Nintendo Diary
2026Mario and Lugi Super Star Saga (Gameboy Advance, 2003)--Completed Jan 2026OH MY GOSH. Marios Bros combined with my favorite gaming genre? This game was so...good... I picked this up to take a break from playing Elder Scrolls: Arena in the middle of 2025. It's not that I did not enjoy that game (I fully intend to finish it). As I told my husband, I needed something with a little "whimsy". And boy does this game have a lot of that. The Mario franchise holds such a special place in my heart for many reasons I can go into later. But this game switches up the formula of the Mario Bros franchise that must have been refreshing at the time. 
Once again, you will see that I try my best to emulate the original hardware but I didn't want to rob myself of the saturation of the actual graphics from this game. It is so colorful and you see this from the beginning with Cackletta's reveal. I might include the shaders for the Anbernic if you would like to try this emulation itself. 
Side note: I had a bit of an issue transferring my Anbernic save and Retroarch save on my computer so you will see some differences in my screenshot overlays/shaders. 2025Pokemon Blue Version (Gambeboy, 1996)--Completed Oct 2025
Last year, in the midst of studies, I decided to pick up this game again. My Anbernic machine makes me really want to go through all the classics. Despite the fact that I was alive for the whole Pokemon craze and could have arguably played this game, my parents weren't very keen on buying game consoles. So most of my experience of Pokemon was received through the anime and watching my friends play the game after church. My first proper playthrough of a Pokemon game wasn't until I bought my own Nintendo DS Lite in 2010 and played Pokemon Black. Since then, I have played Pokemon X, Pokemon Sun, and some of Pokemon Legends Arceus and Pokemon Sword. The 3D Pokemon games are okay but I have a sense of overwhelming nostalgia playing the old pixel games. Back in ~2019-2020 I played Pokemon Emerald on my husband's Gameboy SP and enjoyed it so much, I wanted to try and go back and play the original Pokemon Blue. I would finally experience what I missed in my childhood. I even used a Gameboy shader to really replicate that "authetic experience". 
Playing this game was certainly a challenge. I feel like the modern games do a lot more handholding and that left me at a disadvantage. I am not entirely sure if I would be a fan of this game on release if it simply did not have so much monster collecting potential. Small things such as finding the old man's golden teeth in the Safari Zone could not possibly be discovered without the help of a guide (or my husband, who has been playing these games since he was seven years old). I had to put down this game and pick it up several different times from frustration and the overwhelming GREEN pallette. At the same time, I feel like this game is only hard to come back to because I know that so many things will be improved on in later generations. As a child who had the old Vtech computer toys with green LCDs that entertained me for hours on end, I am sure I would have gone nuts over this game. It was fun to trade with my husband using the Anbernic's awesome netplay option. Anyways, my team that I beat the game with was made up of the following Pokemon. 
I named this guy Biffo based off of this > weird bear . He was really popular on Bluesky in early 2025 and I enjoyed the sillines of the name. Bulbasaur was the obvious starter because he is one of my favorite Pokemon of all time.     
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