In a month, Americans will be asked to make a choice. The decision we make will not only affect the direction of our nation for the next four years or more, but will alter the very fabric of history we Americans sew into the great big metaphysical quilt of our heritage. Before the first Tuesday of November, we’ll have the opportunity to let our voices be heard. Many of us have already made up our minds. I have. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” instead of opting for Sony’s next-generation console, both of which share an Oct. 26 release date. I’m saving up for Nintendo’s Gamecube, due a year later. It’s partly because I’m not ready to spend $400 for a Playstation 2 and a few of the impressive 30-odd launch titles; it’s also because I’m a Nintendo loyalist. I have many fond memories of the countless hours I blissfully squandered on various Nintendo consoles. My brother and I were jealous of my cousin Chung-Kay’s Atari and pestered my dad endlessly until he caved in and got us a Nintendo. Embarrassingly, my initial reaction was, “Hey-this isn’t an Atari.” There’s nothing more magical than waking up bright and early on a Saturday morning, playing “The Legend of Zelda” all day and going back to sleep in the same clothes. On days like those, I never had to accomplish anything other than beating the sixth labyrinth and recovering the master sword from the northeast corner of the graveyard. I didn’t worry about much back then, although one time I had to get stitches after my demonic baby sister split my head open with a plastic crate for refusing to share the controller. My parents are still saving up for the exorcism. That incident aside, my gaming experiences were overwhelmingly positive. My dad could always outshoot me in Duck Hunt. I remember Ma Ma making radish cake and homemade apple-carrot juice as I fought those possessed trapdoors in “Final Fantasy II.” I first tasted “Zelda: A Link to the Past” in British Columbia. I banished Ganondorf in the “Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s” at my cousin’s house in Toledo. I perfected my game of “Tetris DX” last summer in Malaysia. Video games are more than just addictive ways of killing time. Each one is a part of me, and each represents a pane in the great stained glass window of my life. The games intimately remind me of the person I was at the time, all I was going through, and the dreamy, youthful peace and idealism I once had in this sometimes cold and lonely world. This is especially true of Zelda. Older generations can’t see the love that went into making these classic titles. In general, they tend to dismiss video games as shallow and devoid of artistic content. The binary nature of digital entertainment is often used as excuse to say it is cold and impersonal; that it is a crude and inappropriate way of properly describing the human experience. That may have been a fair argument against “Pong,” but today there is more sophistication and human emotion in computer-generated entertainment than ever. The original “Super Mario Brothers” was like The Jazz Singer – simplistic, but at the same time revolutionary in what it embodied – a taste of things to come. With the second generation of 3D video games systems such as the Gamecube, visionaries such as the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto will finally have the tools and raw computing muscle it needs to create a world without borders or boundaries. We will finally no longer have to judge a game by the fluidity of its framerate or the resolution of its textures, but simply as a vision. Whether that vision is youthful and imaginative like “Zelda” or mature and photo-realistic like “Metal Gear Solid 2,” it is entirely left to the director’s discretion. In the past, great video games had to transcend the sprites and polygons the games were made of to become something much greater. Now, there’s nothing holding it back. Oct. 26 is only the beginning of the bright future ahead of us. While I have an obvious bias, both Nintendo and Sony have a plethora of quality products coming out and you can’t lose either way. I’ve heard there’s also this Dreamcast thing, something called an X-Box, but Sega has yet to prove itself once the competition gets heated up. Microsoft can’t exactly buy out its competitors, withhold APIs or leverage its crappy OS this time around. As a person of limited funds, great faith and conviction in my heart, I’m sticking with Nintendo.