Skippy B. Coyote

Ms. Pac-Man (Arcade) Boggle Plus (Game Boy) Duke Nukem (Game Boy Color)

Asteroids was the game that got my wife into retro gaming, so I voted "False" in the poll, but I'm also in the camp of "whether you have a penis or vagina has nothing to do with your preference in video games". The number of times the misses has completely wiped the floor with me in Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II is beyond my ability to count.

Kirby's Block Ball (Game Boy) Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (Game Boy Color) Shanghai Pocket (Game Boy Color)

First off, a belated Happy Halloween to all my fellow tracker participants! I hope that you and yours had a nice holiday weekend. This week was a fairly typical one for my household, both in terms of time logged and games played. Before I get into the details though, here's my household's times for the week: Ineligible The Pinball Arcade (Android) - 34 minutes Tomb Raider: The Prophecy (Game Boy Advance) - 172 minutes Arcade Arkanoid - 31 minutes Centipede - 15 minutes Donkey Kong - 15 minutes Frogger - 39 minutes Galaga 3 - 3 minutes Lady Bug - 22 minutes Millipede - 68 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 14 minutes Pac-Man - 18 minutes Pinball Action - 4 minutes Shao-Lin's Road - 20 minutes Space Invaders - 36 minutes Super Breakout - 34 minutes Game Boy Alleyway - 108 minutes Boggle Plus - 245 minutes The Castlevania Adventure - 33 minutes Qix - 19 minutes Game Boy Color Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 14 minutes PlayStation Deathtrap Dungeon - 98 minutes Silent Hill - 336 minutes Total Play Time This Week 1,378 minutes (22 hours 58 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week PlayStation: 434 minutes Game Boy: 405 minutes Arcade: 319 minutes Game Boy Advance: 172 minutes Android: 34 minutes Game Boy Color: 14 minutes With Halloween approaching, this week my wife decided to start playing through Silent Hill on the PS1 and I began my second delve into the perilous depths of Deathtrap Dungeon to get in the holiday mood. The misses is still playing through Silent Hill in her free time, but I'm not sure how soon I'm going to get back to Deathtrap Dungeon since I quickly got distracted by one of my favorite handhelds: The Game Boy Color. Rather than play The Pinball Arcade on my Android tablet during smoke breaks this week, I filled most of my "a few minutes here and a few minutes there" game time with Boggle Plus for the Game Boy. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure Boggle Plus has been the best $3 I've ever spent on a game, since I couldn't even begin to count how many hours of entertainment it's brought me over the years. It's one game that I can always go back to have just as much fun playing it as the first time I picked it up. Since I got more than a little distracted by the Game Boy Color I also ended up popping in The Castlevania Adventure for a half an hour or so on Halloween night, and as per usual I made it to the third stage before powering it off due to a nasty case of "Game Boy thumb" beginning to develop. I have beaten it once before, but man does that third stage ever put some wear and tear on your thumbs! In spite of the Game Boy Color occupying most of my gaming time this week, the household multicade wasn't neglected and the misses and I both played our usual rotations of arcade games a fair bit. She topped her previous high scores in Donkey Kong and Frogger, and I ended up getting an especially pleasing new high score of 148,846 in Millipede at one point. All in all it was a pretty good week around here. Good games were played, good times were had!

To answer the OP's question, it's pretty simple: Running MAME requires a great deal of setup, tinkering, and technical knowledge. Sticking a disc or cartridge in a console and pressing the Power button does not. Simplicity and ease of use often trumps authenticity for many people.

Very good points all around! I'm definitely one of those collectors who probably enjoys hunting for games more than I do actually playing them (thus why flash carts are so unappealing to me), though I have always limited myself to hunting for games that I think I will genuinely enjoy playing when I get them. I've never been the "completionist" type who felt the need to own every game released for a system, I just try to track down the games that I think I would personally enjoy playing; and build diverse enough library for all my systems to give a good representation of that system's strengths and it's standout titles. For many years that wasn't a problem at all, because I spent most of my time hunting for fairly common games for the Atari 2600, Game Boy/Color/Advance, and Genesis. The games I bought all ran me $1 to $3 each on average so it wasn't a big deal if I only played them for half an hour or so then put them in a drawer. At that price I felt like I was getting my money's worth of fun out of them, both in the hunt and the time I spent actually playing them. But times have changed and I now own all the common and inexpensive games I wanted to acquire for all my systems, and the prices for the rest of the games on my various wants lists just keep going up and up; making it unaffordable for me to keep collecting across a wide range of systems. That in turn makes me wish I could just narrow my collecting desires to one or two systems, and be happy and content enjoying not only the hunt but actually playing the games I buy. Can I ask what it was that made you decide on the GameCube as "The One"? You seem to have had a pretty similar collecting background to me so I think I might already have a pretty good idea why you chose to stick with the system you did, but I'd still like to hear your thoughts on what makes the GameCube so special to you that you've been happy collecting for and playing games on just that one system. If you're up for sharing that is.

