About

Hey everyone! My name is Bruno. I’m in my mid-30s, I have my master’s in public administration, and I’m originally from San Jose, California, but I’ve lived in central Arkansas for most of my life (currently with my girlfriend, Tiffany, and our animals). I work as a state tax policy analyst and advocate by day. In my off-time, I love to play games, whether video games, board games, or basketball.

I originally started this site with the intention to share my professional work, but, after a false start or two, I’ve since pivoted to writing about games. Most of these will be older generation cooperative or 3-5 player (local) multiplayer games since those are the majority of games that I play.

I got into “retro” gaming in 2017 when I bought a Raspberry Pi and set up RetroPie as a cheap way to do something fun with my friends. We were really into board games for a few years (and still are) but got a little burnt out on what we had. New board games aren’t cheap, either. I really started to add video games into the mix after that.

There are a lot of great resources on old games, but very few of them focus on their local multiplayer experience. A lot of the time, people haven’t tried these games cooperatively much less with 3+ players. Often, if they have, their experiences are more from their childhood than today.

Now, I’ve played video games on PC and consoles for more than 30 years, on-and-off. But most of the games I play on older consoles today are games for which I have no specific nostalgia. I couldn’t write about them with that perspective even if I wanted to.

Luckily, I don’t want to do that! I’m most interested in looking at them how a retro gamer playing them today might feel. That isn’t to say I approach them thinking, for example, “would I rather play Turtles in Time or a modern game in this genre like Shredder’s Revenge?” I take for granted that those interested in playing a game on Super Nintendo at all will be willing to concede certain limitations in features or graphics.

But they say to write what you’d like to read and I want to see more perspectives on how fun these games are to play on the couch with other people today. Where possible, I hope to look at how reviewers received the games at the time and compare how it to how we (my gaming group) feel now.

I hope this blog can be useful in some small way for people like me who like retro games but who mostly play them with friends.