Skippy B. Coyote

This most recent generation was the first console generation since the Genesis/SNES generation that I didn't have any interest in owning a home console from it and never ended up buying one. I enjoyed both the Wii and Xbox 360 last generation, but none of the home consoles this time around interest me. The PS4 and Xbox One are pretty much identical in terms of game libraries and annoyances like online accounts, software updates, DLC, etc. and I really dislike the enormous controller on Nintendo's home console offering this generation. That all said, I still think the 3DS is really neat and have every intention of buying a New 3DS if Nintendo ever releases the smaller regular sized version in black (or any color other than white really) in North America.

Ineligible Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized (Nintendo DS) - 24 minutes Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 241 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 264 minutes Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (Nintendo DS) - 189 minutes Arcade Centipede - 26 minutes Donkey Kong - 6 minutes Frogger - 8 minutes Lady Bug - 7 minutes Millipede - 12 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 27 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (Speed-Up Version) - 8 minutes Pac-Man - 5 minutes Shao-Lin's Road - 10 minutes Super Breakout - 15 minutes 1942 - 9 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 92 minutes Total Play Time This Week 943 minutes (15 hours 43 minutes) [225 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS: 718 minutes Arcade: 133 minutes Game Boy Color: 92 minutes It was another really good week for gaming around here, with lots of time logged on the misses' DSi XL by both she and I, and a fair bit of tracker eligible playtime logged to boot! I finished up and beat the Rebirth mode in Resident Evil DS with Jill, played quite a bit of Clubhouse Games (and a few minutes of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized) on the bus, and my better half is still making her way through The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I think she's about 3/4 of the way done with the game at this point. In terms of eligible playtime, my wife and I both sat down in front of the multicade and took turns playing a variety of arcade games over the weekend. It had been a while since I spent any serious amount of time playing arcade games so I had forgotten just how frazzled I always end up feeling after long play sessions of them. Don't get me wrong, I still love arcade games in general (Centipede and Ms. Pac-Man especially), but I think I'm starting to get old enough that my brain just can't handle the high-speed, frenetic, twitchy gameplay of arcade games for more than a few minutes at a time without leaving me feeling exhausted afterwards. That said, I did manage to top my previous high score in Centipede with a new score of 64,848 and I had an absolutely awesome time doing it. The misses beat one of her previous high scores too, setting the new household record of 623 in the Cavity mode of Super Breakout. Lastly, just to round things out, I got in two games of Monopoly on the Game Boy Color this week and had just as much fun as ever playing it. Next week I expect to be logging a whole ton more time on the Nintendo DS, since I finally managed to snag a new in box authentic crimson colored DS Lite on eBay last night and it should arrive in the mail later this week. As soon as it shows up I can stop borrowing my wife's DSi XL all the time since I'll finally have a DS system of my own to play (which I'm sure she'll be grateful for lol), and the first game I'm going to play through on it will be the copy of Okamiden that I've had sitting on the DS game shelf for the past month or so; just waiting for me to get my own DS to play it on.

Monopoly (Game Boy Color) Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (Nintendo DS) Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS)

I'm in the same boat, but... If a homebrew publisher ever releases Battlezone with a snazzy green overlay I may not be able to resist the temptation to add a Vectrex to my gaming center.

If you're willing to spend $1,000 on a TV for other hobbies (watching television shows/movies and playing modern games) and you still enjoy retro games then why not invest $20 or $30 in a TV to play your retro games on? You can find really nice CRT TVs like Sony Trinitrons on Craigslist for super cheap and all your pre-HD era games will look great on them. A 20" CRT TV doesn't take up much space and will be light enough to pick up and carry yourself, so why not make a little room in your entertainment center for one and continue enjoying your hobby?

A good point indeed! The Game Boy line of systems all have huge libraries of great games, and most of them are dirt cheap to collect these days. While classic Nintendo home consoles have all gotten fairly pricey to collect for, the Game Boy/Color/Advance lineup are still very affordable and feature a very large selection of excellent titles in all kinds of genres. The DS Lite was my top pick for handheld collecting as it plays DS and GBA games, but a Game Boy Advance SP (preferably an AGS-101 backlit model) would be a wonderful choice too since it will play almost all original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games. The GameCube's Game Boy Player add-on is another great option that offers the same functionality if you'd rather plunk down in front of a TV to play games than play them on a handheld.

This is such a difficult question to answer because it's a really subjective sort of thing. The best systems to collect for are usually going to be the one that the person doing the collecting has a personal attachment to and, thus, is going to enjoy playing the most. Whatever systems you grew up with or wished you had but never got as a kid are generally going to be the ones that will bring you the most enjoyment. That said, there are some systems that just have outstandingly large and diverse game libraries that can be enjoyed by pretty much anyone who likes video games; and are fairly inexpensive to collect for to boot. From my perspective those are the PlayStation 2 and the (unlisted in the poll) Nintendo DS Lite. Both have phenomenally large and diverse libraries of quality games to collect and play on the cheap, especially due to their backwards compatibility with very well supported previous generation systems.

