Which returns us to one of the recurring images of the NES, death. Which I, of course, dutifully listened to for half an hour straight. In this regard, there is perhaps no game, in my world, quite as iconic as Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball, in that as soon as I pick what field I want to play my simulated game of softball on, the game crashes to black and emits a continual tone. The NES is never quite so iconic as when it is not working, hence the universal recognition that taking a non-functioning piece of electronics and blowing in it is a valid method of repair. In the context of a system crash, the existence of this tone adds stress to the already tense moment of Heideggarian recognition of object-as-thing. This unchanging tone is profoundly unnatural - regardless of what tone it happens to be. Absent the system altering the sound waves to produce music, the system would simply emit a single unchanging tone until it was turned off or reset. See, when the NES crashed, it would often freeze in a state where it was emitting sound. This is particularly true in terms of the music. The digital nature of the game's corporeal embodiment is also responsible for making the technological limitations of the game an integral part of the death process.
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