The Game Boy was incredible. It was a bit of gaming hardware that was essentially sent to the ‘80s from the long run. To have video games of the standard they’re on the Game Boy, even with its lack of color, felt like some Tomorrow’s World stuff back after I was a small child. I had a Game Boy. I lived that early era. Everyone wanted a Game Boy. To be quite hyperbolic, it was unbelievable that this was a thing we could buy.
It was a totally different era, though, one where what was accepted as “good” is vastly different to how we judge video games today. Over 30 years have passed since those wonderous days, and it makes me greater than a bit of sad to say that It was a mistake to return.
Possibly I’m only a grumpy old man, now, but revisiting original Game Boy games a couple of years back (on original hardware) left me scratching my head, wondering if the passage of time had made all those games I loved grow to be obsolete – relics you may take a look at in a museum/pages of Retro Gamer and nod knowingly (and even lovingly) at. For as much as my brain memories said “I bloody love this game,” my brain thoughts there after which were saying, “how did I play this back then? It’s… not good.”
Nail-it-to-the-wall classics, reminiscent of Super Mario Land and Metroid II, simply don’t feel nearly as good to play today as they did within the early ‘90s. Tetris continues to be great, to be fair, but I’d quite play one in every of the more feature-rich, visually spectacular versions. Your mileage with Game Boy games is more likely to vary, but I truthfully think that the hardware limitations combined with the sport design of the era makes lots of those early Game Boy games (definitely pre-Game Boy Color) quite a chore to play.
The Game Boy Advance, alternatively, was one in every of the best consoles of all time – and it still is – despite initially having a screen so bad I almost binned the system off completely. The SP fixed that up, and now you could possibly pick up a GBA SP and find an absolute treasure trove of wonderful games to enjoy.
While playing an OG Game Boy game might provide you with nostalgia whiplash so fierce it’ll knock your magnifying unit clean off, GBA games delay brilliantly. More powerful hardware and modern game design combined to make a handheld I could only dream of just a couple of years earlier. In writing this I picked a bunch of games without an excessive amount of thought, and it’s top to bottom bangers: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Metroid Fusion, Golden Sun, WarioWare, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. Absolutely amazing scenes.
There’s clearly a reason Nintendo decided to place Game Boy games on the usual tier Switch Online membership and GBA games as a part of the Expansion Pack tier: GBA games are largely great, with some all-timers, whereas Game Boy games are a miracle of the time that must be left prior to now. By all means fan the flames of your Switch, throw on a couple of Game Boy ‘classics’ and get that hit of nostalgia all of us love, but you’ll have a tough time convincing me those games are still good and value playing today.