Thank you for sharing your story TPA5! That was a really good read and, frankly, I'd love to get to where you are some day. I do feel like my collecting and gaming experiences would be a lot more relaxed and enjoyable if I had less systems to focus on, and I know exactly what you mean when it comes to buying a game, playing it for a few minutes, then sticking it on a shelf where it will remain untouched for the next 6 months or so until I one day decide to break it out, play it for a few minutes, then put it back on the shelf to gather dust. It never feels good to spend money on things you won't actually use, but there's always that "collector compulsion" there in the back of your head insisting that you should be acquiring more stuff that you probably won't play all that often. And you're right, it is all just stuff. None of it is anything that can't be lived without, it's all just luxury items for a bored gamer with nostalgia for "the old days" to fill their free time with. Now, if only I could come to terms with the idea of letting go of some of it. Inner-peace doesn't always come easy. #FirstWorldProblems

Deathtrap Dungeon (PlayStation) Boggle Plus (Game Boy) Alleyway (Game Boy)

Thank you to everyone of the abundance of really good ideas and collecting advice! I really wish I could take the time to reply to all of you individually, but that could take literally an entire day of typing. I will say though that I have read each and every one of your posts and given everything that all of you have had to say thorough consideration. After taking a few days consider peoples' advice here's where I'm at at this point: You guys (and everyone who said similar things) all hit the nail on the head. I have more than enough space to store my game libraries with plenty of room to spare, it's just an issue of deciding which systems to dedicate my limited financial resources to collecting for. And I already know which systems I play the most: Atari 2600, Game Boy / Color, and PS1. Between those three I get a really good variety of gameplay options, from the arcade style gameplay of the Atari 2600 to the "half hour adventure" style quick fix gaming of the Game Boy / Color, and the longer more engrossing games of the PS1 when I want to play something with serious depth to it. Those are the systems that I enjoy playing—and thus collecting for—the most, but I don't think that means I should run out and sell off my Sega Genesis, NES, Game Boy Advance SP, and GameCube. I may not play those systems as much right now, but they're still systems that I play now and then for certain titles or types of gameplay that I just don't think are done as well on other systems. I tend to go through phases with my gaming habits, and there are months where almost all I'll play are some of those systems that I don't usually play as often. I love the Genesis for the early Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Sonic titles, the NES for it's light gun shooters and classic Mario and Zelda games, the Game Boy Advance for it's abundance of classic game ports in just about every genre imaginable made portable, and the GameCube for a few select titles that just aren't on any other system (I'm looking at you, Star Fox Adventures) and it's Game Boy Player for enjoying all the Game Boy games I like to collect at home on a larger screen. In short, there's a good reason I decided to add all of these consoles to my retro gaming center, and while I may not play some as much as others, I know for a fact that I would really miss the games they had to offer if I got rid of any of them. With that in mind, I think the best thing to do is to hold onto all of my systems and just narrow my collecting focus to say "I'm only going to collect for the Atari 2600 and Game Boy / Color until the spring". Then once the spring comes I can evaluate my game library and pick a different system or two to collect for if I feel like my interests have shifted a bit and there are other systems that I'd like to play more frequently and devote more attention to. From there I can collect for whatever two systems I choose during the spring and summer, and pick a different two when the fall comes around again. I do think I'm going to sell off some of the games for a couple of the systems that I know I'll never play, or at least can't imagine myself or my wife wanting to play at any point in the foreseeable future, but I am going to hold onto the systems themselves and all the games that I really enjoy and like to play on them. The only exception might be the Game Boy Advance SP, which I'm thinking of putting up for sale just so I can replace it with an original Game Boy Advance that's been modded with the backlit screen from an AGS-101 SP; but that's just because I'm tired of going through proprietary lithium ion battery packs for the SP and would rather have a GBA that ran off longer lasting and easy to replace rechargeable AA batteries. Other than that though, I think my systems will be staying right where they are.

