When I grew up I never had the luxury of owning a gaming console. My parents did not like the influence a gaming console can have on kids, so erring on the side of caution we never had one at our house. This did not mean that I never got to play any of the classic Nintendo games, it meerly meant I had to do it at friends. Although I never got any consistency, I think that over the years, quite a few hours where spent playing varios gaming consoles, from the first Nintendo (NES), through the other Nintendos of the 90’ to Sony PlayStation.
Fast forward 20-30 years, and I am now in the position of deciding wheter my kids should own a gaming console or not. I mostly agree with the rationale and decision my parents made, and think that gaming consoles may generally do more harm than good, and if you decide to give it to kids, they should have rather strict limits, both on time spent but also on what kind of games they play (For me it is impossible to understand that long term gaming wont have a serious effect on how the brain is wired, but that is another discussion for another day).
There is however something to be said for the fact that most of their friends are going to have some kind of gaming console/pc, so if you restrict it too much they might just end up spending more time at their freinds than home. Weighing the pros and cons, this Christmas we decided to give them a Nintendo Switch 2 to share between them. It is guaranteed to cause some arguments over who is playing the most, but hopefully it may atleast renew their understanding of the need to share.
Upon starting to use the console, I realised that Nintendo offers a rather cool feature; For a yearly fee you get access to a large back catalogue of games from NES, SNES, Nintendo64, Gameboy and Gamecube. Having spent a few hours with the kids, playing Super Mario Bros and the likes of days gone past, I realised that I do not think I knew the difference between Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2 and Super Mario Bros 3 back then. I can however tell you that they are all bringing back some long lost memories of my mind! Well done Nintendo; please take my money for the abilty to play these classics (although I would have liked it to be a pay once, have them forewever kind of deal!)
We have just starting to play with the old NES games, but I already have some memories from SNES popping up, and I cannot wait to test out SNES and N64.