Dabble Here and There

Sometimes I can go down a bit of a rabbit hole..

Like many guys my age, one of the things I enjoyed a lot as a kid and as I got older was playing some video games. These days, I don't get to do much of that and there are a lot of reasons for that, but occasionally I get to dabble!

I never realized it.. but archive.org lets you play video games on it! That's pretty damn cool. They are obviously very lightweight games.. so it makes sense that they don't put everything up there. There are some really awesome classics though! I've played a few on there so far these last few weeks..

Mario is the latest one I've been playing a bit, and I recently found the Super Mario bros version! I think that one is for sure my favorite. It's one of the most entertaining ones, but I've played all of them except Mario Kart. I was never into the racing game side of it.

It's really fun though to take a step back into my childhood! These games are a lot of fun and great memories, hanging out with my family or my friends and just rocking the games. We would stay inside for a few hours, play some Mario or a few other games, and then screw around outside for the rest of the day. That's the type of healthy balance that kids need when it comes to things like video games, that we sadly don't have much of in the day we live in.

Besides Mario, I've played and beat the original Doom game, though it was only the first episode. That was originally the game I wanted to play this entire time, but I struggled to find it. I think it was Bozz that ended up sending me down the acrchive.org path, and shit am I glad I found it out! Lol. Doom was one of my favorite games as a kid, although it is pretty dark and scary for someone who is 8 or 9 years old to play lol. It didn't seem to bother us too much.. but thinking about it now, I don't know if I would let my son play it until he was like 12 or 13 lol.

A recent game I ended up stumbling upon as well was Earthworm Jim! Holy shit, I played that game a LOT as a kid as well! We didn't have Sega, we were Nintendo bros and then Playstation, but a few of my friends had a Sega and we rocked the Earthworm Jim game for a really long time. I remember beating it that's for sure, but that was so long ago that I forget what it was all about at the end lol.

The balance for me is not doing this all the time. Some nights I will play a little bit, while most others I won't so that I can do other things. I think that's the important reason I don't play much anymore, is that I need to be able to balance the things I need to do versus the things I want to do. Playing games falls completely in the Want category, so it's important not to get sucked into it!

What about you, have you found some classic things you enjoyed years past, recently? What was it? Let me know in the comments!