A big hand please... (Nintendo Gameboy (GB))

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Nintendo Gameboy (GB)
Date:	05/07/02 (292 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Vast range of games, One of the great Zelda games, Reasonable battery life

Disadvantages: Poor screen display, Slightly uncomfortable for long gaming sessions

I feel like a veritable dinosaur in writing about this product. After all, this isn't the Game Boy Advance, it's not the rather older Game Boy "Color" (now, wasn't that a rip-off? You needed a SNES as well!), it's not even the (in itself virtually pensionable) "Pocket Game Boy". No, what we have here is the machine that started it all - and, in many ways, blasted the entire handheld market from a niche sector for hardcore enthusiasts into the mainstream - ladies and gentlemen I give you the good old, 100-million-plus-selling, Nintendo Game Boy itself. Just let me drag myself away from playing with Alfred Chicken for a minute (no officer, it's nothing like that. Honestly. All you Dooyoo chickens out there, I assure you my intentions are entirely honourable) and I'll be right with you.

At first glance, the Game Boy looks rather dull. At second glance, it looks even duller - it's really not much more than a chunky grey brick with an LCD screen a couple of inches square, an even tinier (and, indeed, tinnier) speaker... oh, and a few buttons dotted about. The most exciting feature the thing can muster is probably the legend above the screen, which informs you breathlessly, "Dot matrix with stereo sound" - I assume this is for those Japanese people who think anything in English is utterly thrilling; "purple sackcloth tyre governor" and the like. Possibly not, at first sight, the most promising base for world domination. But the Game Boy is the supreme embodiment of that oft-abused line (especially by ISPs that are trying to charge you more for a pathetic service, not that I'm bitter, you understand, BT) "content is king". The Game Boy may be less than beautiful; one might even call it ugly (I would, anyway. It's used to it by now; you won't hurt its feelings) - but it fully deserves its place in the console hall of fame.

With a mass-market product such as this, it
was, of course, absolutely vital to make a big impression early on. Which means getting people talking about it (though not in a "anyone got the phone number for Watchdog?" type of way). Nintendo achieved this by selling many - in fact, probably most - early Game Boys bundled with a game. Not remotely original in itself, though it's always a good idea, as what's the point of a console with no games (except to show off with)?. What really made a success of Nintendo's sttategy was the identity of this bundled game - one of the very first games to hail from what was then still (just about) the Soviet Union. The author of said game was one Alexei Pajitnov; the name of the game... was... (oh come on then, all together now) Tetris!

So, within what seemed like a matter of moments, there was a vast base of millions of Game Boy owners all around the world. But one game, no matter how addictive - and the staggering number of Tetris clones (95% of which make Vic 20 games look sophisticated, but that's not the point) bear witness to its awesome brainwashing power - couldn't last forever. Nintendo being Nintendo, though, there was little chance of them packing up and going home at this point. The Game Boy market expanded hugely as it devoured the technically more advanced colour handheld consoles from Atari (RIP, though it's been revived a couple of times in a sort of "badge engineering" way) and Sega (who have also been forced out of the market after the mediocre Saturn and unpopular Dreamcast), and games flooded onto the shelves from all quarters.

Nintendo were strict about their "Seal of Quality" - it was very rare to see a game sold without one, though a few did slip through, especially in the console's dying years. Some might say that this stifled independent developers - and they'd have a point - but it does have to be said that you could be sure that you could buy a Game Boy cartridge, plug
it in, and *know* it would work perfectly first time, which at a time when setting up a PC game involved detailed knowledge of IRQ, DMA, EMS, TSR and quite probably TLA, was worth a lot.

It's always been the case that, while PC developers tend to be lazy and assume that the required spec will be along before they release the game, console (and 8-bit micro) developers have had to work within fixed boundaries for some years, meaning that ingenuity and innovation can come to the fore. The supreme example of this in the 1980s was the Sinclair Spectrum, and in the 2000s it was (and, to an extent, still is) the PlayStation. In the 1990s, the console to stretch to its limits was the Game Boy.

And before long developers were doing things with the little grey handheld which were miracles of programming. Games thought impossible to squeeze into such a small space were converted from other formats. Lemmings (I still have fond memories of first playing this, illicitly, on my school's Archimedes - remember Archimedes?) turned out to work brilliantly, the restricted dimensions of the screen bringing to life the confined spaces of the lemmings' caverns. (Shame about the appallingly annoying music, though!) One of the last black and white games before developers moved entirely to the colour platform was an astounding conversion of V-Rally. And, as many will recall, there was the fluorescent banana-yellow cartridge of Donkey Kong Land, which brought Game Boy graphical brilliance to new heights. And if, for some reason, you actually find fighting games interesting, there was - believe it or not - a conversion of Street Fighter 2 Alpha Turbo Plus Extra Ultra Multigrade Championship Ibble Obble Black Bobble Ibble Obble Out Special Edition with Pro-Vitamin B5 (well, you know what I mean).

