ESPN.com's Bill Simmons has a new podcast to go along with his Grantland.com project. The first episode features a discussion with Gus Ramsey about Madden NFL 12, an NFL video game that is being released tomorrow.
During the episode, Simmons briefly talks about Portland, as he often does, and uses a recent trip to the Rose City as a jumping off point to reminisce about the good old days, when video games weren't so complicated that they required nine buttons on a controller to operate.
-------------------------------
"When I was in Portland last Spring for a Blazers game, they have this old eighties, nineties arcade there that they have all these old video games. People go there and play, because Portland is kind of trapped in the early 1990s in general, so that fits in. I was playing NBA Jam, the first NBA Jam arcade game, which you and I have played many times. Fun to play. Simple. You just move the joystick around, there's two buttons, you're done. There's something to be said for that I think. There is a place somewhere in life for simple video games."
-------------------------------
The arcade Simmons makes reference to is Ground Kontrol.