Huh, most reviewers seem to think it's pretty good and I have to admit it does look fun. I already have three of the four other horror games for the 2600 (Haunted House, Ghost Manor, and Halloween. I never picked up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because it just doesn't look like much fun to me) and enjoy all of them a great deal, so I will be purchasing a copy of Frankenstein's Monster at some point when I stumble on a copy locally, but your criticisms have been noted. Of the horror games I have played on the 2600 I think Ghost Manor is probably my favorite. The visuals are detailed and interesting, the gameplay is fairly diverse by 2600 standards, and I dig how you can choose a male or female character using the Color/B&W switch. The only complaint I could really make about it is that the audio can be a bit grating. Still, if you're looking for a fun game to satisfy your horror cravings on the Atari 2600 I'd recommend giving Ghost Manor a try.

For me it was the DOS game Paganitzu on the family computer, an IBM PC XT when I was 4 or 5 (around '89 or '90). I'm not sure exactly what the first home console game I played was, but it was definitely on my older brother's ColecoVision around the same time. Cosmic Avenger maybe? I definitely remember my first arcade game, a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail machine at a local bar/restaurant when I was 5 or 6, and the first handheld game I ever played was Tetris on an original gray brick Game Boy that I got for Christmas when I was 5. That also happened to be the first video game system that I could really call my own.

Thanks for the replies and insight you guys! I'll admit that I've always had a bit of a dislike for playing games off flash carts or emulators, because half the fun (probably more than half, if I'm being honest with myself) of retro gaming for me is hunting down physical copies of the games I want to play with the best condition labels I can find and enjoying holding the cartridge or jewel case in my hand, admiring the label art, reading the paper manual, etc. I'm someone who really enjoys the visceral aspects of physical media, and I've never been able to get into flash carts or emulators because of that. I wouldn't be opposed to getting a Harmony cart for the Atari 2600 at some point so I could use it to try out new homebrew titles that haven't gotten a physical cartridge release yet, and for testing out my own Atari 2600 games if I ever take the time to learn Batari Basic like I've been thinking about doing for the last few years, but outside of the 2600 I can't see myself ever owning a flash cart for any other system. I have already soft modded my Wii to run the Homebrew Channel and tried out several different emulators for the systems I like on it, but playing the games emulated like that instead of off the original physical media just feels… unsatisfying. I know it shouldn't make any difference if the game looks and plays the same, but it just doesn't feel "real" to me. I think I'm just really not a emulation or flash cart kinda guy. In a way I suppose that's kinda funny since I play emulated arcade games all the time on the household multicade running an iCade 60-in-1 JAMMA board (which is based off a fairly old version of MAME) and that never bothers me, but I'm guessing that's just because they're arcade games as opposed to console games and I've plunked a whole lot of quarters into restaurant arcade machines running iCade 60-in-1 boards in the past before I got my own machine. In any case, when I brought up the situation with a non-gamer friend of mine earlier tonight he had an interesting bit of advice that I hadn't considered. He suggested that I base my decision about which systems to collect for on which systems I actually play the most (as opposed to which ones I have the most nostalgia attached to), which reminded me that for the better part of half a year now the misses and I have been participating in the What have you actually PLAYED tracker for 2015 thread here on AtariAge. So, tonight I took some time to go back through the past 5 months worth of play time submissions that I've made to that thread and see what I actually play and enjoy the most. They were all total household play time submissions, so a fair bit of the time logged (mostly on the PS1 and NES) belonged to my wife, but it definitely gave me a more clear perspective on which systems I actually use the most and which ones sit on the shelf gathering dust. For those interested in reading it, you can see the results for my household's Top 10 Most Played Systems & Games over the last 5 months in the spoiler tag below. What it taught me wasn't too surprising: I spend a ton of time playing Atari 2600, Game Boy / Color, and arcade games on the household multicade; and my wife spends a pretty fair chunk of her time playing PlayStation and NES. I'm not sure those results would make me feel any better about selling off the lesser played systems and games to help fund my collecting for the systems that I do actually play a lot, but it's certainly food for thought.

