Game Boy Color

"What a great little thing."

The gameboy is the best-selling system of all time. It had a huge library of games, link up options so you could play 2 player games( a very few could have more. Faceball 2000 could have 16!), decent battery life, more than decent sound for its size and age and was indestructible in terms of damage in the event you dropped it, etcetera.

Still, it was a tad bulky, and although it was certainly portable you needed big pockets to keep it safe. So Nintendo released the Gameboy Pocket, identical to the GB apart from being smaller, needed smaller batteries ( 2 AAAs instead of 4 AAs) and had a clearer screen.

Still, games had to be slightly dumbed down as it only had 4 shades of grey and no colour to speak of. By dumbed down I mean you can't have a red key and a blue key, so levels usually had to be slightly redesigned to be be more simple to accomodate this.

Then came the Game Boy Colour. The GBC is slightly larger than GB pocket, but was concealable, and was compatible with every GB game made. It still had 2-player link up, around (I think) 15-20 hours on double AAs, headphone jack and same number of buttons. But it had colour. Suddenly a huge amount of options previously unavailable were waiting to be implemented. There were a lot of straight NES and arcade conversions, and the GBC had an infra-red port to exchange data, which was new. Games like Micro Machines and Zelda, which looked a little sorry for themselves in grey, were made in colour, brightening them up. The coloured key thing was no more, You could have 64 colours on screen at any one time. Lovely. It also had a crystal-clear screen.

As a result, developers became very interested in the opportunities, and the was a huge array of games.

Nowadays we have the GBA, and the ultra modern GBA SP. And DS will be out in a matter of months. But I still love my GBC. I intend to but a few more classic games for it, both colour and non-colour. I will never get to play all the games I want to play unless I get an emulator and appropriate ROMs. That will mean looking through hundreds of porn/game sites loaded with pop-ups and unreliable links. I'd rather stick with Ebay, thank you very much.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/04