this hand-held gaming device It’s incredible. This is gaming hardware that’s basically sent from the future to the ’80s. Playing a video game of good quality on the Game Boy, even if it lacks color, feels like some Tomorrowland game from my childhood. I have a Game Boy. I lived in that early era. Everyone wants a Game Boy. To exaggerate a bit, it’s unbelievable that we can even buy such a thing.
However, that was a very different time, and what was considered “good” in that era was very different from how we judge video games today. It’s been more than 30 years since those good days, and it makes me a little sad to say that going back was a mistake.
Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man now, but revisiting the original Game Boy games a few years ago (on the original hardware) made me scratch my head and wonder if the passage of time has made all the games I love obsolete — Relic you might check out in Retro Gamer’s museum/page and nod consciously (or even affectionately). Even though my brain memory was saying “I love this game so much,” my brain was there thinking and saying, “How did I play this game? It’s not good.”
classics nailed to the wall such as super mario land and Metroid 2Well, today’s game simply doesn’t feel as good as it did in the early 90’s. To be fair, Tetris is still great, but I’d much rather play one of the more feature-rich, visually spectacular versions. Your experience with Game Boy games may vary, but I honestly think that the combination of hardware limitations and game design of the era made many early Game Boy games (pre-Game Boy Color, of course) pretty playable cumbersome.
The Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, was one of the greatest consoles of all time—and still is—even though the original screen was so bad I almost turned the system off entirely. The SP solves that problem, and now you can pick up a GBA SP and find an absolute treasure trove of great games to enjoy.
While playing OG Game Boy titles might give you a strong nostalgia that blows your magnifying glass out, GBA titles do a fine job. The combination of more powerful hardware and modern game design has resulted in a handheld computer I could only have dreamed of a few years ago. While writing this article, I picked a bunch of games without thinking too much, top to bottom hits: The Legend of Zelda: Shrunk Cap, Metroid Fusion, Golden Sun, WarioWare, Mario Kart: Super Race Tracks, F-Zero: Max Speed, and Mario & Luigi: A Superstar Saga. Absolutely stunning scene.
Apparently, there’s a reason Nintendo decided to put Game Boy games in the standard tier for Switch Online members and GBA games as part of the expansion tier: the GBA games are largely great, with some historic titles, and the Game Boy Gaming is the wonder of Game Boy gaming needs to stay in a bygone time. Do fire up your Switch and play some Game Boy “classics” for that nostalgic vibe we all love, but you’d have a hard time convincing me that those games are still good and worth playing today.
