Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It’s my burfday. That said, thinking about gaming, and combining that with a burfday, means I’m thinking about the gaming I’ve done throughout the years, and my gaming system history. I’ll share, and maybe you’d like to do the same.

The earliest gaming I remember was on a Commodore 64. Standout titles include Jumpman, Lode Runner, Archon, Master of the Lamps, and some bigger games like Seven Cities of Gold and Mail Order Monsters.

I remember playing games on other people’s Colecovision systems, games like Smurf and a maze game with a cat and mice. My family owned an Atari 2600, with Combat, Pong, Superman, Maze Craze, Missile Command, Pac-Man, and a bunch of other titles. I remember Defender being a lot of fun.

My family was a couple of years late to the NES party, but I remember playing lots of games on there. That was where my addiction to Castlevania began with Simon’s Quest, and thanks to connections to a store that rented video games, there were always plenty of games to play, everything from gems like The Immortal to forgettable slop like Total Recall.

My brother had a SNES, but I had a Genesis, which was where I really got hooked on space shooters. I was playing Sword of Vermilion, Toejam and Earl, and Sonic the Hedgehog until my brother seemed to lose interest in his SNES and I started playing that, going through the Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, etc. By the time he got a PS1 and was playing the stunning Parasite Eve, I had largely lost interest in console gaming.

I’ve done some PC gaming over the years, but not much. Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, Diablo, Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights are some of the more memorable titles and series.

Fast forward to right around when the Gamecube came out, I was given a free, heavily-used (and it turns out, broken) N64. I got a couple of months out of it before just throwing it away because the games wouldn’t stop crashing. I went through several copies of Ocarina of Time trying to get one that would work for more than 15 minutes, before deciding it was the console with the problem. My wife had a heavily used Gameboy when I met her, and we picked up a GBA and a GBA SP when each launched. We ended up with two SPs so both of us could play. I still have the GBA, but it’s in pretty bad shape because of a botched Afterburner installation. GBA games that really stay with me are the Castlevania titles, the Golden Sun games, and the Mega Man Zero titles, but I have a large library of great titles that I still play on my DS LIte.

My wife and I were given a Gamecube as a gift, and we picked up Pikmin. After that we got Eternal Darkness, Animal Crossing, and Super Smash Bros Melee. I’ve been seriously hooked on Metroid since Metroid Prime, perhaps even moreso than Castlevania. The Wii’s reverse compatibility ensures that I’m likely to still pick up more titles for the Cube, in addition to the dozens I’ve owned, some of which I’ve resold.

The Nintendo DS is probably our favorite of all the systems we’ve owned. We got a pair of those around launch, and a pair of Lites around that launch. I got Asphalt Urban GT at launch, Mario 64 DS and Feel the Magic shortly thereafter. The titles keep rolling in, and today I was given Final Fantasy III as a gift to add to a large library.

This year, we got a Wii. We’ve got Sports, Zelda, Trauma Center, and today I was given Rayman Raving Rabbids, which I’m looking forward to trying tonight. I’ve picked up Castlevania IV and Columns for the virtual console, and if I get any Wii Points today they will likely get spent pretty quickly.

Let me know what your gaming history and memorable titles have been. I’d be interested to see the patterns in people’s gaming habits.