allowed to download one classic NES game for free.  Naturally, I picked 'BLADES OF STEEL'.  Woo!  Nothing says 'Canadian childhood' like a good ol' button-mashing hockey game!

Blades of Steel, turns out, was a front runner in video game engineering in its day.  It was one of the very first games to use voice sampling - a real voice in the game.  Who, in their best commentator voice, hasn't mimicked 'BLADES OF STEEL' when turning on the game; or just when thinking about the game for that matter?  You're probably saying it right now!  I'm not sure anyone ever really understood what the commentator said when you passed the puck, but it was awesome anyway!  "It's a pass!", "With the pass", "What the puck"... ?

I remember playing this game for hours and hours as a kid - always letting my older cousin beat me of course.  But every once in awhile the actual hockey game would get a little dull, so we'd just skate our players around the ice and intentionally bash them into each other in hopes to start a fight.  What other hockey game rewards the winning fighter by carting the losing fighter off to the penalty box??  Pure gold!

If you'd like to relive a little bit of the Nintendo Entertainment System nostalgia for yourself, You can right HERE.  Yay for the internet - Bringing all our childhood dreams to reality!