Seb's Web

This autumn had a bad start, with both me and my girlfriend getting covid for a week, plus another two weeks of recovering after that… House was a mess, everything felt icky and upside down. But we turned things around and with that I’m done with the whole “I wish I updated this website more often but I have legitimate excuses”.

One great thing that came out of this turnaround was that mid-September we both gave up smoking. It’s going great, never going back to that. But now we both had an app that celebrated milestones since we stopped smoking. And it also had a ticker that told us how many euros were no longer spent every month. A reward was warranted and in our case it was a retro handheld for both of us.

The market’s absolutely flooded with these things, at any-and-every-price.
I mean that, there are handhelds at $30 and some that are more expensive than Steam Decks. We considered an Xbox for the same money but ultimately these seemed really fun – and being able to pocket them on flights and train rides was another plus. After a week of research the Retroid 4 Pro came up again and again so we pulled the trigger. The timing was right, the Retroid 5 came out so this was discounted. It took way too long for these to ship, customs included, and then we had to go through another day of setups and tinkering for almost everything to work.

I never had any kind of console until I was about 15, so my early summers were not spent playing Mario, Zelda, Contra and whatever else people my age played… So I’ll do like Marcel Proust and recherche du temps perdu and try to get through many of those games I never got to experience. For a start I’ve been playing Dr Mario like crazy, a game I never knew existed until a month ago.

After I received a bootleg PS2 around Christmas in 2007, the next console I had was a second-hand PSP I bought with my own money in college. By that time the PS Vita was already coming out so this PSP was, in tech terms, already ancient. But Playing Pro Skater on that thing for an hour straight when a professor would not come to class was some of the best fun I had during college. Unfortunately, because it was second hand, it had a sticky back, creaky controls, a bad battery, and the paint was fading. Which is fine if it’s faded from use, it’s your patina on that bad boy… But it was never mine. And it’s too bad because I think no handheld today looks as good as the Portable PlayStations did.

I don’t know if I’ll ever splurge on a brand new PSP or PS Vita from eBay to enjoy it and feel like it’s really mine. But I plan to use the heck out of this Retroid until its paint fades as well. And by then I hope to find out, after twenty-odd years, what the heck a Kirby is and in what castle princess Zelda is.