MX Rewrite

My little brother's birthday is in a couple of days and I have the perfect gift for him.

I'm being serious here, I really do have the perfect gift for him and I know without a doubt that as soon as he sees it he's gonna love it. For the last month I've been doing my homework (as shocking as that might be to my mother) and I figured out that my brother is a major Mario fanatic. Of course I've seen him spend all that time on that DS of his but it wasn't until recently that I took a peek over his shoulder and saw what he was playing. Since then whenever the opportunity presents itself I ask him a couple of questions about what Mario games he plays, why he likes them, what's his favorite character etcetera etcetera and in all of those conversations I've had with him a little nugget of information popped up: a new Mario game on the DS just came out and he's dying to play it! He told me the game's name, what it's about, even showed me a couple of trailers and videos of people playing the game. He seems to know absolutely everything there is about the game in spite of the fact that he's never actually played it.

This little interaction (obviously) made it clear that he'd absolutely love receiving the game for his birthday but there's one issue: my family isn't exactly the richest out there. We live in the South so it's not as though we have to skip meals but the amount of money my father brings in makes it difficult for anybody in our family to buy anything new, especially if it relates to modern technology. Heck, the only reason why my family was able to get my brother a DS was because my mom came across one dirt cheap at a yard sale, being bundled with all those "Super Mario Advance" games he plays everyday.

That's why I, using the small amounts of brain thinking powers I've got, came up with a truly brilliant idea: stealing!

Now I don't mean going to a store and taking an actual copy of the game, just pirating the thing so that my brother can play it. It's way cheaper to do (all I need is a flash cart and I can get one of those for a couple of bucks) and as a bonus it feels more "personal" than merely going to a store and buying the game so my parents would probably like that as well. I asked my friend Quincy, being the big computer nerd that he is, if he could help me with this and he happily obliged.

Over the course of a couple of days, hanging out at Quincy's house after-school, we were finally able to finish it. Sure there was a lot of goofing off in between all of that, hence why we took so long, but hey we completed the project, or at the very least I think we did. With how often my brother uses his DS I was only able to use his for a bit just to see if the game would boot - it did - so I can only assume that the rest of it works.

Still though, that's just the risk you take when you download a game from an extremely questionable site with an unholy amount of pornographic pop-ups. Ignoring all that, I think that my little brother’s gonna love my gift. I even used my very small knowledge of arts-and-crafts to make a semi-decent sticker for the cartridge so it's kinda like the real thing. Only thing I have to do now is wrap the gift but that's incredibly easy to do so from here it's smooth sailing. At this point I'm just waiting to present it to him at his birthday party. Even now I can feel how big of a smile he's gonna have when he sees what I got him.

Happy Birthday, Lucas! I hope you enjoy my present.