The Blog Subscribe

Look at you there with you little supercomputer in your pocket that also doubles up as a phone with millions of apps and possibilities but some of us remember a time when things were just as sweet even without the bells as whistles of the modern day.

Of course I’m talking about the Nintendo Gameboy, the first truly portable games console, and what wasn’t there to love? It had an amazing screen. Just look at that resolution, a whole 160×144 pixels and such a lifelike colour palette with 4, I repeat 4 shades of grey. Gameplay was backed up with plenty under the hood too with an processor running at 4.19 MHz and 8k of internal S-RAM and 8k of video RAM. It really was a beast!

Levels of addictiveness were harnessed with that all time favourite, Tetris that came bundled with with the console. Who could resist rotating blocks down into a pit? Well I certainly couldn’t. I think that I went about 6 months before purchasing my next game, one because Tetris and its soundtrack was AWESOME but two the games were so damn bloody expensive.

Other games came along and became firm favourites. Super Mario Land, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Megaman. If you were really, really lucky you could get one of those dodgy Japanese import cartridges that had 30+ games on them that you could switch through at the touch of a button, the world of game piracy was alive and well.

And then there were the accessories. Oh the accessories! If you were a hardcore gamer and had some friends, which was a rarity being a Gameboy owner then you could fork out for the official 4 player adapter.

Or maybe your Gameboy wasn’t beefy enough for you. Maybe the speakers weren’t loud enough or you found the screen a little too small or maybe even you wanted to play in the dark. So what you needed young skip was the Handy Boy. It added additional speakers, a magnifying glass with light plus a joystick to replace the D-Pad if you fancied. Could you really ask for more?

Maybe you wanted to listen to the Nescafe Chart Show on a Sunday afternoon, of course you did. That’s why you needed the Gameboy Radio, it worked pretty much independently from the Gameboy itself apart from draining its batteries and playing David ‘Kid’ Jensen’s dulcet tones through those muffled Gameboy speakers.

Don’t even get me started about the camera and printer!

Over the years the Gameboy produced many spawn such as the Light, The Color and the Advance but nothing compared to that original experience. I was totally in love with this pixelated pleasure and still am today. Somehow anything modern just doesn’t compare.

How about you?

Author

Paul Wright

Gold Subscriber : $20.00 USD - monthly Silver Subscriber : $10.00 USD - monthly Bronze Subscriber : $5.00 USD - monthly