I feel like this is one of those posts that should start by me standing up at the front of the room and saying "My name is Jin and I have a problem". To cut right to the chase, the problem is that I've been collecting for way more systems than I can realistically afford to collect for; so I'm looking for advice on how to to reduce the number of systems I own and collect for without feeling like I've lost something precious in the process. I've tried a few times in the the past to whittle down the number of systems I collect for and was unsuccessful at doing so, mainly because I had some silly attachment of one kind or another to whatever system and it's corresponding game library that I was thinking about excising from my collection; so I could really use some advice from other collectors about how to moderate and focus my collecting down to just a couple systems. For many people I imagine that collecting for several different systems wouldn't be a problem, but as someone who lives on a fixed income (and will be for the foreseeable future due to medical circumstances preventing me from working) I'm finding that there's just never enough money to go around for me to able to afford to collect for more than a couple systems. At this point I've been actively collecting for the Atari 2600, NES, Sega Genesis, PS1 (to a lesser extent, since the PS1 is pretty much my wife's system), GameCube, Game Boy / Color, and Game Boy Advance. I've been continually finding myself feeling really frustrated with collecting because it seems like there's always so many games and peripherals I'd like to pick up for all of those systems, and every month I'm faced with the nail bitingly difficult task of deciding which system to spend the small amount of discretionary income I have on. That frustration and indecision has really taken a lot of the enjoyment out of collecting for me, so I feel like it's time to narrow my game collecting focus a bit. Of those systems the only one I can safely say that I'll never sell a single game or accessory for is the Atari 2600, and I wouldn't dare touch the PS1 library since at least 80% of it is my wife's, but I'd really like to find a way to whittle down the rest so I can focus my collecting efforts on the Atari 2600 and one or two other systems. Any suggestions for how choose? Every system I'm currently collecting for has played a significant role in my life at one point or another, and they all feel special to me in their own way, so I could really use some insight on how to let go of some of them without feeling bad about it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Awesome week! Those are some seriously massive play times, and the TI-99/4A continues to impress me with it's roster of new homebrews and it's big fan following. I seriously need to pick one up! On a side note, might this very well known game be an Arcade game?

