With the advancement of modern technology, entertainment in our day and age has become easier to access. Our generation has been obsessed with video games as long as they have been portable and handheld, like the GameBoy, released in 1989.

At first we had the DS. Nintendo’s DS was released on November 21, 2004, so it was the year most of us were born. I know when I was about 4-5 I got a DS of my own, I would (and still do) play Mario Brothers (the original, not the new one), Cooking Mama, Mario Kart, and a GameBoy game (because everyone who has owned a DS knows that there’s a GameBoy game slot in the DS) called “Dogs”. Anyone who has ever owned a DS knows that the stylus was lost in the first month of having it and were forced to use a bobby pin (or any pointed object) for the remainder of the time. 

When the DS fire finally burned out, the Nintendo Wii was released. Starting in 2006, all the games we loved to play on our little screens could be brought to our TV’s. With this, a swarm of new game releases were out and about, including Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, Just Dance, and so many more. Versions of DS games were now released in bigger and better modes for the Wii, and versions of arcade games could now be played in the comfort of your own home. 

So many of us had parents who also liked to play video games, so most of us grew up with either a Playstation or an Xbox in the household. Our parents were playing their games while we either A) silently watched or B) begged to play with them. For instance, my mother would play Plants vs. Zombies for at least three hours a day during the summertime, and I would constantly beg her to play just so I could watch (and get a break from cleaning my room). My family also owned a Playstation 3 so my sisters and I would get into (physical) fights about who would get to play Little Big Planet (a very fun game where you play as a sock puppet). 

Nowadays we have cell phones. Everything has either grown with us or ceased to exist, Nintendo no longer makes the DS or the Wii anymore, but we have something even better: a handheld communication device with almost unlimited storage for all the games we could possibly ever want to play. A lot of the games today including, but not limited to, are Project Makeover, Granny 2, Hayday, and Clash of Clans, but there are puzzle games, painting games, racing games, anything you could want, there’s a game for it. Although we may not play on our DS or Wii anymore, we still have countless amounts of memories made from them.