I’m a gamer. Always have been. Well, ever since Mom and Dad let me grip that Atari 2600 controller. Or did the trick to loading a floppy on the Commodore 64 come first?

LOAD “*”, 8, 1

If you know, you know

Regardless, games have been a part of my life from a very early age.

As alluded to above, I was born into the very early 8-bit age. Nintendo came out in my early childhood, and while I never had one of my own [until I was an adult] I got plenty of playtime on it at friends’ houses. The memories are fond, but limited since one wasn’t in our house. I have memories of a lot of great PC games from the era, but mostly titles nobody would know of.

In the early 90s, we received a Super Nintendo for Christmas! I don’t think we were early adopters and ultimately had only a limited number of games, but I loved those games so much. It’s funny how now we know the games we should have been playing, but with limited resources back then you’d often go to the store and buy something that was straight up bad. That doesn’t happen anymore, fortunately. I consider myself a 16-bit kid.

Other systems came and went over the years. I was big into the first two Playstations, did a lot of PC gaming (even created one of the more popular demo download and review sites on the web!), went to the Xbox realm, and then mobile. I played far too much Counter-Strike in college and the first person shooter interest has never really gone away, although it has waned as my time is limited and I’m just not as good as I used to be. I had a Wii at some point, a Dreamcast that I regret getting rid of, and I’m sure a few other systems lost to the fuzziness of my memory.

PC gaming faded as I became a Mac user, but that was right around the time mobile gaming picked up so I’ve played all the popular iOS stuff. I still Xbox, but have been feeling nostalgic and that’s where this post is really going.

I learned a lot from gaming. My affinity with programming stemmed from “building” games in some absolutely horrible technologies (Hypercard), my Jeopardy knowledge is a bit ridiculous – weapons, history, Latin, sports. I want my girls to have that same experience, but I don’t want them to start with the modern experience, which in my opinion is absolute trash (Roblox and Fortnite). I want them to have that same experience. So I dug out my old stuff.

My Old Stuff

Around the age of 20 I picked up an NES and I still had my childhood SNES. Both took a bit of internal work, cleaning, and new cables, but they’re now up and running. The NES could stand to have its power capacitors replaced, but switching to a DC power supply masks that problem well, and Amazon has such power supplies that provide power to it and the NES with a single brick. Win!

I have a good number of games for each system, but not necessarily the ones I feel I need to play. So I got to searching. What shocked me first was how expensive games have become! It feels like a bubble, but there’s no way I’m paying $100s for any title. I’m not a collector, I’m a player. In come the flash drive cartridges! For $20-$100 you can have every title ever made for a system. I went ahead and bought one for each of the three systems, have been able to box and put away all my real cartridges, and never have to deal with wiggling things to get them to start properly again since they simply stay inserted. I did a fair amount of research so if you want to buy any of these, go with the items I bought from these exact sellers (every detail matters lest you not get the perfect thing): NES | SNES | N64

I also needed something to play them on. You can’t simply plug a 40 year old console into your flat screen. a) it doesn’t have the right connectors, b) if you do simply convert to a proper converter it will look terrible and have input lag. There are some relatively expensive options for converting the video signal, but part of the joy of retro gaming to me is the feel I had as a kid. That involved bulky CRTs. You know, the ones you couldn’t give away 25 years ago. They’re relatively hard to find now because nobody is making them and nice ones go for many hundreds of dollars (thousands if you want to get crazy). They are otherwise ideal because they have the correct inputs and the they are the technology intended for these games; they technically work better. I’m not too picky so I put a feeler out on the local message board and came away with three TVs for free. One had a good picture, but cosmetic damage so I gave it to another gamer in need. The one I’m currently using is cosmetically great, but has some image issues. The third I do not yet have, but it is a large nice Sony. I’m hoping it isn’t too large as it could be the perfect thing long-term.

Anyway, the discerning reading may have noted me having NES and SNES, but then dropped “three systems” above. When I put my feeler out for free TVs, a friend said she was just about to donate her kids’ Nintendo 64 and offered to me. YES! Of course I needed one to round out the early Nintendo setup. This system I mostly missed as a busy high schooler. I played an epic amount of Goldeneye at friends’ house, but there are some Top 20 titles on the system I’ve never even seen.

Untethered

The physical setup is great and perfect for the girls, but I really have limited time or back strength to sit down on the floor and really get into anything. I will have to eventually because the N64 is a pretty unique system in that it doesn’t work off the original hardware very well.

So I wanted something I could move around with. After an insane amount of research I ended up dropping $50 on a TrimUI Brick off of Aliexpress. In hindsight, I should have spent less time, bought a few options and resold the ones I didn’t care for. Time is money! I digress.

The Brick looks like an original Gameboy. It is actually a good bit smaller, has amenities such as wifi and Bluetooth (when they work – you get what you pay for), has a segment topping 4″ HD screen, has shoulder buttons for compatibility, and runs a pretty crappy Linux operating system, which is good enough. Mine came with a memory card that contained tons of games (too many) and was formatted for Linux so unfortunately I couldn’t really do much modification of it. Over the course of a night, I built my own SD card with the Tiny Best Set Go romset (package of games) trimmed down to things prior to CD-based games, made some UI tweaks, and have been rocking this thing happily ever since.

What to play?

The million dollar question. I know all games and know what I’ve missed. I’ve also always tracked my list of complete games on the site, but I never tracked what I wanted to play very well.

With the help of Google and perusing a bunch of lists and sites, I’ve filled out a backlog and also entered most of my completed games into a tool called Backloggd.

What next?

I’ve put together a good list of games for the girls at their current age. The list is pretty short as it needs to be things without violence or timers. Open ended and low pressure were not exactly characteristics of early games, but they exist. So far they’ve gotten about 15 minutes per week and I’ve no plans to exceed that; I really like keeping it as something special. It is amazing seeing them be perfectly happy progressing absolutely nowhere and exploring nothing. It is truly special when they do figure something out and they’re so proud of themselves.

For me? Every system kind of fills its own niche.

Portable

I’ve never played a Pokemon game. Internet consensus was Emerald for Gameboy Advance is the best place to start. Over the holidays I completed that and have no desire to play another. It was good, but I can’t imagine things change very much across titles. r/SBCGaming has a game of the month, which is a fun idea. Metroids rank very high on my list of things I’ve not played, but want to. January 2025? Metroid Fusion. Working my way through it.

I’m also always dabbling with something on my iPad or iPhone. At present, I’ve almost completed Monument Valley.

Original Hardware (NES/SNES/N64)

Not playing anything at this time.

XBOX

AAA titles here, but there’s also plenty of retro stuff available and I can play on the couch, which is nice. I have a number of big titles I need to work through and just completed Diablo 4. I don’t know what’s next, but that does free me to get back to the original Castlevania, which is an exercise in frustration that I needed a short break from. This is scratching the retro itch so that’s why I’m not doing anything on the real hardware. These very old games really on some pretty tricky bullshit and patterns that take a lot of mental energy – it’s how they made games take a long time with limited resources; just make them ridiculously hard and bullshitty!

And Beyond

I’ll continue working through my backlog, which is just under 100 titles. That will take a long time and will be added to, but I’m motivated and organized so I’m confident I’ll begin making progress.

I’ll eventually also get a more capable handheld as mine is pretty limited. Anything requiring thumbsticks (1996 and beyond) doesn’t work on it, but I’ve got some time before I feel I need anything supporting that.

For the girls? As long as I keep them away from the modern garbage I suspect they’ll be very happy with what they have for years to come.