It wasn't all straight conversions, though - there were plenty of original titles as well. On the platform side, I have a particular soft spot for the ultra-
cute Kirby's Dreamland... mainly because, incompetent gamer that I am, it's the only platform game I've ever completed without cheating! (Except for QL Caverns, a quite wonderful arcade adventure that sadly doesn't work on QL emulators because of its tricky programming.) Nintendo's own Golf, although rather simplistic as far as graphics were concerned, and a little "far East" in the animations ("Fight! Fight!" - remember "Korea Team Fighting" in the World Cup?), worked very well because of thoughtful course design (though the US course was absolutely vicious). Monster Max brought 3D isometric games a la Knight Lore to the handheld - just by looking at it, you can tell immediately that it's the work of the great Jon Ritman, who was also responsible for that multi-platform (even, with music, on the Amstrad PCW!) 8-bit classic, Head Over Heels. Unfortunately Monster Max was criminally undervalued by its publishers, and release was delayed for months, ruining its chances of widespread popularity.

One other game cannot pass unmentioned. Most platforms, whether they be computer or console, have one, perhaps two games that define them to future generations. For the BBC Micro, there is of course the legendary Elite, and also Geoff Crammond's (of Grand Prix 1/2/3/4 fame) first racing simulator, Revs; there are Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the Spectrum; MineStorm for the Vectrex (a vector-based console); and so on. The Game Boy has its superstar too (no, not Tetris), and it's so good that I even forgive it its unwieldy title. All rise please for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

This (its successor, Zelda DX, is so similar that I'll lump them together) is, by common consent, the best of all the Zelda games released up to that point, on any format. An RPG set in a vast, superbly realised fantasy world, Zelda has it all - fighting, adventure, humour, irritating subgames ("The
Trendy Game" - I ask you... but woe betide you if you take out your anger on the shopkeeper!), and even a battery backup that - gasp! - actually works. There's so much freedom in this game that the PC game one thinks of when playing it is Black and White. Frankly, if you own a Game Boy and don't have Zelda, then one can only despair....

Well, now you know about some of the games. What of the console on which you play them? Well, as Nintendo clearly recognised judging by the later Pocket versions, it is a little bit bulky unless you have large hands - your thumbs are sure to feel the strain after a while (especially if you're playing that classic button-basher Track and Field!), and you do start to notice the weight before too long. The four AA batteries (the Pocket version downsized this to AAA, which does make a difference) are an unavoidable weight, but even so the console feels very old-fashioned in its bulkiness these days. Having said that, the buttons themselves are surprisingly comfortable, and have lasted me a decade without any trouble, and the sockets for mains adapter (remember to set it to 6V or you'll blow it up!) and link cable appear still to be intact (though as I haven't used the link for years I can't be certain of that one).

The screen, of course, is the number one concern for most Game Boy owners, and it must be admitted that it's not the console's finest point. There's no getting away from it: it's too small, and too dim. A couple of inches in each direction ain't a great deal considering how cluttered some screens, especially on the platform games, can become. The best developers, of course, plan for this (Zelda, typically, is especially clear) but even so there are often problems with telling a moving foreground from a static background, or vice versa (insert some technogeek stuff about "parallax scrolling" [which was all the rage in SNES days, apparently] here). Va
rious magnifiers and lights appeared on the market over the years, and these do help somewhat, but you're unlikely to find them around now except in the small ads and on eBay, so you may have to make do with what you've got, in which case even with the contrast turned right up it can be a little hard on the eyes.

When you think of the fact that the monochrome Game Boy first appeared no less than thirteen years ago, in 1989 - a year, let us remember, when the British market was still dominated by Spectrums, Commodores and Amstrads; a time when the Amiga and Atari ST were considered high-end machines - it's quite remarkable that it's held out (with, beneath the bells and whistles, very little change) for so long. Over a decade in production is quite an achievement in the computer industry (unless you count Windows, I suppose, whose longevity might not be considered an "achievement" by some), but one that the little handheld quite deserves. The decaying body of the monochrome marvel has probably now at last ceased twitching (after a final, unexpected second childhood thanks to the power of the Pokemon), but it remains one of the great landmarks in the gaming industry, and many of the conventions we now take for granted were born when those blocks began to fall.

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