Game Boy

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JaySevenZero
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Game Boy

Post by JaySevenZero »

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As some of you may have already heard, we're creating a series of podcast specials, this time the focus being on the consoles themselves.

The plan is for the podcast to encompass the history of the chosen system from launch through its evolution, mixed with the panels personal perspective of their time spent with it. There will also be discussion of some of the stand-out titles for the system.

As with the regular Cane and Rinse podcast, we'd like to include contributions from you, our community, too. So we've created this sub forum and thread so you can leave us your most memorable moments spent with the systems we're covering.

Our third show will be covering the Nintendo Game Boy.

All being well, we'll be recording this December. So If you have something to say about this system this is where you should leave it.

As with the others, this will be also a timed exclusive for our Patreon, with each special being released on our regular feed only once the next one is published, so if ever there was a time to give us just 75p a month, this could be it! :)
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duskvstweak
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Re: Special No.3: Game Boy

Post by duskvstweak »

Is this going to go all the way to the Gameboy Advance, then?
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Special No.3: Game Boy

Post by ratsoalbion »

No, this is the original Game Boy (and the ‘Pocket’ version).
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Quiet Paul
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Quiet Paul »

The original Game Boy always reminds me of a holiday I had when I was younger. It was in Tenerife with my parents, brothers and my gran. One of the last real positive memories of my gran.

I owned a Game Boy but rarely played it. Since we were now abroad with no TV based gaming platform, the GB would have to do. I played the crap out of Pokemon Blue and fell in love on that holiday with that franchise. My dad even managing to nab a bootleg (camcorder in a cinema) VHS copy of the Pokemon Movie from some other Scottish guy in Tenerife.

-I must have been about 9-10 years old, will find out for sure and edit this bit-

Hours of sunny Spanish fun passing me by as I was nose-deep In becoming a Pokemon master. Fighting more with the lighting though so I could see the screen past the glare.

I still remember my gran talking to me about the game and hilariously attempting to play the game at one point. She eventually convinced me to put the GB away and have some fun in the pool before the holiday’s finished. I always took her advice as she taught me many other things such as tying my own shoe laces, which I appreciate as I’d otherwise be stumbling around to this day. I remember putting the GB away and jumping in the pool and pretending to be a water Pokemon. I’d arise from the splash waves and fire a stream of water from my mouth, removing hit points from my mum her mum’s life bars. Essentially I thrashed around for a minute, stood up and spat on my family. As ye do!

So my first real go with an original Game Boy was on this holiday and just the words Game Boy brings back memories of that time. A happy memory with my grandmother who passed away not too long after. Ironically, the memory of hearing that news is also linked to a video game, which I’ve never played again since that day. Not GB related though.

I went on to make good friends in School playing Pokemon, aiming to achieve all 150! ‘Til someone, who had attended some special event somewhere, came in with a Mew. I. Was. Jealous! She let me borrow the Mew for a weekend though so that was nice of her. I never did get all 150 but I got close, made some good friends at the time and made a few memories with my gran.

The Game Boy is not currently in my game collection anymore. Might have to change that and sling a bunch of the other titles I used to own in there. Nostalgia.
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Re: Special No.3: Game Boy

Post by dezm0nd »

ratsoalbion wrote: August 29th, 2018, 10:00 pm No, this is the original Game Boy (and the ‘Pocket’ version).
Is the Colour considered a different beast, then? I always thought it was an extension of the original and pocket.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by ratsoalbion »

Tough call actually, we could potentially roll it in. It had its own library though and was around for four years.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Spacefarer »

I'd personally consider the Colour to be a separate console, since it had its own games that weren't compatible with the previous system. If the Colour games could be played in black and white (or green and green), then it'd be a different kettle of fish.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by ratsoalbion »

Some can, but not all.
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Suits
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Suits »

There was a sort of half way house between that, which were boxed in original GameBoy boxes but with a Super GameBoy compatible logo on them.

Which in reality just meant there was a file on the cart that prompted a palette picked out by the devs for Super GameBoy use on the SNES.

WarioLand 2 came in two versions, a GameBoy version and a GameBoy colour version.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by matten zwei »

The GameBoy was the very first console i've ever owned. To be precise, I've had a lousy Tiger-Game-And_watch-Knock-Off with a Star Trek game, but that was as fun, as setting a timer on a digital casio-watch. Anyway...

