Nostalgia with the R36S

I picked up an R36S recently. It's a cheap Chinese handheld, roughly Game Boy Advance shaped, runs Linux, emulates everything up to the PS1, costs about £35-40. Bit of a whim purchase. Best decision I've made in a while.

But this isn't really about the console. It's about what I've been playing on it, and why going back to games from the 90s feels so genuinely refreshing in 2026.

Modern Gaming is Exhausting

I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here. You boot up a modern game and before you've even touched the actual game you're being shown a battle pass, a seasonal store, a starter pack, a limited time offer, a premium currency bundle that works out to a slightly worse deal than the one above it. It's a slot machine wearing a game's clothing. The whole thing is designed to extract money from you on a recurring basis and it's dressed up in enough UI that you're supposed to not notice.

I noticed. I got tired of it. So I went back.

The Good Stuff

Link's Awakening on the original Game Boy is still brilliant. Weird, charming, slightly melancholy in a way you don't expect from a Zelda game. You pay for it once and it just gives you a complete, thoughtful experience with no strings attached. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

The Addams Family on the Amiga is a cursed game that I have complicated feelings about. It's difficult for no good reason and I keep going back like an idiot, but at least when I fail it's because I'm bad at it, not because I didn't buy the right power-up pack.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation is Lara back in Egypt, trying something a bit different with the formula. Runs perfectly on the R36S. Looks better than I remember. There's a confidence to how it's designed, a game that trusted you to figure things out rather than nudging you toward a microtransaction every time you got stuck.

Wipeout 2097 is still one of the best racing games ever made. The Chemical Brothers and Orbital on the soundtrack, brutal difficulty, an incredible sense of speed. You unlock things by getting good at the game. Imagine.

Colony Wars might be the most underrated PS1 game in existence. Space combat, branching narrative, a real sense of scale and consequence. It was ambitious in a way that studios today tend not to be, possibly because ambition doesn't monetise as cleanly as a cosmetic shop.

MediEvil is Sir Dan, my boy. Funny and charming and janky in all the right ways. It knew what it was and committed to it completely.

And Rayman. Rayman was hard in 1995 and it's hard now. Nothing has changed and I'm fine.

The Point

None of these games want anything from me. They don't have a season ending in three days. They don't have a store. They don't send notifications. They don't have a VIP tier. They just have levels and music and a vague desire to entertain you, which is apparently all a game actually needs to be good.

I got most of these from completely legal places. Ahem.

The R36S sits in my pocket and asks nothing of me except the occasional charge. I'd recommend it, but honestly, the more important recommendation is just to go back and play the old stuff. It turns out a lot of it was genuinely great.

If you want one, I picked mine up on Amazon from a seller called Blidinner. No complaints. One important caveat though: the memory card it ships with is garbage and will die on you at some point, probably when you least want it to. Buy a decent replacement, copy everything over, and bin the stock one. Don't say I didn't warn you.