The Nintendo Lineage 4: Gameboy Family

Part 4, my review of the original Gameboy and its variants

I have to admit, I was umm-ing and ahh-ing over whether to include the handhelds in this series, and how, if I did, I was going to review lines of consoles with many console revisions. For the former? I obviously decided yes and for the latter issue, I decided I would award a score as a kind of average: hardware would be marked down if the revisions were generally terrible, or had significant issues not fixed until later, for example.

As usual I will be grading the original Gameboy Family based on its hardware, software, impact and my general sentiment towards the console; you’ll get the idea but if you’d like a deeper explanation, you can find it back in the first part.

This review will not include the Gameboy Advance or its variants, which will get their own entry in the coming weeks.

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HARDWARE: ** 2 Stars

Every version of the Gameboy, unfortunately, has some kind of crippling flaw.

The original Gameboy had, as one Sega Game Gear advert described, a screen the ‘colour of creamed spinach’ it ate batteries like Barry, 61 at the local greasy-spoon (that sentence will fly so far over the head of anyone outside of these islands) and it had no back or front light for its screen, making it impossible to see unless the stars aligned right and Mercury was in retrograde.

The Gameboy Light was Japan exclusive and although it included a screen light, it resembled a leaky glowstick, the actual image quality was still very poor too but it was slightly larger and a slick silver.

The Gameboy Color still had the gall to sport an unlit screen, at the original’s size once again but the image quality is a bit better and it had some extra features like an IR blaster.

So why have I scored the Gameboy above the Nintendo 64 in hardware if it has so many flaws? For three big reasons: the buttons, the form factor and the aesthetic.

Firstly, the buttons on the Gameboy family of systems, while they very slightly and have a bit of an odd layout, feel really good. They are responsive, clicky in that pleasant, retro Nintendo kind of way and on the Color they are rubbery and easy on the thumbs. Next is the form factor. I have to say, I find it a bit stupid how some Nintendo handhelds struggled to fit in a trouser pocket; that’s the whole point of being a handheld console! The Gameboy systems do not have this issue. Look at the Gameboy Color line (I hate not putting the ‘u’ in there, but that’s what they’re called) the variety of colours makes them so damn collectable and any child of the era has that shape burned into their brain. It’s iconic and I don’t use that word lightly.

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SOFTWARE: ** 2 Stars

I might be alone in this experience, especially given that my audience tends to skew older than I am but I have to ask, did anyone own more than 2-3 Gameboy games that weren’t Pokémon? Because I didn’t and I’m willing to bet that millions of other Gameboy late-adopters didn’t either.

That anecdote aside, I’m going to give the Gameboy library 2 stars firstly because the Gameboy’s 2 generations of Pokémon, generally speaking, aren’t really anyone’s favourites; Gen I is a famously, loveably broken mess and Gen II has some bad structural and progression issues and drags on a bit too long.

Secondly, there are hundreds of good Gameboy games… but with so little reason to play them today. There are some exceptions there like Metroid II and Super Mario Land but the majority of this library is like the diet-version of an NES game or a compromised offshoot, like the original Link’s Awakening which is really a devastatingly compromised, A Link to the Past-flavoured NES Zelda, and I’m saying that as someone who grew up with the game.

Portability is an appeal of course but these systems are old enough that I don’t want to risk dropping them on a bus or plane journey.

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IMPACT: ***** 5 Stars

The Gameboy would already score at least 3 stars on its own but the fact that this platform was the birthplace of the the most valuable intellectual property in the world propels it very easily to a 5 star rating for me.

Aside from that, I know there is a lot of love for this line of systems from children of the 1980’s. I’m only 25 so it’s hard for me to imagine the impact but I bet it was the coolest carrying a handheld NES to school, to sneak a few levels of Mario between class or at lunch. The games contained in Gameboy cartridges are smaller than a modern JPEG, so the amount of adventure and tens of hours of fun they provide is mind blowing and truly a sign of how far tech has come.

Talking retrospectively, the Gameboy Color is just one of those systems you have to have in your collection. It gets a smile from adults young and old who remember using it and can even charm younger people with its bright colour and the intrigue of black and white Pokémon. The Gameboy Light is also sought after by collectors, it isn’t region locked so anyone from any region can enjoy Chernobyl-green, glowing Gameboy games.

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SENTIMENT: ** 2 stars

I don’t like awarding such a low score but if I’m honest with both you and myself, there are really only a fistful of Gameboy games I bother playing and when I do? I use the Super Gameboy add-on for the SNES to play them instead; my Gameboy sits in a drawer, ready to be brought out as a conversation piece every few months and little more.

The pathetic light attachment leaves red streaks in my vision when it reflects off the screen making it a nightmare to use, I don’t want to spend (and cannot recommend anyone else does) about £150 to import a Gameboy Light from Japan and backlight mod kits for this series of handhelds are a thing of the past compared to the Gameboy Advance.

There is zero reason to play on any of these devices today.

But we should all respect the Gameboy and its revisions an what they did for this industry and for global entertainment. For millions of kids in 1989 and beyond the Gameboy was the first time video games: not Game and Watch trinkets, actual videogames left the TV and were put in the hands of the player, years later in 1996, the Gameboy became our portal into a different world too, a world of friendly little pocket monsters and gym badges, a world of child heroes taking on shady criminal syndicates and a world in which, although spoiled on my backlit GBA SP, I spent hundreds of hours, training my little 8-bit friends to conquer a blocky rival.

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FINAL SCORE: 11/20

My next episode will be on the beloved Gamecube, a review I’m sure many have been looking forward to.

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