How many gaming systems do you have?  I mean all together, and not just your Xbox 360 or your PS3, I mean all of them.  Be sure to include those little hand held things that you had as a kid that you would play for hours during long car trips and that old Atari 2600 in the basement “somewhere” and, of course, your Desktop PC.

I may not have the latest gaming equipment, but I enjoy what I like to think is a nice assortment of gaming systems.  I have a PC that I use for gaming, an original Xbox, PSP, and when I am feeling nostalgic, an Atari Lynx.  I would say that the order that I described them in is pretty much the order that I use them in.  While this may not be a large list of gaming systems, I make up for it with a rather extensive listing of games for each.  You may be asking, why is he telling me this, “What has this got to do with anything?”  Allow me to explain.

Last week, I went to someone's house to drop off some items he had purchased from me via Craig's List.  When I got there I knocked on the door and waited.  A moment later, the door opened, and I introduced myself.  I handed him the items, and he asked if I would like to see his game collection.  Initially, I was concerned about a remake of The Silence of the Lambs: being lead down to a basement where I would end up chanting “It puts the lotion on” or something like that. This was not the case.  In fact, I was lead to a brightly lit room, one that if it were not for the absence of cigarette smoke, I would have mistaken for a corner pub. The room was filled with all sorts of gaming paraphernalia: in one corner was an Xbox 360 playing Gears of War and to the left, what to my wondering eyes should appear?  No, not eight tiny reindeer, but three full size arcade games.  There was a NeoGeo machine that I think had around 40 games on it, a Robotron 2084, and Thexider.  Instead of wallpaper, this room had bezels from other video games as wall art.

As it turns out, this guy works in the arcade game industry.  After a couple hours of chatting and playing video games, I finally headed home, and felt humbled by the small size of my own collection.  When I arrived, I looked over my collection, the PC, Xbox, and the handhelds, and I was feeling like the ugly stepsister in Cinderella.  I had some of the right stuff, but I just could not measure up.

Then, "it happened", as it always does.  While I was looking over my collection, I "had to turn them on" to "make sure that they still worked”.  Three hours seemed to fly by in mere moments.  When I finished playing Rygar on the Atari Lynx, Star Wars: Battlefront on the Xbox, and, of course, some Battlefield: Desert Combat on my PC, I was left with a big grin on my face.  I was feeling pretty good about my gaming systems, after all.

I fired up a cup of coffee to help bring my energy levels back up from my exhausting gaming session, and again I thought about my gaming collection.  I came to a conclusion about gaming collections in general  “It’s not how big it is; it’s how you use it.”  It really does not matter how many gaming systems you own, be it one or twelve, with three games or hundreds.  It is more important that your gaming systems do just one thing: make you happy.

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