This TikTok account dedicated to replaying Nintendo DS-era life sims is helping me relive my childhood

Cooking Mama — (Image credit: Nintendo / Office Create)

A TikTok account dedicated to revisiting some of my favorite childhood games has got me feeling like it's 2004 again.

TikTok user RetroNintendoGirl has been providing fellow Nintendo DS girlies a hit of nostalgia by posting videos of the games we all grew up playing. Everything from Nintendogs, Cooking Mama, New Super Mario Bros, Animal Crossing: Wild World, and more have made their way onto the account which now boasts 11.8K followers.

There isn't much to understand about this account, it started out with a video captioned: "POV: You got Nintendogs for Christmas" which saw RetroNintendoGirl opening a pink Nintendo DS Lite and booting up Nintendogs Dachshund & Friends for the "first time" - this hit me especially hard as I also had a pink Nintendo DS and the first game I played on it was Nintendogs Dachshund.

@retronintendogirl
♬ original sound - RetroNintendoGirl

The account's other videos feature throwbacks to the days of PictoChat (does anyone else remember coloring the entire screen in just so you could write with the eraser?), the Nintendo DSi, and more. Things really started to get interesting though when RetroNintendoGirl bought a bundle of Nintendo DS games from eBay and did an unboxing video.

Ever since then, followers have been requesting to see gameplay from several of these games including The Sims 2 Pets, Gardening Mama, Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training, and other DS staples - literally just for old times' sake. Although I played my chunky pink Nintendo DS to DEATH, it's still so nice to see RetroNintendoGirl's videos pop up on my For You Page just so I can pretend I'm 10 years old again.

I'm clearly not the only one to be charmed by this user's simple but extremely effective content either. Regardless of whether RetroNintendoGirl has someone's favorite childhood game or not, the user's followers are requesting that they showcase some of the game in question's gameplay. I'm still waiting to see WarioWare Touched and Dogz show up on my For You Page.

We can't turn back time, but you can reminisce about the early 2000s with our best DS games list.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.