Nintendo Gameboy A look Back (sort of)

When i was a kid on my 14th or 15th birthday (i can't remember which) I wa faced with a difficult choice on which games console to get. I had already decided at that point that i wanted a handheld but wasn't exactly sure which one. I had 120 squidoodles burning a hole in my pocket and a handful of shops in the town center with which to drag my lucky siblings and father around in while i decided to make up my mind Ummmmming and Arrrrring in each shop not yet ready to part with all my lovely lolly.

One  reason for my immense mental turmoil at the time hinged on an important factor being that  i  really had my heart set on a Sega Game Gear. I knew the pros and cons and was well aware (thanks to the informative kids gaming TV show Bad Influence) just how bad the battery life of the Game Gear was and exactly how many batteries it chewed through in a less than 2 hour playing time. But fuck it not only did it have a colour backlit screen you could play perfect versions of all the master system classics that i had grown up on and loved as well as eventually being able to con my parents into forking over another ninety quid for a TV adapter which i'm sure they would have eventually. Of course i wasn't ready to write off the breezeblock of pseudo portable gaming that was the atari lynx either.

The main reason for my dragging everyone round the shops such as Dixons' Boots (yep Boots did at one point have a healthy games section upstairs long given way to crappy gift packs of smellies and kitchen equipment) as well as the limited number of games shops.back then there were no real chain store game retailers it was small independents (and a fuck sight better of for it as well) is that i could have my proverbial cake (which weighed in at exactly the right amount of cash i had) after which point i would put it on a shelf and have to wait a bloody age to  afford six double A batteries for two hours of gameplay or an adapter to make a portable gaming system not so fucking portable. And if that wasn't bad enough wait so I could actually afford a game to bloody play on it. (pffft first world problems huh? i bet those  Ethiopians are glad they only had the problem of starvation to worry about now)

As it turned out there was an option that not only allowed me to get a portable games console but to also kit it out with batteries and have myself 2 games with which to play. Yeah so ok it wasn't a colour screen or backlit but Fuck it i bought me a Gameboy and very glad i did too.

the cool thing about the Gameboy (and lets be honest it wasn't or its looks) was that for four double a batteries you got six hours of gameplay out o a machine that pretty much in every way apart from colour emulated the nintendo games console (which was nice). the two games i came away with was of course Tetris that came boxed with it (but put to one side coz it was free therefore probably shit) and with the remaining wonga Spiderman (well ok The Amazing Spiderman).

So me with a brand new up and running portable games console sitting in the pub playing spiderman my father barely had to buy me any cokes that day (i still wanted my inside out cheeseburger and chips though) and i was thoroughly pleased with my purchase. Lets face it i now owned a gameboy so the other handhelds (in my opinion) were shit mainly due to me not wanting to admit to getting the wrong one since i could no longer afford to change my mind. thankfully i needn't have worried. the lack of a colour screen was somewhat disappointing but the amount of quality games available for the system kept me very happy for years to come  (and tetris was actually pretty fucking good as well)

As the years passed and i enjoyed some classics on my nintendo system adverts in the local papers and games mags couldn't give away the rivals fast enough (at one point the Atari Lynx was going for £20) by which point i couldn't give 2 shits 20 quid to me was 1 Gameboy game or 2 if i went second hand. To this day i still own a gameboy colour and a few select gameboy original games (yep including tetris).

the fact that both sega and atari have now bitten the dust and that nintendo still trades is mainly testament to the Gameboy (that at one point in history was Nintendo's biggest selling console) and deserves a place in any retro collectors ....errrrm collection