I love my Steam Deck more than my gaming PC.
Since I was about 6, I've been a gamer. (Lowercase g, of course) My first console was a Sega Genesis. We had a few games, Sonic The Hedgehog, John Madden football, and few others that I didn't really understand. Nothing gaming wise really resonated with me until I found my dad's Gameboy. I had to have been 6 or 7 and I found it in a drawer, which I knew was definitely in there to be hidden from me.
Some initial standouts at first were Tetris, and Super Mario Land 2: The Six Golden Coins. I played these almost non-stop, going through batteries like they were an unlimited resource. Which of course, they weren't. My battery supply was eventually limited and I tried everything, rubbing them together, freezing them, and just about anything you could think of.
As a kid, I lived on a military base in Germany, and my mom and the family are from a medium sized city in the Netherlands. On occasion, we would make the drive from Southwestern Germany to the middle of Holland. These trips would take around 4 hours, during which my mom would find ways to entertain me and my siblings. We'd play the "quiet game" or "the bridge game." You'd get a point in the bridge game if you were quiet between highway overpasses. (I totally get it as an adult.) When I had the game boy, the 4 hour trip seemed to just pass in an instant.
These days, technology has progressed to a point where terms like Long Distance Calling may be an alien concept to the youths. I bring this up, because as some people may remember, the original Gameboy had no light source on it. No front light, no back light. On these trips, I would lit the passing overhead street lights illuminate my gameboy. Playing seconds at a time. This is a sentiment among many a millennial.
When I was 7, Pokemon came out. (I got Red Version, and I will be forever a Charizard stan.) This took the world by storm, and I played all the time. This was the first game I remember playing with a saved time counter, which hit over 100 hours. I don't think as a kid I ever Caught 'Em All, but man we traded and a battled and played all the time.
Later down the line for Christmas, I got a Gameboy Color, (A yellow one!), and Pokemon Yellow as well. Then I got Pokemon Silver, and Pokemon Crystal, and I played them all the way through, multiple times. I would trade with myself between the Gameboy and Gameboy Color.
At some point, for Christmas I also got a Playstation 1. This was a game changer. I got Gran Turismo and even though I didn't know what to do I poked around and looked at the cars. Gran Turismo 2 was the first game that I actually remember playing with any actual objective. I'd play the licenses, and the races, and get the prize cars. My favorite game weirdly enough on the PS1 was The World's Scariest Police Chases. Mostly because the fact that it was the first open world driving game I'd ever played.
In Christmas of 2000, I got a Playstation2. When I moved to the states in 2001, we used it to play DVD's and games. The only game that I really remember playing on PS2 was Gran Turismo 4, Simpsons Hit and Run, and the Grand Theft Auto games.
When the Xbox came out, we all played Halo at my friend's house. This was literally a game that changed everything for me. It was fun, and I was playing with friends. For the first time it wasn't a single player game, but I was in fact playing games with others and having a great time. Boy, was I awful at it, and I still am to this day. It was fun though.
When I was in High School, I got my first computer. I'd pirate and play games on it, and I eventually fell into the World of Warcraft. In the 20 years it's been around, I've played thousands of hours of Warcraft.
The thing that drew me to WoW, was that High School was a lonely time. At the beginning of High School, I'd been living in New Jersey, but my dad had moved us all to Florida and I had a hard time adjusting. WoW was just a comforting place to be and I didn't have to think much. Hours came and hours went, and I wasn't playing to enjoy, I was playing to escape how crappy I thought my life was. This continued mostly through my early 20s.
Once I started working full time, and making serious money I built a gaming computer, with all the bells and whistles. At the time fully built, and nothing that it couldn't run. It's now about 7 years old and finally starting to age. I've played plenty of games on it, but I've never been a "PC Gamer." I don't really care about frame rates or high resolutions. I don't need 8k resolution at 240 frames per second. I just want something to run and look good.
Gaming kind of got away for a while. I started working jobs where I was at a computer all day, and eventually the last thing I wanted to do was spend all day looking at the bad screen, to come home and look at the good screen. So my computer eventually got powered off, and I would just leave it be.
In 2020 when the Pandemic hit, I ended up gaming a lot more. I played WoW again, I finished Red Dead Redemption 2, and just a bunch of other things. But, eventually I found my old gameboys. Man, how I'd missed those. I like, many other went down the rabbit hole of modding them.
However, I never played this. This was fun to build but not play. It got tucked in a drawer. Eventually, I just moved on. In 2023 we moved from Florida to Oregon, and through my first Oregon winter I got a Steam Deck, and man it was exactly what I needed. My entire steam library, available in a handheld. It brought back the feelings I had when I played my Gameboy as a kid.
One thing I've come to love as an adult is tinkering with my things. The Steam Deck is perfect for it. Initially, I bought a 256gb LCD model, but have upgraded it to a 1tb Hard Drive. I've installed Emudeck to play older games, and it's just the ultimate gaming device. It also runs on Linux, which absolutely rips.
The most important thing to me though, is that after a long day at work, if I want to game, I don't have to hog the TV, or sit behind a computer. If I want to play the Deck, I can sit on the couch next to Fiance while she watches TV, and it's honestly just great.