About Me

Hi. I’m Jim, a Dad with a Deck. I’m just a pretty regular Dad who lives in Australia. I work for a living, I spend time with my family and I game when there’s time.

I’ve been gaming on and off for quite a long time and it all started for me with the Sega Mega Drive 2. I still vividly remember seeing Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the first time one Christmas Eve when my Dad insisted we fire it up and test it before the big day. I would have been probably 3, maybe 4 at the most. We didn’t have a lot while I was growing up. Despite that, my parents still managed to produce a gaming console for us on a big occasion every few years. It wasn’t always brand new, but that didn’t make it any less meaningful. We moved on from the Mega Drive to the original PlayStation to the Dreamcast and our final family console was the original Xbox.

I then spent a lot of my teenage years gaming on PC. We did have some low-to-mid end family PCs, but when I got my first job while in high school, my first few paycheques were spent buying the parts to build my own high-end PC. I then cycled through a bunch of different PC builds and eventually got sick of being stuck to a desk. From there, I moved onto gaming laptops with some of Alienware’s offerings. After gaming laptops I kinda just stopped gaming for a good few years there. Slowly but surely, I started playing again with a new MacBook Pro, surprisingly. I generally stick to older titles anyway so I was able to use Crossover to make my old Windows games work again with a good deal of success.

More recently, I owned a Nintendo Switch OLED which just didn’t quite hit for me. I did enjoy some of the first-party titles, a lot of the older titles and re-releases in the library but it just didn’t quite feel right. I moved on from the Switch to an Android retro handheld, the Ayn Odin Pro. The Odin Pro was honestly pretty great, but its limitations started to show when moving up in the console generations. Those other handhelds had their strengths, they really did, but they’re just not quite it.

Now, other than a few games on my Mac I spend most, if not all, my gaming time on the Steam Deck OLED. This thing is it. The Steam Deck has single-handedly revived my joy and enthusiasm for playing video games again, which what led me to create Dad with a Deck.