During my childhood it was definitely the original Game Boy and Sega Genesis. The Game Boy was my first system that I could call "my own", and I got it for Christmas when I was 6. I spent innumerable hours playing that black and green screened wonder, especially late at night under the covers (when I was supposed to be sleeping) with a Coleman electric latern to provide enough light to see the screen. I totally blame the Game Boy for why I ended up having to start wearing glasses a few years later. When I was 8 I got my first home console for Christmas, a Sega Genesis with the recently released Mortal Kombat. I told my parents that I wanted a Genesis for Sonic the Hedgehog, since it wasn't on the Super Nintendo, but I'm pretty sure that they saw right through my ruse and knew that I just wanted it to play the best home console version of Mortal Kombat. So I ended up getting a Genesis with Sonic 1 & 2 and Mortal Kombat to boot, and man did I ever have a blast with that system! Platformers and fighting games on the Genesis made up the bulk of my childhood gaming from there on out, and to this day I still feel incredibly grateful to my parents for getting me a Genesis instead of a SNES (which is what all my friends had, since their parents didn't want them playing the gory version of Mortal Kombat) as a kid. My teenage years were dominated by the original PlayStation and then the GameCube, both of which I spent more hours playing than I could possibly count, but my childhood was all about the Game Boy and Sega Genesis.

I'll admit it, I get confused whenever someone starts talking about higher end audio/video connection setups like SCART and RGB systems for connecting their consoles to a TV. I understand coaxial and composite connections but anything past that just makes my brain glaze over a bit.

I was thinking about making a thread for this exact topic, but since there already was one I decided to revive this thread instead. For me there have only been two games that ever brought tears to my eyes, and it still happens every time I play through either of these games no matter how many times I play them. The first is Resident Evil 3: Nemesis on the PlayStation/GameCube. Every time I get to the end of the game and the news announcer is doing the voice over before the credits I always lose it and start getting teary every time he gets to "Our hearts go out to those poor civilians of Raccoon City." The other game is Ikaruga on the GameCube. Strong emotional experiences are not something you'd generally expect from a shoot 'em up game, but the ending of this one is just heart wrenching. After all the hardship and the dozens if not hundreds of hours of practice it takes to get to and beat the final boss, when you finally beat it and expose it's stone-like core your ship starts speaking: "Releasing the restrain device. Releasing the unrestrained power may result in possible destruction of the ship. Was I helpful for you? I am deeply grateful to you." https://youtu.be/CLEHLKT4gJ0

For me the biggest one that comes to mind is R-Type DX on the Game Boy Color. I'm one of those odd shoot 'em up fans who loves 8 and 16-bit shmups, but I don't like them to be too difficult. I like to just sit down and take a leisurely stroll through the game, and R-Type is one game that is anything but leisurely. Between the diabolically difficult corridor navigation sequences and the complete lack of any kind of autofire the game frustrated me beyond measure for weeks before I finally tossed it in the game drawer, cursing it's name and swearing to never play it again. Then, last year, a funny thing happened. I decided that I wanted to beat every quality shmup title for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, so I dug it out of the game drawer and started playing at again. What followed was several hours of hand sweating and moderately rage inducing gameplay, but I did finally manage to beat the entire DX game; which is comprised of both R-Type 1 and 2 back to back. After blowing through 27 continues and hammering the fire button over 10,000 times I felt like my right thumb was about ready to fall off, but the feeling in my hand paled in comparison to the immense feeling of satisfaction that I felt from finally having conquered R-Type DX. I don't think I've ever felt as satisfied to have beaten a game, and I don't know if any game will ever give me that same kind of feeling again. Since that day last spring I have gone back and played through R-Type DX another three times, and it always feels a little easier every time. It's still an incredibly challenging game, but now that I've beaten it several times over I don't really mind the challenge; and I consider it to be one of the best shmups on the Game Boy Color. Maybe one day I'll feel the same way about Ikaruga on the GameCube, but for now that one is still way too difficult for me.