It was another "a little bit of this and a little bit of that" week around here, but this week I decided to do something a little different. I realized that I have this enormous library of 140'ish games for the Atari 2600, but for the last month or so I've been in a bit of a rut just playing the same half a dozen or so Atari 2600 games every week: Ms. Pac-Man, Millipede, Frogger, Missile Command, and a few other ports of arcade classics. With that in mind, this week I decided to pull a few stacks of Atari 2600 games that I knew were good fun games out of the game drawer and give them some well deserved play time. Ineligible The Pinball Arcade (Android) - 30 minutes Arcade Arkanoid - 65 minutes Bomb Jack - 3 minutes Centipede - 27 minutes Congo Bongo - 4 minutes Donkey Kong - 16 minutes Donkey Kong Junior - 10 minutes Frogger - 9 minutes Galaga - 7 minutes King & Balloon - 3 minutes Lady Bug - 44 minutes Mappy - 7 minutes Millipede - 26 minutes Mr. Do! - 10 minutes Mr. Do's Castle - 30 minutes Ms. Pac-Man - 9 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (Speed-Up Version) - 33 minutes Pac-Man - 20 minutes Pooyan - 12 minutes Scramble - 5 minutes Space Invaders - 26 minutes Super Breakout - 38 minutes Super Cobra - 3 minutes Xevious - 6 minutes Zaxxon - 3 minutes 1942 - 25 minutes 1943 - 11 minutes 1943 Kai: Midway Kaisen - 5 minutes Atari 2600 Atlantis - 14 minutes Berzerk - 11 minutes Chopper Command - 25 minutes Commando Raid - 20 minutes Crossbow - 23 minutes Defender - 29 minutes Dig Dug - 14 minutes D.K. VCS (Demo, played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 3 minutes Dodge 'Em - 9 minutes Enduro - 36 minutes Frogs and Flies - 25 minutes Ghost Manor - 31 minutes Halloween - 11 minutes Haunted House - 31 minutes Jungle Hunt - 72 minutes Kangaroo - 13 minutes Keystone Kapers - 36 minutes Lady Bug (played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 58 minutes Lead (played on Stella for Nintendo Wii) - 62 minutes Mario Bros. - 33 minutes Miniature Golf - 100 minutes Q*Bert - 49 minutes River Raid - 42 minutes Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle - 50 minutes Space Attack - 29 minutes Space Invaders - 23 minutes Sprintmaster - 25 minutes Super Breakout - 25 minutes Super Cobra - 58 minutes The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - 10 minutes Venture - 11 minutes Wizard of Wor - 30 minutes Game Boy Double Dragon - 23 minutes Operation C - 47 minutes Game Boy Color Ms. Pac-Man: Special Color Edition - 8 minutes Total Play Time This Week 1,573 minutes (26 hours 13 minutes) Individual System Play Times This Week Atari 2600: 1,008 minutes Arcade: 457 minutes Game Boy: 70 minutes Android: 30 minutes Game Boy Color: 8 minutes Just like last week, a ton of different games were played over the course of the week; but this time the misses decided to join in and take turns playing—or do two player, when the option was available—games on the 2600 along with me. Some of the standout titles ended up being Miniature Golf (which we played over breakfast every day for the last three days, and I rarely won a game ), Jungle Hunt, Defender, Lady Bug, and Lead. I put up a pretty good showing in Lady Bug and Lead, but got my all time high scores in Jungle Hunt and Defender absolutely crushed by m'lady. I really didn't mind though, since I was just happy to see her enjoying some of the games that I've always thought were really cool. We also had a blast playing the very seasonally appropriate games Halloween, Haunted House, and Ghost Manor. Of the three I think Ghost Manor is probably my favorite, but Haunted House is a total classic and my wife always gets a kick out of the music and gore effects in Halloween; plus there's definitely something to be said for it being the first video game to feature blood and decapitation. Nearly a decade before Sub-Zero was yanking off people's heads and pulling out their spines in arcades of 1992, Michael Myers was lopping off heads on the Atari 2600; and I think that's kinda cool from a historical standpoint. The household multicade received a fair bit of playtime this week as well, with the brick breaking classics Super Breakout and Arkanoid receiving a substantial play by both members of the household, and the trackball getting more than a few good spins via Centipede and Millipede. While I continue practicing and honing my skills in Ms. Pac-Man, Lady Bug, and 1942, the misses found herself getting hooked on Mr. Do's Castle and making it a new addition to her usual rotation Donkey Kong, Frogger, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. The only other notable events for the week were that after nearly 22 years of practice I finally managed to 1 credit clear Operation C for the Game Boy ( http://i.imgur.com/bXZGDf7.jpg & http://i.imgur.com/0oxreDO.jpg ) and, with a little practice and a few continues, was able to beat Super Cobra on the Atari 2600 too. I've played the arcade version of Super Cobra a few times on the multicade and couldn't really get into it due to the extremely high difficulty level, but I really enjoy the more reasonable pacing of the Atari 2600 version and was happy to have been able to beat it. The time I spent playing Super Cobra also got my gaming palette thoroughly whetted for the upcoming homebrew release of the Atari 2600 port of Scramble. That is definitely going to be a "buy the day of release" title for me, so I'll be sure to keep my eyes open for any development updates on Scramble. Musings on the history of violence in video games and Scramble ramblings concluded, I think that about covers everything for this week!

Venture (Atari 2600) Arkanoid (Arcade) Lady Bug (Arcade)

After going on a Miniature Golf bender the last few days I'm now convinced that I have to buy the + hack at some point very soon. I'm curious though, how many holes are in it? Is it a 9 hole course like the original or was it expanded to a full 18?

Awesome pictures and video! It was really neat finally getting to take a good look at the labels and box art for all the new homebrew releases and see them being played, and that Tod Frye video was just kind of awe inspiring.

I've gotta go with the original. As fondly as I remember the dozens upon dozens of hours I've logged in Symphony of the Night over the years, the original is still the one I go back and play through whenever I need a Castlevania fix. It's an iconic classic with great level design, excellent music, and just really solid and challenging (yet rarely frustrating, for me at least) gameplay. Best of all it's I game that I can sit down, play through, and beat in half an hour or less. I love shorter action/adventure platformer games in general, and the original Castlevania for the NES—and it's Classic NES Series port for the Game Boy Advance—stands alongside Super Mario Land and Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy as one of my all time favorites.

I'm in the same boat. My wife is a big Asteroids fan and I'd love to get her a Starplex controller, but it seems like they're nearly impossible to find on eBay anymore. From what I gather there was a big crate of new in box Starplex controllers discovered around a decade ago, so the market was temporarily flooded with them, but now the stock has dried up and I can't seem to find any these days. I'd of course also want to get a Space Rocks overlay for it if I could find one, but those seem to be just as non-existent now.