In the process of setting up a new office and store room, I've been trying to sort through a games collection bolstered to an embarrassingly large scale via a lifetime love of interactive games and 15 years of reviewing the latest releases.
Friends, family, neighbours and the local op shop will receive some of the spoils, but I've found it an interesting exercise contemplating what I am not willing to let go of.
I would certainly never part with my copy of Ocarina of Time signed by Miyamoto himself, nor my Drum Mania kit imported from Japan, and surely not my noble Vectrex, even if it makes a disconcerting dog whistle-like squeal when you turn it on.
It's even hard to part with some truly awful games, like Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness, Rise of the Robots, ET or Driver 3. Sometimes you have to play a really bad game to appreciate the good ones.
But it is certainly easy to say goodbye to a myriad of bland platformers (remember Zool, Rascal, Vexx, Clockwork Knight, Bug, Zapper, James Pond or Alfred Chicken?) plus countless indistinguishable EA sports simulations and abominations like the Commodore CD-32 and Sega 32X.
Now the archeological dig is nearly complete and a new home for most of the antiquities has been found, I have finally produced an answer for a question I had always thought stupid and irrelevant - what is the best games system ever?
The answer is an intensely personal one, and for most people likely to correspond with a golden age in their life, like how a man's sense of fashion so often seems to get locked forever in their period of greatest happiness. (Going by my Dad's green flares, purple velour jacket and moustache, he had a wonderful time in the 70s.)
Many pundits will say the NES is the greatest console ever for single-handedly reviving the videogame industry after greed almost destroyed it, while others cling to the Atari 2600 or Commodore 64. The Dreamcast is probably the most revered of modern machines, probably as over-compensation for the collective yawn when it was released.
But this nostalgic gamer has discovered that it is the Nintendo 64 which would be the hardest machine to part with. It certainly cannot complete with the size or diversity of the software catalogues of terrific systems like the PSone and PS2, but N64 is my favourite console ever because of the astonishingly high quality of its leading titles.
The likes of Super Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Goldeneye, 1080 Snowboarding, PilotWings 64, Perfect Dark, Paper Mario, Wave Race 64, Mario Tennis and Mario Golf remain supremely pleasurable a decade on.
Even flawed gems like Banjo-Kazooie, Star Fox 64, Blast Corps and Mario Kart 64 produce a big smile (although Nintendo has sapped any initial enthusiasm for Mario Party with its increasingly tedious yearly clones).
It's funny to look back at my feature for the launch of the
N64 and see all the reasons that the machine was considered a "disappointing failure" by many critics were actually all obvious right from the start, but now they seem unimportant next to the outstanding quality of the system's games.
It's a shame GameCube lacked the N64's sparkle, but given the rapturous reception that Wii has enjoyed, it certainly has every chance of burrowing into the hearts of many gamers and becoming their favourite system of all time.
Now that my therapy session is complete, I'm keen to hear about your favourite console or gaming system…