Back in '96 I desperately wanted a Super Nintendo. I didn't care for the Upcoming Ultra64, PlayStation or Sega Saturn. The Super Nintendo was everything I wanted. But my parents didn't care for video games at all. But when my friend got a GameBoy, I kept asking my parents for it. My parents would eventually compromise: "At least we won't have to fight over the telly." the might have thought. So at the Game Boy-Pockets release, I got one of those, with an AC-Adapter, which meant, that I would never use Game Boy anywhere else than home. My parents thought I was caring for the environment by refusing to use batteries. To be honest, I didn't care for the Game Boys portability.

Since my Dad was a Star Wars-Fan, my parents bought me the ridiculous hard Star Wars-game. As a 8-year old German, I had to guess what the english text-boxes meant and just accepted, that I didn't understand anything. But I never got past the Millenium Falcon stage and left R2D2 and the lightsaber on Tatooine.

With my brand new Game Boy, I became apart of a Game Boy-community at school where we would swap games to each other. We had a lot of game-collections with tens of games on a single cartridge. When I've played 8 of them, I realised, that the developers have just changed the names, so those collections contained Super Mario Land, a tank-game, donkey kong land and several others with multiple names.

My favourite game on the system might be Super Mario Land 2. The graphics und gameplay were pretty close to Super Mario World. The Zelda game was quite dark and the music of the bubble-boss at the end, gave me nightmares. I did play the first pokemon-game, which actually holds up pretty well to this day, I think.

My Game Boy-era ended, when I finally got a PlayStation in '98. It is hard to go back to Game Boy-games nowadays, because it always reminds me, how badly I wanted a Super Nintendo.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Mr Ixolite »

The Gameboy is the epicenter of my gaming hobby. It was the first console I owned, and I can still feel the influence on my gaming preferences to this day. it was the first console I kept

I was probably around 5 years old when I was gifted my first videogame console ever, in the shape of agrey brick called the Gameboy. Like so many others my first exposure to its library was Tetris, but I can’t say it left much of an impression on me. Good for passing the time for a bit, but too abstract, too impress my young self. Things changed drastically at Christmas however, where I recieved Super Mario Land, and spent the following day trying to surmount the games first goomba. It seemed a herculean task at the time, as I had to learn the very fundamentals of gaming: that I needed to go right to proceed, that things would kill me if I touched them, that my avatar could jump…I remember the excitement I felt as I not only vaulted that goomba but crushed it underfoot; I was taking the first steps on my Gaming journey.

However, even though I’d spend hours trying to beat Super Mario Land, the Gameboy still hadn’t truly wowed me. It still felt a bit like Tetris, an abstract time-passing tool. That all changed during a Road Trip to France, where my dad had bought something with which I could pass the time: A game with a weird blue robot called Mega Man II (Not to be confused with 2). The game was german, and its lush manual was no help in setting up its story or characters- but it didn’t matter. The sprite art was miles beyond Mario, the music was catchy, and the game set my imagination on fire. I was a good robot, there were bad robots, and I was gonna beat them all even if it ended up taking untold months and batteries to do it. I still remember how I beat the four robot masters, confronted Wily in his castle…and got four more stages dropped on me before pursuing Wily into outer space. It blew my tiny mind. Mega Man was the first videogame world I can remember getting immersed in, and the first game that taught me the satisfaction of perseverance, and overcoming a challenge.

Sidebar: as someone whos still playing Mega Man games 26 years later I find handheld to be the ideal format for the series, with Mega Man IV for the Gameboy standing as the finest hour of the franchise. It does so many things better than any of the main entries, and I will happily go into elaborate detail explaining how if anyone is interested.

Following Mario and Mega Man II I moved on to Wario Land and Kirbys Dream Land 2, which introduced me to the idea that a game could feature content beyond merely beating the final stage. Kirbys in particular taunted me by featuring a completely new Boss Sprite during the credits, simply labeled “???”. Who was that guy? Well I had to 100% the game to find out, hadn’t I…

By the time the Gameboy had finished educating me in the ways of gaming, I had gone through two “bricks” (three if you include my sisters) one Pocket and one Color, and my gaming preferences were clear: A good game had a distinctive art style, some sort of context, a certain level of challenge, was a 2D platformer, and most importantly: It had levels. That is to say, it had bite-sized challenges that ensured that in the time it took to drive to my grandparents, I could make some sort of progress. And as an adult, with all the time-consuming responsibilities that follow, this principle holds more true than ever.

Top 5 games:
- Mega Man IV
- Wario Land (super Mario land 3)
- Kirbys Dream Land 2
- Castlevania II: Belmonts Revenge
- Pokémon Red
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Suits »

It must have been the summer of 1991, I would have been around 7 and I can vividly remember being in my Grandparents house in Romford, Essex, during the summer holidays.