Time to get back in the swing of things! I actually got enough sleep last night and woke up early enough today to do a proper weekly tracker post for the first time this year. Ineligible Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 216 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 302 minutes Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (Nintendo DS) - 153 minutes Arcade Centipede - 7 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 4 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 120 minutes Sega Genesis Raiden Trad - 39 minutes Total Play Time This Week 841 minutes (14 hours 1 minute) [170 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS - 671 minutes Game Boy Color - 120 minutes Sega Genesis - 39 minutes Arcade: 11 minutes This week's gaming time around my household was largely dominated by my wife's recently acquired Nintendo DSi XL. She spent a fair bit of time playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and when she wasn't using the system I was borrowing it to play games of darts and mahjong solitaire in Clubhouse Games. I also ended up starting a play through of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence on her system yesterday afternoon while I wait to get my own DS system (which will be a crimson & black colored DS Lite, for those curious) next week. Not wanting to find myself with no eligible time to post this week though I did take a couple hours to feed my seemingly insatiable Monopoly addiction on the Game Boy Color, and get in a few games of my two favorite arcade games on the household multicade. I also spent the better part of an hour blasting my way through Raiden Trad on the Genesis yesterday afternoon, because, well, it's Raiden! And it's on the Genesis! What's not to love? That's all the gaming news that's fit to print from my household this week. If I had to venture a guess I'd say that next week's game lineup will look fairly similar, since I'm only halfway through Resident Evil: Deadly Silence at this point and my wife has who knows how many hours left to go in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I would like to make a little more time to replay some old Genesis favorites though, because it's just such a cool system and it definitely deserves to be played more often.

There was one game that I forgot to mention in my original post back on page 1, and I'm not sure how it slipped my mind. The House of the Dead for the Sega Saturn. As someone who is a huge fan of light gun shooting games and the horror genre in general this game is totally worth it's utterly absurd $170 CIB price to me. It's a darn shame that it was never ported to the Wii like The House of the Dead 2 & 3 were, but it's just one of those timeless classics of the genre that no light gun gaming fan should be without. Ridiculously expensive? Yes. Worth it? To me it sure is.

Literally: Doom on the original Game Boy Advance, with no backlight or frontlight. Content Wise: Phantasmagoria for MS-DOS / Windows. I haven't played it in 17 years and I still feel slightly disturbed whenever I think about it.

Oh I am so downloading and playing this tonight! I usually play the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation, or Xbox 360 ports of Doom and Doom II, but I will totally fire up DOSBox for this!

It begins again! 1. Monopoly (Game Boy Color) I've now beaten every possible combination of opponent characters in this game and for some reason I still keep wanting to go back and play at least 2 or 3 games of Monopoly a week. It's like some kind of addiction! 2. Touch the Dead (Nintendo DS) It's like The House of the Dead on a handheld, and for that reason alone I love this game. Instead of wielding a light gun to shoot at a CRT monitor this on-rails shooter lets you use the DS's stylus to shoot zombies and other assorted fiends by tapping them on the touchscreen, and reloading is accomplished by dragging ammo from one side of the screen to your magazine on the other. The whole system works very well and results in a challenging game with a good amount of replay value, due largely to the variety of difficulty options, unlockables, and different paths you can take through the game. I highly recommend Touch the Dead for any House of the Dead fan looking for a way to blast some zombies on the go! 3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized (Nintendo DS) I ended up enjoying this one way more than I thought I would, since I'm not usually into more modern first-person shooter games. One thing I am really into though is Nintendo handhelds, and there has always been something just kind of wondrous to me about playing a FPS on a handheld. The graphics looked great, the game controlled very well, and the story kept me captivated with some surprisingly dramatic and intense moments that made me want to keep playing just to see what would happen next. The voice acting was great too, which is something I don't usually expect from games like this. The entire experience was so thoroughly enjoyable that I fully intend to play through it again and pick up the other two Modern Warfare games as well as Black Ops for the DS in the near future.

I really need to get out of the habit of staying up all night on Sunday night then squeaking in at the last minute Monday morning, so I can actually take the time to start taking pictures and writing thorough weekly gaming posts again. But, for today, this will have to do. Ineligible Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Mobilized (Nintendo DS) - 361 minutes Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 39 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 151 minutes Touch the Dead (Nintendo DS) - 75 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 92 minutes PlayStation Tomb Raider III - 96 minutes Total Play Time This Week 814 minutes (13 hours 34 minutes) [188 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS: 626 minutes PlayStation: 96 minutes Game Boy Color: 92 minutes

Sneaking in at the last second (a little late actually) today due to oversleeping, but here's my household's times for the week. Ineligible Clubhouse Games (Nintendo DS) - 7 minutes The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS) - 5 minutes Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (Nintendo DS) - 12 minutes Touch the Dead (Nintendo DS) - 521 minutes Game Boy Boggle Plus - 31 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 326 minutes Total Play Time This Week 902 minutes (15 hours 2 minutes) [357 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo DS: 545 minutes Game Boy Color: 326 minutes Game Boy: 31 minutes As we enter into the second week of the new year, I'm starting to foresee a lot more ineligible playtime in my household's future this year. My wife has been putting her new DSi XL to constant use this past week, playing through Touch the Dead several times on different game modes, and I'm planning on picking myself up a DS Lite in the not too distant future to replace the old one that I sold last year. In any case, I still managed to log some eligible time in a couple of my favorite Game Boy/Color time killers and I'm going to be trying to get in some play time on at least a couple eligible systems every week; even if the majority of my household's gaming focus may drift towards slightly newer and ineligible systems for a while.

