My father is not a gamer by any sense of the meaning. He plays the mobile game kinda platform style shooters here and there but that’s it.
Was racking my brain for something to get him when for no reason I found myself digging up memories of being 4 or 5 years old sitting on his lap playing some flying shooter game. Him and my mom were 17 & 19 when they had me so I often forget how much of life they missed raising a little shitbrick that early in their lives.
So I really went out on a limb and felt like I was reaching with this present. Going so far as to get an extra Amazon card either for someone else if he liked it or for him if he didn’t like it.
Holy shit did he like it. Took me by full surprise. As soon as I showed him the library he was like a kid in a candy shop. So many stories and anecdotes about this game and that game. Told me how the “idiots” at megaman made sequels 1-8, then for reasons before he could google them, they skipped megaman 9 and went to megaman x, megaman x2, and megaman x3.
Told me how when I was around 6 or 7 I was obsessed with tecmo bowl, tecmo super bowl and tecmo superbowl 3. Which I remember. But what I didn’t remember was that I used to shut the Nintendo off anytime I (playing only as the Buffalo Bills) was about to lose the game, would quickly shutoff the Nintendo so not to ruin my perfect seasons. Then would throw a bitchfit tantrum over losing that my parents would have to take away the controllers from me cuz part of my tantrum would be biting the soft rubber controller cords. Which were not in their broke ass budgets at the time.
Anywho… that’s all. What I thought was a risky Xmas gift turned out to be a wonderfully appreciated gift accompanied by an amazing walk down memory lane with the rents.
I recommend just looking on a BitTorrent tracker for an archive of “every NES rom” (or whatever platform you want). At least until you start getting into platforms new enough to use CD-ROMs, the entire platform catalog – including every US/EU/Japan version of every game, and even obscure stuff like games downloaded from Satellaview or Sega Channel – is only going to be a gig or so.
You might even be able to find a single torrent with ROMs for every pre-CD console game ever made (including for arcade machines and oddball consoles like Intellivision and TurboGrafx-16), if you look hard enough – that’d be even more convenient.
(Getting a one-and-done complete collection of old home computer games – Windows, DOS, Mac, Apple II, Commodore 64, etc. – is harder because there’s no authoritative and discrete list of every game for those platforms, since they didn’t require first-party walled-garden licensing.)
Eh might be easier for initial set up but would be more inconvenient, for me personally, to have to scroll thru preloaded game libraries to get to the games I would like to play. I take value from the personalization of the game library over speeding up the setup. But if that isn’t the case for you, I totally agree the pre loaded libraries are great. They even come in tiers from what I’ve seen. So you can get, for example, 200 games for console X, 500 games for console X, or 750 games for console X. And go console by console.