Game Boy

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The original Game Boy.

Game Boy is a portable handheld video game console created by Nintendo and released in Japan and the USA in 1989.

I first saw one during recess in elementary school, an older boy had one and was playing Super Mario Land. The very first time I played a Game Boy was during my fifth grade cast party of the Nutcracker Suite I was in, when I played Nintendo's Tennis. Later, my brother stole a Game Boy from a classmate in high school and I played Tetris on it before he either sold it or gave it back. I never did get a Game Boy, but I always wanted one even though I knew it was inferior to my coveted NES.

Later in my life, after Game Boy emulators matured, I started familiarizing myself with the catalog of games for the system and found that, other than about a dozen games, the bulk of the library was garbage. So, now I'm glad that I never did get a Game Boy, as the cost of batteries and money wasted on lame games would have prevented me from getting more games for the NES (though, I did buy a lot of trash games on the NES too).

Status

I do not own, or have ever owned, a Game Boy.

Games

See all Game Boy Games.

Of the games I've played on the system, I have particularly enjoyed:

Review

Good

  • The Game Boy is pretty comfortable in your hand.
  • Using a grayscale LCD was a good choice for saving battery life.
  • The system had stereo sound (through headphones) which was impressive at the time.
  • Most of Nintendo's first-party games were superb, and a couple of third-party games were also good.
  • The system was engineered very well, for everyone I know who held onto their Game Boy, they still work nearly 30 years later.

Bad

  • The LCD, though a necessary trade-off for battery life, looks pretty bad, and has a slow refresh rate causing blurring.
  • Most of the games released on the platform are pretty terrible, and most of the good games were just weaker ports from existing NES games.
  • A lot of games were released for the Game Boy with the same title of an NES game, so buyers assumed it would be essentially the same game, but they were actually entirely different games (Bionic Commando (Game Boy), Bonk's Adventure (Game Boy), Mega Man II (Game Boy), etc.). Nintendo should have forced alternate titles for games that were so different.

Ugly

  • Nothing

Links