Last bump before the rest of the games get listed as lots on eBay this weekend. If there are any carts here that anyone still wants then now would be a good time to let me know.

Bumpin' it up.

Starting off the new year with a short, but still fun week. Arcade Centipede - 9 minutes Millipede - 7 minutes Pac-Man - 7 minutes Space Invaders - 6 minutes Game Boy Boggle Plus - 17 minutes Game Boy Color Monopoly - 202 minutes PlayStation Alien Trilogy - 58 minutes Tomb Raider III - 21 minutes Total Play Time This Week 327 minutes (5 hours 27 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week Game Boy Color: 202 minutes PlayStation: 79 minutes Arcade: 29 minutes Game Boy: 17 minutes Not much to say about this week really, since there wasn't a whole lot of time to play games. I managed to get in a few games of Monopoly on the Game Boy Color here and there, played a little Boggle Plus on the bus, spent a couple minutes blasting bugs on the household multicade, and remained completely stuck and frustrated in Tomb Raider III. My wife had a much more enjoyable gaming session on the PlayStation this week though, spending an hour or so playing Alien Trilogy and blasting a completely different kind of "bug" than the ones found in Centipede and Millipede. That's all the gaming news from around here that's fit to print for the first week of 2016!

As promised, here's a few recommendations for the original Game Boy to go along with my Game Boy Color recommendations. Before I get started though, I just wanted to say that was a great video in the original post! And kudos for showcasing Need for Speed: Underground 2 for the Game Boy Advance! That's definitely my second favorite racing game on the GBA (with Mario Kart: Super Circuit taking the #1 spot) and really shows off what the GBA can do graphically speaking. Anyhoo... Alleyway - This may be the only Breakout style game I've ever played that actually plays really well with a D-Pad, and there's a great deal of diversity to the gameplay in this one. Just beware that once you get the feel for Alleyway it does become a fairly easy game that you can play for literally hours on end without losing all your lives. Boggle Plus - Possibly the best $3 I ever spent on a video game. I've gotten hundreds of hours of gameplay out of this one and the regular tournament mode always seems like the perfect thing to play whenever I've got 10 minutes or so to spare and want to exercise my brain a bit. I had never played Boggle in any form before I picked this game up, but it's definitely become a bit of an addiction for me thanks to this game. Gauntlet II - The voice acting in this game is really impressive for the original Game Boy hardware, and the gameplay isn't too shabby either! There's a little bit of slowdown here and there, but the game still does a remarkable job of handling a dozen or more sprites on screen at once in classic Gauntlet fashion. "Wizard shot the food!" may be the most disheartening thing that you will ever hear come out of your Game Boy's speakers. Gremlins 2: The New Batch - Someone already recommended this one, but I'll second it! If you like action platformers then this one is certainly worth looking into. It plays well and the graphics look great for the system, just beware that it is mercilessly difficult. I've beaten it a few times, but it's no easy task. Mortal Kombat II - I'm a huge fan of the Mortal Kombat series and have owned every Mortal Kombat game published on a Nintendo handheld to date, and I gotta say this one is by far my favorite. It plays just like Mortal Kombat II should, with fluid controls, no slowdown whatsoever, and a nice variety of difficulty options. The character roster is reduced slightly from the home console versions, but all the fan favorites are here with with special moves and fatalities-a-plenty. I'd also recommend Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance for the Game Boy Advance and Ultimate Mortal Kombat for the Nintendo DS, but MK II is still my favorite of the handheld Mortal Kombat games. Street Fighter II - If you're more of a Street Fighter fan than a Mortal Kombat fan, this is the Game Boy game for you! There's a little bit of slowdown here and there, but man did they ever nail the music and graphics. The music is almost flawlessly ported from the arcade and home console versions of Street Fighter II, and the characters and stages all look fantastic. There's none of that chibi-fication going on here that you so often find in other Game Boy fighting games. Speaking of characters, all the fan favorites are here with their full array of special moves intact. If you like Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival and Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the GBA then you might want to give this one a go to explore the series' handheld roots. The Sword of Hope - A first-person dungeon crawling RPG on the Game Boy? Oh yeah! Unlike Towers for the Game Boy Color, the combat in this one is turn based and there is a fair bit more puzzle solving to be done, but if you're a fan of first-person dungeon crawlers then this is definitely one worth picking up and giving a go. The dialog can be a bit Engrish'y at times, but I think that little bit of (likely unintended) comic relief just adds to the game's charm.