The mail bag in Nintendo Power (later given the official name of the Player's Pulse) was always a hodgepodge of goofy. Filled, if this page is to be believed, with boys whose names start with the letter A. Whether it was raps written by scrawny white kids (and there was more than one), letters to inform the general populace that someone's grandmother had picked up Super Mario Bros. and since become a "power playing granny," or just idle talk about what game they were currently playing, it seemed everyone just wanted a place where they could gush about their obsession with likeminded folk who wouldn't look at them funny. It makes you wonder exactly when the cynicism and irony comes into people's lives, because these kids are so overwhelmingly earnest.

NP's response to the SMB3 question is a little odd, I think. "Yeah, we've got Mario 3, but we don't really know if it's gonna be on the NES... We wanna get it out on the Playchoice 10 first, that's where the real money is."

Sorry if the words are slightly clipped on the edges of a couple of these pages, but they got the text really close to the spine this time. This is the first edition of the Nester Awards, voted on by readers of Nintendo Power. Nintendo's two big franchises dominate most of the awards, which isn't too surprising, but I'm not sure why the original Zelda was nominated for one category. If Zelda II was in everything else, why couldn't it have been nominated for challenge? Among the losers, Castlevania, Blaster Master, and Bionic Commando were nominated in almost every category and got squat. For Best Character, Link beat out Mega Man, Samus, Mario, Simon Belmont, Commando Joe from Bionic Commando, Kuros from Wizards & Warriors, Jason from Blaster Master, Master Higgins from Adventure Island, and Duke Togo from Golgo 13. I'd make some comment about Duke being an obscure choice, but it seems like everybody on the Internet played Golgo 13 as a kid except for me.

I think SMB2 won the Best Ending category mainly on the strength of it being one of the only NES games of the time to actually have an ending beyond "Congraturation! THANK YOU FOR BEST PLAY"

For as much as I could mock this, I think it's too sweet to be mean about it. Yes, I said sweet. Like I said, earnest -- perhaps even naive -- love for gaming was a hallmark of fan-produced content in Nintendo Power, and it would make me a crotchety old man who's forgotten what it was like to be a kid if I were to knock it down. Besides, I think this story serves as a good example of why kids play games. Not to waste time, or turn off their brains, or to luxuriate in violence, but to partake in adventures that they couldn't find in real life. And, perhaps, to give some lonely kids a friend. Of course, this is where the critics come in to say that considering a character in a video game as a "friend" is mentally unhealthy, but screw those guys.

Here's some slightly obscure trivia to bust out at your next Nintendo-themed cocktail party. The Jeffrey Scott Campbell pictured here, winning a game design contest in Nintendo Power at the age of 15, later went on to apply to a talent search ad in the back of an issue of the WILDC.A.T.S. comic book, which got him a job drawing comics and later led to him co-creating Gen 13 and Danger Girl. He now goes by the name J. Scott Campbell.

Just this past February, he was contacted by Nintendo Power to do a poster of Nintendo's iconic characters for their 200th issue. Nintendo.com has an interview with him where he discusses gaming, the poster, and his entry for Lockarm, "the ultimate video game."

So who says fans can't make something of themselves?