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Reason #7: The Fish Museum - 11/06/25

Last Christmas, I received one of the best gifts I've ever gotten: the Anbernic RG35XXSP, a 3rd party handheld console meant to emulate the look and feel of the Game Boy Advance SP. It's so awesome!! I've used it to play all kinds of games (primarily early Pokemon titles) and I love to take it with me while I'm out and about! I love love love it!

It took me a while to realize something though. I don't have to limit myself to playing games that were released during the Gameboy era...there's an entire community of indie GB/GBA developers releasing their games online! I'm in a position where I can play these types of games on physical hardware! How cool is that!! And so begins my new journey: discovering and playing newly released Gameboy games in the year 2025.

I've spent a lot of today with the very first game I picked up for this purpose. I first played the beginning of Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish on browser after searching for picross games on Itch.io. I wasn't able to finish it for one reason or another, but now I get to experience it on my beautiful machine - and it. is. AWESOME.

An image of a handheld gaming console that resembles a Game Boy Advance. On it's screen is the titlescreen for the video game, Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish.

The game itself is a great picross game! The puzzles are a good mix of difficulties, ranging from 4x4s to 12x12s at it's most difficult. I love the fish-theming, I love the simplicity of its world-building, and I love searching the island for puzzles. It actually reminds me a lot of my time playing The Witness, which is so cool that a retro-style game can ellicit those feelings from me.

The tactile feeling of holding this game in my hand...it's interesting, because theoretically I could also play this game on my phone browser, which is also a physical object that I hold in my hand. But there is something about playing this on a handheld console that's forging a deeper connection in me. Regardless, it's been super fun and I can't wait to do this for a million more games in the future!

Even if you don't have a way to play it handheld, I strongly recommend checking out TaiFab on browser or via emulator!! You can also check out the dev, objectdiscret, on fedi!

(An extra note: today marks the first week of this month long project COMPLETE! I was sure I would've missed a day by now, but I've actually been really looking forward to writing these before bed. It's been very therapeutic :3 Let's see how much further I can keep the train moving!)

Today was: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ 3 out of 5 stars.