"10 years and still champion of the Handheld market"

Gameboy Hardware
Nearly 10 years after it was released Nintendo finally put the system known as gameboy to rest. Every one of Nintendo's rivals (Sega on down) tried to compete with Nintendo's little green screen machine (with color systems no less) and failed miserably. How can color get its butt whooped by a machine that can display 32 different scales of green? Simple answer... The games.

Evolution of the Gameboy
Back in the golden age of Nintendo Entertainment System, somebody got the idea to make a ''portable Nintendo'', but the only drawback was the technology was very expensive to make the system color (more expensive then the Virtual Boy when it was first released), and Nintendo knew (atleast back then) that nobody really wanted to buy a $300.00 + game system. So they decided to go with a machine that could display 2 colors, green and darker green. Often times its necessity that is the mother of invention and in this case Nintendo knew that this ''Gameboy'' would have limits but it did its best to create fun games that wouldnt rely on ''good colorful graphics'' but were simply fun to play. This is what the ''Golden Age'' of gaming was about. Video Game machines were so limited back then that the only way to sell games was on good gameplay alone. Thats where you get games like Tetris and Super Mario Land2 and countless others.

Nintendo adds color (sorta)
Well now its been about 5 or 6 years and Nintendo's little Gameboy has taken out Sega's color Gamegear, and is the undisputed king of handheld. So what does Nintendo do? It decides that maybe they could design the gameboy to be a little smaller so it becomes easy to port around. So they release Gameboy Pocket and a Gameboy that is smaller then the original but bigger then Gameboy Pocket and the case had different colors. Still the screen is green but Nintendo wanted be different.

Ok This time will add color
And after about 9 years after the original Gameboy comes out, Nintendo finds a cheap way to make the gameboy color (so that it is actually like a portable NES now) and Nintendo calls it the Gameboy Color and they release different colors of the Gameboy Color (still with me?)
And as soon as they did that, Really bad games started coming out for it because (hey we can actually try stuff with the graphics now) And the focus went from gameplay to graphics. Needless to say Gameboy Color had a shelf life of around 3 years and then Nintendo released... The Gameboy Advance. (AKA Poritble SNES) And That is where Nintendo's little handheld has gone.

Original Gameboy Hardware

Screen 3: - Could display 32 shades of Gray (more of a Green though)
Sound 4: - Tiny speakers could only play midi music
Ease of Use 4: - The original case was pretty big and It was actually a little tricky not to damage it sometimes. Thats probably why they eventually made it smaller.
Games 10 : around like 900 now. Most of them were decent to ok But 100 or so are actually MUST BUYS, and should be fairly easy to find and fairly cheap.
Overall : 8 Its all about the games. Something Sega learned a little to late.

I dont recommend buying the Gameboy or any of its ''sequels'' simply because GameBoy Advance will play every gameboy game to date on that machine. Its even in color so those shades of green are no longer even an issue. The games though are some of the greatest titles around and beats the current crop of garbage they are making for Gameboy Advance (except for some SNES remakes) My only hope is the wont do to the Gameboy Advance what they did to GameBoy Color.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/22/01, Updated 09/22/01