Introduction

This is basically a reply to Joel’s post about handheld gaming memories and it’s a topic that I think gets a bit too long winded to post on fedi, even with the pretty generous character allotment that we have there. I’ve always been mostly a handheld gaming person, we never had TV consoles, the TV was passive entertainment, and mostly something for the family to gather by while playing cards or doing crafts and stuff with the background noise going on in the background.

GameBoy Era

The gameboy was fun, and it was a companion that was with me a lot, the days of summer when it was warm outside we built pillow forts on the balcony and played Mario 6 golden coins and Wario-Land always having sets of batteries charging for the little things, the first I remember of the system as a whole was when we were visiting my aunt and we played tetris for hours over the link-cable, it was just so much fun.

Then came Pokémon red and blue and that took up a lot of our time, that was in the time when I wasn’t very good at reading english, and we slowly puzzled out what the different things meant, here we spent time with paper dictionaries and the pea soup screen of the game boy, my brother was blue, and I was red, we spent time trading pokemon, and we did manage to finish up my brother’s pokédex on a car trip to our family who lived two hours away, it was just fun for us, and I think my parents also where pretty happy to have some quiet while driving. We never had that many games for the gameboy, but I have vivid memories of most of them, it’s amazing how much they managed to get out of a thing with less calculating power than most graphing calculators now a days. Fun times.

Nintendo DS / PSP

I basically skipped the Gameboy color and Gameboy advanced generations, which I’ve been going back to in later years, but never really had much time of in the years later. I bought both my DS and PSP when I was serving in the army, and they were to follow me through my Army and University days, so this is the generation that really was with me on a lot of things. I had many evenings lying in my bunk bed in the barracks after long days and decompressing a bit.

When we went to the military tattoo in Halifax in Canada, they helped me get through my nervousness of flying, and some of the evenings where I didn’t felt like going out drinking beer with my comerades. In Canada was the first time I played puzzle quest on the PSP and I had so much fun tinkering with that both when we were in Halifax and later in Ottawa, although there were other things there that occupied more of my mind, being a youngish guy in a fun new place, after months of excercising, meeting new people.

Towards the end of my Military time was when I installed Custom Firmware on my PSP which opened a lot of possibilities, and in the beginning of my time at the Uni, me and one of the other students got r4 cards together, under the excuse that we would get to play games in japanese, we did some of that, but mostly that was mostly an excuse. It was great though, and since the DS was so easy to carry along, and this was the time that I started doing a lot of longer walks, I have so many memories of sitting in the shade under a tree just playing some games for a while, while listening to early 2000s emo and metal music and looking at people in the park.

Both of these also followed me to Japan when we went there to practice japanese, and we were living in these town houses facing each other in a small city, so we spent so much time drinking beer and cheap japanese whiskey playing Monster Hunter and Phantasy star portable, it was a great time, and we probably really didn’t do as much homework as we should have done.

Later I also remember having a lot of fun in Kobe playing pop’n’music, and tons of ds rpgs, I don’t remember what they were, most of them had long japanese names, and it was always the excuse that at least they were some kind of practice. The PSP was mostly my at home system, while the DS came with me when I was out, just the clamshell form of it made it so easy to slip in a pocket together with my mp3 player when I went outside. I had whole day rides out on my “mamachari” (grandma bike with basket) and when I felt a bit too winded or tired of riding taking a little break diving into another world, on a bench, under a tree, and forgetting the direction that I was asking the last konbini attendant for when trying to find my way back home probably cycling in circles around my goal.

3DS Era

And then we get close to the current time, I was with my ex-wife who always was kind of annoyed when I played games, but was begrudgingly okay with me playing together with our small one. So we spent some time with Tomodatchi Life and Mii-topia and me sneaking in some time with fantasy life while putting him to bed.

Later when we got apart, it was nice having the system that I hadn’t really played that much of to dive into to put my head off of lesser happy things. And my habit of taking it along on walks, and listening to music came back, just now with the 3DS and a smart-phone instead, funny how the story repeats itself, and it will again.

Switch + miyoo mini plus (the now times)

And then along came the switch, I was some year late to the party, and got a switch-lite, which has been with me for many years now, and it’s still is one that I do use quite often. Like the PSP always was for me, it is a stay at home system, one that I never really carry along creating vivid memories of the place and time around me. So there isn’t much here, for me the switch was always more about the games than about the situation around me. I still enjoy it a lot, it’s just too big and fragile for me to feel happy with taking it around with me.

And then Joel, the same one that wrote the post inspiring this one (yeah go and read it) convinced me to get an emulator system, and I went for the miyoo mini plus, I’ve had it for a bit over a year now, and it’s a great little system, loading it up with different oldish games, and small enough to be easy to carry along in a small bag to save it’s screen, it’s not quite the DS in practicality, but it gets close, and it’s really fun getting back into having a system that I can take along, sitting on a bench in a park playing, looking over at other people having the time. On a treestump in the forest with a majestic view in front of me. Or the times when I just want a little break from having to pretend that I’m a respectable and serious adult.

Conclusion

Handheld gaming systems have always been a big part of my life, especially the ones that are small, and easy to carry around, with a long battery life, so that I can just bring them along. They have always been a way to spend some time out, and some times they have gotten me to go out and enjoy the place around me more than I would otherwise have. They were a big part of me growing up, and still an important part of me. I really hope we get something like the DS again, a small hardy system, simple, but with so many fun games and experiments on it. With how the games industry is at the moment it’s something that is pretty hard to imagine, but a guy can dream right.