My Grandmother called out, “Quick, a Magpie is flying off with the GameBoy !”, which sent me scrambling like a child possessed into the garden where I’d made a makeshift tent with the washing line, a bedsheet and a few kit-kats.

Of course, this was a cruel ruse, designed to tease me over my brand-new Gameboy that my grandparents had bought for my upcoming Christmas gift. I’d been given it that day as part of the old school way of making sure that it worked first, then to put it back into the box for Christmas later that year.

It was later decided to let me keep the new device as later that summer holiday I was going on a family holiday down to Weymouth and it would have kept me occupied on the way down in the car.

I have many other wonderful memoires of my GameBoy, which always seemed to be around in some sort of fashion, regardless of what my main home console was. Many times this was a weapon of choice for school toy days and playground swap shops.

Another very vivid memory is the first time I played Mystic Quest (Final Fantasy Adventure/ Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden) on it, to which I borrowed from the girl next door who said she didn’t like it and that you can’t just “have a quick of go” of it. Something that looking back at now is quite profound for a pair of ten-year olds.

I’d named the characters Nick & Sian (my ten-year old girlfriend at the time) and fell deeper in love with a console and a genre than I ever had before. I even remember the place I was when it all clicked for me, sitting on the top but one step on my stairs in my house, leaning onto the landing with my GameBoy in hand and landing light above me. Age, console and application all suddenly clicked for me.

Then there are some of the other success stories of games that I played and loved on the GameBoy, Revenge of the Gator, Ducktails, Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2, Zelda:LA and Super RC Pro-AM to name but a few that stick out to me.

Not all games were always so successful however. One Christmas, I asked for Nigel Mansell’s World Championship, which at the time was big up-coming title – albeit not on the GameBoy.

That awfully prickly feeling of dread, when you suddenly realise after 5 minutes that the game you’d asked for, and would ultimately be playing for the next 6 months - is bad.

The Mortal Kombat port held a similar fate for me.

I can also remember being ill once, with Shingles as it turned out and had to spend some time in hospital as a little child. To try and sooth me my mother bought me the GameBoy ASCII Carry-All DLX, to which I absolutely adored. It held your games, Maglite, spare batteries and four stacks of four games in their cartridge cases. I used to spend ages arranging them and then re-arranging them into some sort of order or what looked best.

As the years ticked by my Gameboy started to become faulty on the power coupling, which made it very temperamental; and to try and stop the connector fouling and critically halting play instantly, I had to wrap the cord around the Gameboy itself to try and attempt a more solid connecting resulting in the most awful monstrosity of a mess. Which ultimately ended my affair with the Original GameBoy.


The sound of a GameBoy cartridge in its case knocking into others is delightful. I have quite a few loose GameBoy games now, I often rescue ones I see floating about at car boots sales for cheap, or get given ones that have been found down the back of cupboards or wardrobes. I’ve even bought a box of empty official cases for homeless cartridges that I find. I keep them all in a Nintendo zipped soft case that I often just run my hands through and wonder what a 10 year old Suits would have thought of that sight.

A wonderful console that really nailed the market at a time when there wasn’t much that could get close to it. A special system for a special time in gaming.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by DomsBeard »

I bought a Gameboy from someone at school for £20 with Tetris. I had no money to buy anything else and my local indie did not rent Gameboy games so I had many nights when I should be asleep playing Tetris with my headphones in till the batteries ran out and this version of the famous tune I must have heard 1000's of times

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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by DomsBeard »

Which reminds me I bought this classical piece of music on tape on the back of it:

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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by duskvstweak »

I still remember the day my parents gifted me the original Gameboy back in 1991, me sitting in the car as they talked outside for what must have been an hour, but for what seemed to be no time at all for me. The handheld had come with Tetris and Super Mario Land and I latched on to Tetris with ease (Mario was a bit tricky at first but I eventually figured it out). And, while I did play it at home, it really was a portable device for my childhood. I took it everywhere I went; to church, to school, to the store, road trips, anywhere I could get away with it. Games like Tiny Toon Adventures and Kirby's Dream Land were just difficult and engaging enough to keep my attention for long periods of time.

As I got older, I kept my Gameboy love and moved on to the Gameboy Pocket, which traveled even better! And the games became even more fantastic, with Link's Awakening teaching me all new levels of melancholy and, of course, the juggernaut that was Pokemon Red in my life. I kept with the Gameboy and it's "advancements" all the way to the end, as the Advance SP was released during my late teens and the last handheld I ever owned. I still find myself referring to the DS/3DS as Gameboys, perhaps showing how quickly we gamers can become old codgers.

