Hello! My name is Brian Rubin, and I’ve been gaming since I was three years old, when I got my first Pong machine in the mid 1970s. My gaming life started with consoles and arcades, then moved to PCs, but one thing has stayed constant throughout: my love of handhelds.

From Game and Watches, to the Vectrex to the original Gameboy to the Atari Lynx to the Sega Game Gear, I’ve been obsessed with portable gaming as long as there’s BEEN portable gaming. With one exception…

When the original DS came out in 2004, I was going through a severe financial hardship, so I couldn’t afford one. Then, in 2006, I gave up gaming for two years to focus on my mental health. It was a great experience because when I came back to gaming, I found it more joyful than ever.

Then, in 2015, I got an original 3DS XL, which I wrote about here. I played it for quite a while, and eventually got it modded. It was then that I really fell in love with it. However, pre-Prozac, I didn’t stay with it forever.

Then earlier this year, thanks to a podcast called Expedition: Handheld, I was reminded how wonderful my modded 3DS XL is. However, after falling down the rabbit hole of the 3DS community, via Subreddits, Facebook groups, Discord servers and more, I found out that the original 3DS XL has a notorious hinge problem, in which they always break eventually.

So I eventually sought out a New 3DS XL, and snagged a Galaxy edition a little bit ago. Then, last month as I write this, I was able to snag a lovely 2DS as well. I am now fully-invested into the 3DS ecosystem, and am learning more about this wonderful machine all the time.