GAME BOY MEMORIES
Whilst
growing up I was lucky enough to own all 3 popular hand held consoles
at one point or another. I remember playing Sonic The Hedgehog,
Wonder Boy, and GG Shinobi on the Game Gear's bright colour screen. I
can picture sitting on the living room floor of our old family home,
tucked behind a sofa so I could be near to the power socket, playing
Batman Returns and California Games on Atari's behemoth, the Lynx.
But most of all I remember Nintendo's monochrome legend, the Game
Boy. Like every other kid on the planet I owned one – even having a
ridiculous carry case for it, complete with shoulder strap – and it
went everywhere with me. It was like an extension of my own body,
much like the way people seem to treat mobile phones today, except
this was strictly for gaming only. And boy, what games they were.
While the other two handholds had some great games, the Game Boy was
my weapon of choice. I would play Super Mario Land and Revenge of The
'Gator religiously, and God forbid anyone should try to prize my
cherished console from my hands while in the middle of a game.
Tetris - The game everybody on the planet will recognise
While
the Atari Lynx was an impressive beast, with 16-bit power and the
best graphics of all the handholds, I found the selection of games
pretty lacklustre and the fact it was so enormous and drained
batteries like crazy made it only worth playing while near a pocket
socket (defeating the point of a portable console somewhat). Sega's
Game Gear was wonderful, what with it essentially being a portable
Master System, and I loved playing the classic Sega arcade games on
the move. But again, it was slightly too large for its own good, and
the screen was quite blurry. So it is no surprise that Nintendo's
machine won the hand held war of the 90's.
Super Mario Land is a fantastic spin-off series to the
main home console Mario games
Over
the period I owned one I amassed a huge library of games. Some great
(Super Mario Land series, Gargoyle's Quest, Revenge of the Gator,
Duck Tales). Some bad (Spiderman, Bill & Ted's Excellent
Adventure and any other movie license). But overall it was one of the
greatest machines I owned. I was even duped into buying many of the
ludicrous accessories that you could purchase at the time. Nonsense
such as strap-on lights and magnifying screen attachments that made
the poor machine resemble something from a cheap Sci-Fi B-movie, and
never worked as well as they promised on the adverts or box. Nintendo
released the Game Boy Pocket in 1996 which improved the screen, both
in quality of the image and size (but still no back-light), but by
this stage I had moved on to other games machines such as the Sony
Playstation and Nintendo 64.
NES classics such as Duck Tales (above) and
Mega Man 2 (below) were ported to the hand held
My
interest in portable gaming as a whole had diminished, as I never
bothered with the Game Boy's successors, the Game Boy Colour (1998)
or the Game Boy Advance (2001). I didn't even get around to getting a
Nintendo DSi and Sony PSP until 2011. So, for me, my memories of
portable gaming is confined to the first 3 major players, as well as
the handful of Game & Watch and various cheap imitation LCD games
that were purchased for me by my father to keep me entertained on
trips abroad.
Nintendo's wonderful Zelda series debuted on the
system with the epic, Link's Awakening
More portable RPG-lite action in Capcom's Gargoyle's Quest
- a spin-off from their Ghosts 'N Goblins series
Reviews
Now
that I have a taste for Game Boy gaming again – playing them via
emulation on my Nintendo Dsi XL - I will be looking at some of the
games that hold the fondest memories for me, as well as ones I missed
first time around that I would like to bring to your attention.
Starting with Amazing Penguin, which you can read about here.