While I've loved all my consoles, the Gameboy is, while risking sentimentality here, the one with the coziest memories. Wrapped in blankets during bed time or sickness, using light attachments to sneak sessions in when I should have been asleep.
Rob

Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Rob »

I was six when we got our Gameboy (quite soon after release) and it was the first games console I ever owned - albeit jointly with two older brothers. I was so young that my memory is hazy on some of the details, but my experience with the console was undoubtedly formative, and set me on a path of lifelong games playing.

I remember that even the box it came in felt impossibly futuristic. Arthur C Clarke's famous third law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, was certainly true for my six-year-old eyes. It wasn't just a games console, we could take it and play it anywhere!

Much of my time with the machine was spent in the back of my parents' car, sandwiched uncomfortably in the middle seat between those two bigger brothers. We might have been competing for the best score on Tetris, or passing it between us with each completed level or lost life in Super Mario Land, or trying to figure out exactly where it was you were supposed to go in Gargoyle's Quest. Whatever we were playing, waiting my turn was always excruciating, and I'm sure I still harbour some deep-seated resentment against my two brothers for all the times I was told "that go didn't count!" when they never allowed me any such leeway.

Of course, it's all about the games. The ubiquitous pack-in title, now almost thirty years old, is still - for me at least - the most convincing contender for the title of greatest videogame ever made. Everyone rightly hails the world-famous hypnotic single-player, but the Gameboy version also gave us one of the purest, most ruthless and exciting games you can play with two as well. Hurrah for the link cable, which, in an outbreak of generosity Nintendo is not usually known for, was smartly included with every console. It was a decision that must have enabled thousands - probably millions - of playground and coach-based Tetris battles that otherwise would never have happened.

I remember the Christmas I got given Link's Awakening, alongside a third-party clip-on magnifier and light for the screen. Now we really *could* play our beloved Gameboy anywhere! Except of course that the light reflected on the screen unless you held the console at a totally unnatural angle, so it quickly became clear it was very rarely worth using. But hey, Link's Awakening - what a beautiful hallucination of a game that was! It felt miraculous that something so ambitious, that did such a good job of replicating the aesthetic of the SNES game, could exist on what was already, by that time, considered a somewhat under-powered machine.

Yet the Gameboy endured, seeing off challenges from the Game Gear, the Lynx, the Barcode Battler(!), and scores of others now consigned to history and relative obscurity. The glue behind the grey panel that supports the screen gave up on ours years ago (would be interested to know how common this is) but the machine remains functional if fragile to this day.

I could ramble for thousands of words with half-remembered reminisces, but just want to give a shout out to a few other highlights:

The smartly designed pinballer Revenge of the Gator, which had so much more depth than first appearances suggested and was perfect for pass-and-play.

The wow-this-almost-has-actual-speech-in-it arcade thrills of Gauntlet II - even if we sadly never found anyone else who owned the game to play it with in multiplayer.

The weird nerfed fireballs of Super Mario Land - a rival to Super Mario Bros. 2 for least Mario-like Mario game, but still immensely playable today.

Golf! Bizarrely not called Mario Golf, even though it had Mario on the cover of the box, he was in the game and that's what everybody called it. It was tough as nails but totally fair: every fluffed shot was your own fault.

The surely illegal but totally envy-inducing 20-in-1 cart my buddy Chris had, which had a surprisingly playable version of Contra III on it. He still hasn't told me where he got it from...

And finally of course: all the long car trips and summer holidays that flew by thanks to this magic little grey box.

The Gameboy will of course always have a special place in my heart for being my first games console, and crucially having the quality to ensure it wouldn't be my last. I might not pick it up very often these days, but it is intimately bound up in so many of my fondest childhood memories - and I have no doubt my machine-hogging brothers would say the same.
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Re: Special No.3 - recording December 2018: Game Boy

Post by Chaos9001 »

I will always remember getting my Game Boy. I was in grade school and it was one of the prizes for selling a bunch of stuff during the yearly fundraiser. I remember how hard I worked to get this Game Boy. By working hard I mean giving my mom the fund raiser material and having her take it to work. I ended up selling the most in the school and I received my Game Boy console during class. I was the envy of the rest of the children.

I had this GameBoy for years. My favorites on this system were Mario Land 2, Metroid 2, Donkey Kong (The 1994 puzzle platformer), and eventually the battery destroying Pokemon games. I have fond memories of this system, but I do not miss the days before hand held consoles had backlights.
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