Did I ever tell you guys how big a handheld geek I used to be in the good ol' days?
Ay. I was. In the eighties I was addicted to Nintendo's Game & Watch series. I still have most of these handhelds today, and most of them still work, but nowadays I have gotten a little more demanding when it comes to graphics. Also, the repetitive gameplay has often become tiresome and I find myself closing my Mario Bros. or my Donkey Kong within the hour.
I purchased a Game Boy shortly after it was first released. You know the one I mean, you probably had one yourself: the big grey one with the ruby coloured buttons and the pea coloured screen that was inferior to many of the lcd screens on the Game & Watch handhelds (contrast-wise). Sales have proven the Game Boy to be addictive as hell, and I can see why, but personally I never truly enjoyed Nintendo's classic compact video system. The quality of the screen was absurdly bad. In fact, most lcd wrist watches at that time had better screens than the Game Boy (again, contrast-wise). I could bear playing Tetris on it for an hour, but I never really enjoyed other games on it, and eventually my Game Boy became my mom's and she wasted many, many hours on it trying to beat her own Tetris scores.
I purchased a pc instead and discovered the complexity, the possibilities and the graphical qualities of computer games. Why would anyone want to stare at a miniscule low-quality screen when you can sit in front of a small tv screen and enjoy a myriad of shapes and colours and puzzles and sounds? Handhelds disappeared out of my life. For many, many years.
That changed last year, when I grew tired of reading the newspaper or a book whilst taking the train to work. Sure, reading is educational, but I started becoming nostalgic, I remembered my bus rides to school, playing on my Game & Watch machine, forgetting about time.
I asked my mom if she still had my old Game Boy, and she did (she stopped playing it eventually, thank God), but after seeing the contraption, I said she could keep it, no way was I going to sit on a train with such a toy in my hands. 'Cause a toy it is, isn't it? It looks like something Fisher Price could have come up with.
Around that time, though, Nintendo was releasing their new Game Boy, the Game Boy Micro, the smallest handheld console in the world. I immediately bought one of those and a copy of Tetris Worlds, and I got hooked pretty fast.
The Game Boy Micro is an awesome little gadget. While the Game Boy felt as if you were holding a heavy Betamax videotape, holding the Micro feels like holding one of those tiny Game & Watch handhelds (like Manhole). It even looks similar, yet you get a state of the art screen in a durable aluminium body. The Micro looks sophisticated in a way the GBA SP (my cousin has one) can only dream of. And a grown up can play a thing like this on the train without being looked at in a suspicious manner. That's an enormous plus when you're thirty.
This month I purchased a DS Lite as well. My girlfriend's father bought a PSP, but after seeing the thing and reading about it (it's huge, it looks so fragile, the battery sucks and memory sticks aren't exactly cheap), I decided to stick with the creative innovators (Nintendo) rather than turn to the technological cosmetics group (Sony). Can't say I regret it. The DS Lite is awesome. The quality of the screens isn't as good as the screen of the PSP or the Game Boy Micro (which has - resolution-wise - an unbelievably good screen, probably even topping that of the PSP, though not in size
), but it's still a humongous leap from the GBA SP. The touch screen has totally won my heart. To me, introducing such a feature into the world of handhelds has about the same effect as introducing the mouse to the pc had: more freedom. When you've played both Harvest Moon (GBA) and Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS), you should know what I'm talking about. And you probably do. At least I hope you do, since I was kind of counting on you guys to help me in purchasing some new games for my recently acquired DS Lite. So far, I've played/am playing AC: WW, WarioWare: Touched!, Yoshi's Island DS and Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time. These are all fine games, but YI DS and M&L: PIT are the kind of games that are equally enjoyable on the Micro (or even more so on the Micro and I have quite a big GBA games collection), so I'm really looking for games that require the use of the stylus and the touch screen or allow those to be used instead of the regular controls. Any ideas from other DS fans?
Ay. I was. In the eighties I was addicted to Nintendo's Game & Watch series. I still have most of these handhelds today, and most of them still work, but nowadays I have gotten a little more demanding when it comes to graphics. Also, the repetitive gameplay has often become tiresome and I find myself closing my Mario Bros. or my Donkey Kong within the hour.
I purchased a Game Boy shortly after it was first released. You know the one I mean, you probably had one yourself: the big grey one with the ruby coloured buttons and the pea coloured screen that was inferior to many of the lcd screens on the Game & Watch handhelds (contrast-wise). Sales have proven the Game Boy to be addictive as hell, and I can see why, but personally I never truly enjoyed Nintendo's classic compact video system. The quality of the screen was absurdly bad. In fact, most lcd wrist watches at that time had better screens than the Game Boy (again, contrast-wise). I could bear playing Tetris on it for an hour, but I never really enjoyed other games on it, and eventually my Game Boy became my mom's and she wasted many, many hours on it trying to beat her own Tetris scores.
I purchased a pc instead and discovered the complexity, the possibilities and the graphical qualities of computer games. Why would anyone want to stare at a miniscule low-quality screen when you can sit in front of a small tv screen and enjoy a myriad of shapes and colours and puzzles and sounds? Handhelds disappeared out of my life. For many, many years.
That changed last year, when I grew tired of reading the newspaper or a book whilst taking the train to work. Sure, reading is educational, but I started becoming nostalgic, I remembered my bus rides to school, playing on my Game & Watch machine, forgetting about time.
I asked my mom if she still had my old Game Boy, and she did (she stopped playing it eventually, thank God), but after seeing the contraption, I said she could keep it, no way was I going to sit on a train with such a toy in my hands. 'Cause a toy it is, isn't it? It looks like something Fisher Price could have come up with.
Around that time, though, Nintendo was releasing their new Game Boy, the Game Boy Micro, the smallest handheld console in the world. I immediately bought one of those and a copy of Tetris Worlds, and I got hooked pretty fast.
The Game Boy Micro is an awesome little gadget. While the Game Boy felt as if you were holding a heavy Betamax videotape, holding the Micro feels like holding one of those tiny Game & Watch handhelds (like Manhole). It even looks similar, yet you get a state of the art screen in a durable aluminium body. The Micro looks sophisticated in a way the GBA SP (my cousin has one) can only dream of. And a grown up can play a thing like this on the train without being looked at in a suspicious manner. That's an enormous plus when you're thirty.
This month I purchased a DS Lite as well. My girlfriend's father bought a PSP, but after seeing the thing and reading about it (it's huge, it looks so fragile, the battery sucks and memory sticks aren't exactly cheap), I decided to stick with the creative innovators (Nintendo) rather than turn to the technological cosmetics group (Sony). Can't say I regret it. The DS Lite is awesome. The quality of the screens isn't as good as the screen of the PSP or the Game Boy Micro (which has - resolution-wise - an unbelievably good screen, probably even topping that of the PSP, though not in size
), but it's still a humongous leap from the GBA SP. The touch screen has totally won my heart. To me, introducing such a feature into the world of handhelds has about the same effect as introducing the mouse to the pc had: more freedom. When you've played both Harvest Moon (GBA) and Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS), you should know what I'm talking about. And you probably do. At least I hope you do, since I was kind of counting on you guys to help me in purchasing some new games for my recently acquired DS Lite. So far, I've played/am playing AC: WW, WarioWare: Touched!, Yoshi's Island DS and Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time. These are all fine games, but YI DS and M&L: PIT are the kind of games that are equally enjoyable on the Micro (or even more so on the Micro and I have quite a big GBA games collection), so I'm really looking for games that require the use of the stylus and the touch screen or allow those to be used instead of the regular controls. Any ideas from other DS fans?
