Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap for GBA is my all time favorite from the series. It was made late in the gameboy development cycle, and feels miles ahead of other gba titles. Imo it’s the pinnacle of 2d Zelda.
Another great title is Fire Emblem. It’s not the first one, but a lot of them can be played out of order, and it’s tons of fun if you like turn based strategy.
Other mentions: Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen, Pokemon Yellow/Blue, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages, Link’s Awakening, Fire Emblem Sacred Stones, Final Fight One, and the Elden Ring demake
For my use case, I wanted a hybrid distro that is more rock solid/no hastle but also updated enough for gaming. Og Debian’s update cycle is too slow for some of the things I was doing with proton and wine, while rolling release distros like Arch/Manjaro broke or required fiddling too frequently for my taste. I feel like LMDE is the perfect balance for me personally, taking the rock solid stance of Debian even further than og Mint or Ubuntu, while also being updated enough to not have problems gaming.
Secondly, I greatly prefer flatpaks to snaps, so that’s another reason I stay away from Ubuntu or Ubuntu forks.
I also respect the ethos of Mint and Debian much more than “corporate” owned Ubuntu. It feels much better being on a Debian based fork rather than an Ubuntu based fork, in case Cannonical wants to do stupid things to their OS.
Overall I think it comes down to me just wanting to use Debian, but with more frequent updates, that isn’t Ubuntu.
I use my pc for similar purposes on Linix Mint Debian Edition. Basically mint which is based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. Steam and emulation have been a breeze on it with flatpaks and I’ve fiddled around with Lutris as well. A lot of features are plug n play in many aspects, but the os gives you enough freedom as to not feel restrictive.
I’ve found that the community is helpful and big enough to have all my questions answered. You might need to do some tinkering if you use an Nvidia GPU though. I have an all AMD system, and it was relatively easy to get and install graphics drivers, which will probably be your biggest hurdle/headache with other distros outside of PopOS.
It’s unofficial, but you can play it via browser at shin.itch.io/elden-ring-gb, or download it and play via emulator