Sandpiper121PP gave me a great idea a few days ago when she happened to include a pic of her entire current game collection in a blog post. I thought, "What a great idea! I should do that, too!" So here we are. A few notes: 1) I rarely, if ever, sell or trade in games. That's why I still have so many. The few occasions where I have sold games...maybe about 70% of the time, I come to regret it at some point down the road. So overall, I don't believe in it. But anyway. 2) This is not how my games are typically stored. If you notice, the shelf is exactly the same shelf in all the pics that feature a shelf. Typically, this shelf contains all my paperback Star Wars novels, my entire DS and PSP collections, and the select few games that I'm actively swapping between. I just wanted to let that be known. I don't even think they'd all fit in the one shelf anyway!

So that's it for the preface. Let's begin the tour, shall we? Don't forget to use your inside/library voices, lest you attract the attention of the mean librarian and she smack you fiercely across the face. Heheh. :P

Game Boy Pocket/Color

That's it. For real. As you'll see, I didn't really become even a semi-serious portable gamer until the DS came around. Pokemon is the reason my brother and I got our very first portable handheld systems, Game Boy Pockets. I keep my GBA SP around just so I can keep playing these games. I don't have my GBP or GBC anymore, unfortunately.

Game Boy Advance

Again, not a big collection at all. Mostly enhanced ports. Super Circuit is the reason I went for the GBA in the beginning. I was beyond overjoyed when each of the DKC ports came out. I was really excited about the release of the two SMAs as well. To this day, however, I still hope for an announcement at an E3 for a 3-in-1 DKC collection for the DS. I don't care that they released the games on the GBA and they're all on the VC. Bring the originals to the DS, all in one cartridge! On that same note, I still wish for a DKC4.

Nintendo DS / Sony PSP

Tada! See? I wasn't lying. Portable gaming really hit it off with me once the DS picked up steam after its first year of life. Since I didn't own a Wii or PS3 until just recently, my DS game collection is essentially the extent of my gaming habits during my four years of college, excluding WoW. Things are kinda slow with the handheld now, though. I haven't bought a single game for the DS yet this year.

Super Nintendo

Second grade through sixth right here, haha. My first video game ever was Super Mario World, followed by Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (which, if I'm not mistaken, Hart704 completed recently on just one life!), followed by Donkey Kong Country. It's the platformers I own for the SNES that really let my young imagination run wild. Words cannot describe what those many worlds' themed locales did for my sense of creativity. A favorite childhood pasttime of my brother's and mine was to create a DKC3 (before it was a real thing) and DKC4 on drawing paper. We'd come up with different types of bananas, barrels, and pets; come up with world and level names; draw out the overworlds - we went all out. :)

Nintendo 64

I had them all lined up in rows of five, but the labels just wouldn't have shown up well at all had I taken just one picture. So here we are. Welcome to fifth through ninth grade. :) Not much to say here. Everyone knows how awesome the N64 was. I feel like developers really tried new things on the console, things we weren't at all accustomed to seeing. I'll mention it here because I don't want to spoil the other picture, but looking at my SNES and N64 collections, doesn't it make you the least bit sad when you consider what the Wii's library looks like after what, three and a half years of life? Some of you do have pretty large Wii game collections, but I just can't find myself interested in too many of the games personally. Maybe I have to be younger to find more of the games appealing. After all, I was a kid back in the SNES/N64 days. I don't know. I just feel like the Wii is letting everyone down, whether they know it or not.

Sony Playstation

Essentially, these games were a huge part of my gaming activities while I was in middle school. Between these games and the N64 games, oye! The PS1 really opened my eyes to RPGs. SMRPG got everything started for me in this department, but after my second RPG ever, Final Fantasy VII, I realized there was magic happening. Swords and magic spells and great stories, characters, and music, all wrapped into a single game that lasted far longer than any of the other games I'd ever owned (I look back on this memory I have of my dad bringing home a copy of the NP strategy guide for SMRPG and my brother and I looking at each other with this awestruck face of utter shock when we discovered where we were currently in the game was nowhere close to the end of the game...and I just laugh). It helped, of course, that because FFVII was so big sales and popularity-wise, RPGs became popular in general and more were made as a result. They seem to be dwindling in quality and number nowadays, though. I still haven't quite formulated a personal theory to explain it yet.

Last Generation (Sony Playstation 2, Microsoft XBox, Nintendo Gamecube)

Welcome to drummer131's gaming experiences, High School edition. Actually, I didn't own the XBox until I was a freshman in college and that's primarily why that console's game collection is so small. And come to think of it, the other two consoles have rather small collections, too. With the PS2, it's because my original PS2 got hit hard with the "Disc Read Error" plague in 2003, so I just stopped buying games for it (kind of sad, right? Think of all the games I missed! I do, sometimes.). The Gamecube...I like every game I have for it, and I don't think I've ever sold a Gamecube game. Mario Kart Double Dash is my favorite Mario Kart of them all (excluding MK Wii because I think that one's crap and I'll never ever own it) and SMB2 is the very essence of fun. Even so, as the next evolution after the N64, it just didn't have that many great games coming out for it, in my opinion at least. But, what can you do, right? At least the Gamecube was fairly inexpensive from launch.

Current Gen Consoles (Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3)

Okay, you can't really blame me here for having such small collections for both consoles. I've only had the Wii since last November, and I've only had the PS3 for two months. Five (technically six because ModNation Racers is due to arrive at my doorstep in a couple of weeks) games for a two-month old system ain't too shabby. I'm going to go out on a limb here, though, and predict that my PS3 collection will definitely outshine my Wii game collection by the time this generation is over. It already kinda is. The games I own for the Wii thus far are each good in their own ways, but I just don't see that collection as a whole growing that much larger. It'd be nice if it at least tied with my Gamecube collection, so we'll see. Meanwhile, I have no doubt my PS3 game collection will tie my PS2 collection and perhaps even surpass it.

And that's it! That's every single game I own.

How does yours compare?