I’m one of those people who’ll take Link’s Awakening over ALTTP any day of the week hahaha
Excellent retrospective though! I’ve been a lifelong of handheld gaming yet have also felt kind of detached to the GameBoy, while still acknowledging its profound influence on the industry.
Keen to see what you think of Nintendo’s other handhelds!
I was going to say, I prefer ALttP but I'm still surprised how hard this review was on Link's Awakening, which offers a unique experience that is enjoyable in ways distinct from all other Zelda games.
Can't argue with this. I grew up with the Game Boy, but was never the biggest fan of it. Tetris and Super Mario Land were great, of course, but why play those when you could enjoy SNES?
Anyway, that said, I've recently discovered Mario's Picross on Game Boy, thanks to NSO and that is one of the most addictive games I've played in an age.
Lovely retrospective, but at over ten years older I do see the system with more rose tinted glasses 😆 I had a lot of gameboy and gameboy colour games.
There was Mario, Tetris, donkey Kong, harvest moon, Pokémon, battletoads, lion king, kid Dracula, Kirby street fighter 2 etc. I was obsessed.
Harvest moon on the game boy colour blew my mind. 🤣 I never had the consoles that used a TV apart from a sega mega drive so having a handheld Nintendo console in colour was amazing. Thanks for sharing and making me reminisce a bit :)
Great article. I was at pretty much the perfect age for the original GB, and I lived so far out in the country that my school bus rides were almost two hours of commuting a day, so I had to read a lot of books and play a lot of Gameboy. Obviously I'd have given the original model a 5 for sentimentality, but that's purely subjective. I think you sell the library a bit short by comparing it only to home console games, when the fact was it was really the only viable portable system for a very long time, and a lot of the games weren't just pared down imitations of the NES versions, but often very well-crafted variants redesigned in thoughtful ways for a smaller screen, less memory, and shorter play sessions. Link's Awakening, for example, doesn't at all feel like a 'compromised' ALttP, and has the best story and setting in the series until Majora's Mask, along with most of the best music period. Other standouts I'd strongly recommend are Gargoyle's Quest, Donkey Kong 1994, the Warioland games, and the Final Fantasy Legend games, all of which brought something that wasn't yet represented in their NES counterparts, on top of being fantastic handheld games in their own right.
And I'd also have put the hardware score up one notch, mostly because I think you're letting their age and status as collectables color [or colour] your perception of their ruggedness. Calling the original Game Boy The Brick was less about their weight and form factor and more about their durability, which was probably a huge relief for parents at the time when it turned out they could be thrown naked in a backpack and survive just fine. In fact, I think a huge part of why Pokemon was such a smash hit actually had less to do with the first gen's innate qualities than people assume, and more to do with the fact that such a wide swath of the gaming population had an intact, functioning Game Boy when it came out. I remember vividly all the boys in my class wargaming who would be on which bus for the big school trip to DC so we'd know who had to bring link cables for Pokemon trading, and I don't think anything like that would have happened if, for example, Pokemon or even a better game had released on the Game Gear.
I’m one of those people who’ll take Link’s Awakening over ALTTP any day of the week hahaha
Excellent retrospective though! I’ve been a lifelong of handheld gaming yet have also felt kind of detached to the GameBoy, while still acknowledging its profound influence on the industry.
Keen to see what you think of Nintendo’s other handhelds!
I was going to say, I prefer ALttP but I'm still surprised how hard this review was on Link's Awakening, which offers a unique experience that is enjoyable in ways distinct from all other Zelda games.
Can't argue with this. I grew up with the Game Boy, but was never the biggest fan of it. Tetris and Super Mario Land were great, of course, but why play those when you could enjoy SNES?
Anyway, that said, I've recently discovered Mario's Picross on Game Boy, thanks to NSO and that is one of the most addictive games I've played in an age.
Looking forward to the Gamecube!
Lovely retrospective, but at over ten years older I do see the system with more rose tinted glasses 😆 I had a lot of gameboy and gameboy colour games.
There was Mario, Tetris, donkey Kong, harvest moon, Pokémon, battletoads, lion king, kid Dracula, Kirby street fighter 2 etc. I was obsessed.
Harvest moon on the game boy colour blew my mind. 🤣 I never had the consoles that used a TV apart from a sega mega drive so having a handheld Nintendo console in colour was amazing. Thanks for sharing and making me reminisce a bit :)
Great article. I was at pretty much the perfect age for the original GB, and I lived so far out in the country that my school bus rides were almost two hours of commuting a day, so I had to read a lot of books and play a lot of Gameboy. Obviously I'd have given the original model a 5 for sentimentality, but that's purely subjective. I think you sell the library a bit short by comparing it only to home console games, when the fact was it was really the only viable portable system for a very long time, and a lot of the games weren't just pared down imitations of the NES versions, but often very well-crafted variants redesigned in thoughtful ways for a smaller screen, less memory, and shorter play sessions. Link's Awakening, for example, doesn't at all feel like a 'compromised' ALttP, and has the best story and setting in the series until Majora's Mask, along with most of the best music period. Other standouts I'd strongly recommend are Gargoyle's Quest, Donkey Kong 1994, the Warioland games, and the Final Fantasy Legend games, all of which brought something that wasn't yet represented in their NES counterparts, on top of being fantastic handheld games in their own right.
And I'd also have put the hardware score up one notch, mostly because I think you're letting their age and status as collectables color [or colour] your perception of their ruggedness. Calling the original Game Boy The Brick was less about their weight and form factor and more about their durability, which was probably a huge relief for parents at the time when it turned out they could be thrown naked in a backpack and survive just fine. In fact, I think a huge part of why Pokemon was such a smash hit actually had less to do with the first gen's innate qualities than people assume, and more to do with the fact that such a wide swath of the gaming population had an intact, functioning Game Boy when it came out. I remember vividly all the boys in my class wargaming who would be on which bus for the big school trip to DC so we'd know who had to bring link cables for Pokemon trading, and I don't think anything like that would have happened if, for example, Pokemon or even a better game had released on the Game Gear.
To be fair, you missed another big game besides Pokemon that defined the console: Tetris
It was a pack in and myself at age 5 had to fight my teenage/young adult siblings to use my Gameboy.