Category: History

Happy Birthday Game Boy!

April 21, 2019

30 years ago today Nintendo released their first portable game system: the Game Boy.

That’s a very early Japanese advert touting the ‘handy game machine’ (being played by young boys obviously lost/abandoned in the Australian outback)! As you see the system was very much marketed at children, but as we know now went on to become beloved by players of all ages.

The Game Boy went on to sell almost 120 million units in the fourteen years it was sold, and directly led into the followup Game Boy Advance and then DS series. Many competing handheld consoles came and went, but none made much of a dent in a market absolutely dominated by Nintendo’s Game Boys.

I’ve loved this device since it was released, and to this day handhelds (especially Nintendo ones) are my favorite game systems. Between the Game Boy and it’s followups I own over twenty pieces of hardware and over six hundred games! Needless to say the release of the Game Boy 30 years back had a direct effect on my life 🙂

I’ve written about my (original model) Game Boy collection before. You can read that here (and yes I misspelled the console name throughout). In preparing this post I dug out my collection for another look-see. Here’s a shot of a portion of the game boxes I mentioned five years ago:

And here’s another shot of all five of my Game Boys (all of which still work):

I was looking for a particular game to feature, and found these four Japanese release Pokémon games I bought to play since I couldn’t wait for the USA releases:

(Yes I ended up buying all the USA versions as well, except for Pokémon Card 2 which was never localized!)

And since my original post I’ve added a few more games to my collection, including two more beautiful Wizardry games:

And this guy, bought for ¥100 in Japan last January:

I fired up the above just now on one of my Game Boy Pockets just for some nostalgia…

It was terrible 🙂

The Game Boy may be ‘obsolete’ now, but it will never be forgotten. It’s legacy includes not just numerous followup systems, but also a library of amazing games many of which are still great fun today. The systems themselves are notoriously robust so if you’ve got one in an attic somewhere why not get it out, pop in some batteries, and fire up Tetris again for some late 80’s gaming nostalgia?

My Collection: Game Gear

March 23, 2019

Sega released their Game Gear handheld console in 1990 as their answer to Nintendo’s Gameboy. It was marketed heavily on the strength of its full colour backlit screen, but poor software support coupled with the market dominance of the Gameboy led to the Game Gear never becoming a true hit.

This is my Game Gear. I never bought the system myself – I wasn’t interested in any of its games – but JAF (ie. KLS’s mum) bought herself one. Specifically on June 27, 1993 for $129.99. I know this because I still have the receipt, which shows the rechargeable battery pack ($49.99) and ‘Super Wide Gear’ magnifier ($29.99) were bought at the same time.

Joyce would eventually bequeath the system to me along with the few games she had bought. I myself had bought one game (shown above) but when I inherited it in 1994 I put it into storage and essentially ignored it for 24 years.

Then last year in Scotland I found a large collection of Game Gear games being sold at a CEX used game store and bought them all! Eighteen games in total cost me £18, which was a steal even considering they were unboxed. I was eager to try them, and when I returned to the USA I powered the system up for the first time in decades and saw this:

Yes it had broken and the screen just displayed garbage. There were sound problems as well. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this because in the decades since release the Game Gear has become infamous for the lousy quality that Sega chose to cut costs. Many components are second-rate, and the capacitors in particular are known to be the worst ever placed in a game console.

In short, all the capacitors (about 30) needed to be replaced. I bought tools and a capacitor kit, then did nothing for four months! This was because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at all (leaky surface mounted capacitors needed to be replaced with wired ones) and because the cost of paying someone to do it was cheaper than my time. Eventually that’s what I did, and $30 and one month of work later my Game Gear was fixed.

Now it works we can see the other flaw. The much-marketed full colour screen? It’s terrible! Very washed out, with a slow refresh rate and very limited viewing angle it makes playing anything a bit of a chore in the day of OLED invisible pixel displays!

In short: all games look bad on it, and don’t even have the retro appeal of (for instance) a Gameboy.

Things are slightly better using the magnifier, even if it does make the system less portable. It also reduces the viewing angle quite notably, so you’re better off putting it on a table if you want to use it.

Let’s not discuss the absurd battery pack (top left in the above photo), which gives only about an hours battery life at the expense of a heavy eggplant-sized unit that clips onto your belt. Less expensive I suppose than 6 AA batteries every three hours, but once again something that makes us question how portable this system actually was?

The above is most of my library. I forgot to take a game out of the system (Columns) and of course Shining Force isn’t included. Game Gear games aren’t particularly valuable compared to other handhelds, mostly because if you’re interested in playing them you’ll almost always be emulating. The most valuable game in my collection (Shining Force) is ‘worth’ only about what I paid for it 25 years ago.

This system is a curiosity these days. It had very few good games at the time, and almost none worth seriously playing today. The systems themselves are unreliable, and even when repaired are frustrating to use unless you spent too much to replace the screen with an LED upgrade. This is very much a system just for my collection, and I reckon it could be decades before I turn it on again…

2018 in Photos

December 20, 2018

Distilling a year into ten photos is never easy, but this year was particularly tough. Furthermore whilst this post tends to prioritize vacation shots, that’s only because I’ve sorted them way better than the normal day-to-day photos, so there’s probably a few gems that should have been here that aren’t.

The year began, as it usually does, in Oz:

Bernard and I went on a lengthy road trip from the Southern Ocean all the way up to Newcastle and had a blast on the way. We even ran into notorious Australian terrorist Ned Kelly at one point:

In March KLS and I went to the city for the first of three trips this year. It was cold but fun, and we lived like the urbanites we are for a few days:

Our first international vacation was to Scotland, otherwise known as the prettiest country on Earth. This was one of those dream vacations we’ll never forget, and in our little car we saw the length and breadth of the highlands and hebrides islands and enjoyed one amazing day after another, like the puffins on Staffa:

Or the standing stones on Orkney:

Or even just eating fish’n’chips at the northernmost town in Great Britain:

During the summer Bernard and Lakshmi visited! Here we are deep in a dungeon:

We went on another vacation too. After a brief stop in Portland for Florence’s wedding (insert heart emoji here) we jetted off to Hawaii for fun in the sun… and a hurricane!

The first four days were beautiful and warm and sunny and we spent a lot of time at or on the beaches. But then this happened:

And next thing you know the beaches emptied and people wrote SOS in the sand:

As you know we were lucky and the storm dissolved before reaching us. But that was certainly an interesting and memorable experience, and one I don’t want to soon repeat!

I’ll end with a shot of my lovely friend Yossie, which just shows you don’t have to go to exotic places to take photos you’ll treasure forever:

So thats the year in a nutshell. A good one; a memorable one. I hope you enjoyed the blog in 2018.

What’s next? Well in a week I’ll be in Oz once again, and mid January I’ll be flying from Sydney to Tokyo where I’ll meet Bernard for a week of otaku madness. I think it’s safe to say there’ll certainly be some photos worth seeing here in the next few weeks…

Robot Claw