A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to link back up with a friend of mine for a game of Yu-Gi-Oh. Depending on the Saturday morning cartoons you consumed in your youth or how immersed you are in card collecting or tabletop culture, you'll definitely know about the duel monsters card game. I played extensively in my youth and amassed a respectable collection (a good chunk of which I had to get rid of due to them being pirated Colombian cards in broken English). I had stored my 100+ plus cards in a small tin for posterity's sake, to commemorate a large portion of my childhood (I even had the Seto Kaiba bowl cut).

After squeezing in a friendly duel with my friend (in which I got trounced because I had not put a deck together and instead just pulled out a random handful of cards from my pile) I was galvanized to immerse myself back into the world of Yu-Gi-Oh by actually organizing my cards into decks, binging the anime on Netflix, and even shelling out a few bucks for some rare cards I always wanted to have as a kid (which I can do now because I'm adulting and have some semblence of capital, which to recklessly spend).

While I have no intention of ever dueling competitively or even attending local tournaments or games at local game shops, it is still nice to put the cards to use in duels with friends. It is this same level of nostalgia which drove me to get into Retro Gaming.

I purchased a Playstation 1 and the respective games that I played in my childhood (Crash Bandicoot, Rugrats, Bug's Life, etc.) although now I need to get my hands on an old CRT TV since the new HD ones make the pixels on PS1 look hideous. In my passion for retro gaming I even got my hands on all the original NintenDogs games for the DS, even buying my mum as DS so she could enjoy them as well. She played for one day and never picked it up again.

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, driving us to reconnect with old interests and passions that fell by the wayside to either emerging responsibilities or passing fads. In particular, I find it an awesome way to commemorate all the time, energy, and resources that were sunk into those childhood hobbies by finding use for them in my current age. Even if it's just displaying them on a shelf and marveling at how they've changed.

My mum still gets a kick out of seeing my PS1, PS2, and PS4 side by side on the shelf.