One last GameStop story, then I’ll move on. The Xbox that I spent my final night in New York with wasn’t my first Xbox. My first Xbox came from the GameStop store in Hoboken, New Jersey. According to Google Maps, the store is still there, on Washington Street, in case you’re ever in the neighborhood. I had been dating a girl who lived in Hoboken when the original Xbox debuted in 2001. She lived in a tiny rent-controlled apartment that her dead grandmother had once lived in. She had inherited–or rather “inherited”–the apartment through some kind of illegal real estate transaction after her grandmother had died. The rent was a pittance–$300 or $400 a month. Everyone in the building was practically a thousand years old. No one in his right mind ever gave up those apartments. Instead, they’d been handed down through multiple generations via suspect real estate transactions.

Whenever I’d visit her, taking the PATH train underneath the Hudson River after leaving my terrible job in midtown Manhattan, I’d stop at the Washington Street GameStop and peruse the latest gaming wares. Back then I was still a civilian, dabbling on the edges of the industry, writing freebie reviews for a couple of different websites. Of course, I had to do what civilians did: I saved my money for a few weeks, traded in a handful of used games, and cobbled together enough to purchase an Xbox.

I remember being struck by how heavy the damn thing was. Carrying it home, back underneath the Hudson, then to my apartment on 106th Street, was no small task. The Xbox and I did not get off to a good start. I’d load up Halo, playing it on my 19-inch CRT TV–the world of affordable high-definition televisions was still a good five, six years off–only to be given the following message from the Xbox: “There is a problem with the disc you are using. It may be dirty or scratched.”

This did not happen every time I played Halo, but it happened often enough to raise my blood pressure several points. Malfunctioning electronic devices, from the time I was a kid, have always induced vast amounts of anxiety in me. I remember a digital watch that I received for Christmas one year. After a few days, it stopped telling the correct time. A few days later, some of the LED lights on the digital display had burned out. I recall riding the afternoon school bus home, staring at the watch on my 10-year-old wrist, watching it basically fall apart before my eyes–I wouldn’t have been surprised if a spring suddenly poked from the side with a “boi-oi-oing!” sound–and feeling like the world was practically ending around me. For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, I felt personally responsible for the well-being of the watch. It was somehow my fault that it wasn’t working properly. And, 20 years later, as absurd as it sounds, I felt personally responsible for the Xbox.

Each time I’d pop the disc out and inspect it for dirt of damage. And each time I’d see nothing except my distorted face reflected back at me. Then I’d put the disc back in and wait.

Sometimes the game would play.

Sometimes I’d get another dirty disc error.

At the time, my life wasn’t moving in any sort of direction that appealed to me. Nothing was going my way. My job, as I mentioned, was perfectly awful. I had student loans that I’d neglected for years and that were starting to haunt me in very real ways. A series of medical woes–a story for another time–were ongoing. My credit card debt had ballooned to epic proportions. And things with my Hoboken girlfriend were, after almost two years, starting to unravel. A moody, malfunctioning Xbox–a purchase that I obviously couldn’t afford at the time, and which was, I had hoped, going to give me some much-needed escapism–was the last thing I needed.

I put up with this dirty disc horse s*** for a few more weeks, feeling powerless and at the mercy of Microsoft. I did some investigating online, and learned that I was not the only one suffering with dirty disc errors: thousands of other Xbox owners were as well. It was, angry gamers speculated, the result of a cheap disc drive that Microsoft had installed in a series of first generation Xboxes in order to cut corners. Microsoft, of course, would not publicly admit to any wrongdoing on its part, a fact which only made me–and the other angry gamers–despise Microsoft even more.

I began reading long, ridiculously detailed forum posts describing ways to repair the faulty drive. One night I was shopping for the necessary tools in Radio Shack to make the repairs when it suddenly occurred to me that there was another way for me to go about this. GameStop gave store credit for used game consoles. All I had to do was take the Xbox into a GameStop and get them to buy it back from me. Then, I could take the store credit to another GameStop, and buy another Xbox.

I went back to my apartment and immediately boxed everything up. No, this wasn’t ethical. But I didn’t care. The way I saw it, the only way to respond to being screwed like this–and that’s how I felt: screwed–was to return the favor.

Stage 6-5. Today’s stage introduces us to a new enemy: the Super Cannon. In previous levels, we’ve encountered a type of cannon that could be described as “plain,” and “old,” and that wouldn’t look out of place in a Civil War museum. The Super Cannon is more versatile and modern-looking than the Old-Time Cannon. Super Cannon, for example, can shoot at three different angles: horizontal first, diagonal second, and vertical third (always in that order). And its cannon balls pulse with fury–even in black and white on the Game Boy screen–as opposed to Old-Time Cannons cannonballs, which looked like clumps of dirt that a hillbilly was throwing at you.

The stage is basically a tower that pans vertically across two full gameplay screens. At the top is the key. At the bottom is you. In between: tiers of Super Cannons. The object here, of course, is to keep moving, keep climbing until you’ve reached the key. Then, once you have the key, you must turn around and do some skillful falling back to the bottom, where Pauline’s exit door is. And yes, I promise to never use the phrase “Pauline’s exit door” again. I’m not OK with it, either.

Pro Tip: Ducking allows horizontal cannon fire to sail clear over your head. So duck often in this stage. Another Pro Tip: Be patience during your ascent. The handful of times that I died this morning were due to the fact that I could not, as my first grade teacher would say, hold my horses. (R.I.P., Ms. Presley.) Hold your horses here, and you’ll be fine.

One more thing: the ladders in this stage extend and retract every few seconds, which I believe means that they are haunted. Be careful not to get caught on a ladder when a diagonally-moving bit of cannon fire is heading in your direction. That’s a terrible spot to be in.

Overall, this isn’t the most challenging stage in the game. The key is to keep an eye on all corners of the screen for any incoming cannon fire. That s*** comes at you from all angles. Noting the trajectory of the cannon fire, then stepping aside and letting all of it whisk past you–fwoom, fwoom, fwoom–is incredibly gratifying. There’s also something weirdly satisfying in the way that this level forces you to focus less on Mario’s progress, and more on the edges of the screen. It’s more about the big picture here, literally, than the previous stages have been.

Once you’ve arrived at Pauline’s door, pop in the key–boy, everything I type sounds dirty this morning–then enjoy the majestic “This Stage Is Over (It’s Really Over)” theme music. Treat yourself to a hot cocoa. You’ve earned it.