Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Game Boy's Launch in Japan!

[A Black Falcon]

Happy birthday, Game Boy... you're still probably the best Nintendo handheld. :) Well, not for RPGs and strategy games, but for other stuff. :)

The original GB also has the best battery life of any Nintendo handheld... 40 hours on 4 AA batteries! Amazing...



Nintendo's two first-party games out on launch day were Super Mario Land and Alleyway; Tetris was slightly later (and remember, Japanese systems never came with pack-in games). I have both of those games... Alleyway is pretty good, for a simple Breakout clone. Mario Land of course everyone knows. And it just got better from there...

[TheBiggah]

Happy Birthday GameBoy!

[A Black Falcon]

Mine's fifteen years old now, and still going strong... no other handheld is built as well. :)

[Sacred Jellybean]

40 hours? Damn. I would try to track down and buy another if I could play it in the dark (which would require more power which would drain the battery life but we're not thinking about that).

Pretty sure I mentioned it on here already, but I lost my Game Boy Advance: SP. :( I don't get many opportunities to play it anymore but I still miss it.

[A Black Falcon]

35-40 hours on 4 AAs, yes. :)

Of course it is a non-backlit four-color-greyscale (greenscale? :)) screen, with low-end tech even for the time, but still, it was a great accomplishment. Up against systems which pushed color and tech like the Lynx (2-3 hours for a model 1, 4-6 hours for a model 2, on 6 AAs) or Game Gear (4-6 hours on 6 AAs) or TurboExpress (worst battery life of all of them, I believe, and at least 6 AAs), the Game Boy clearly stuck out with its great battery life... and great games. Particularly Tetris, at first... we didn't own Tetris for GB back then, but for a lot of people, that certainly did sell them the system.

But yeah... I've put 4 AAs in my GB, played it for hours, taken them out and, with two new AAs, put them in my Virtual Boy, used them for all 7 or so hours you get on those 6 AAs until it keeps resetting every time you try to play (a sign the batteries are too low to consistently supply enough power for the system), put four of them back in the GB, and proceeded to play through an entire game of Kirby's Dream Land 2, beginning to end, with plenty of time to spare in the batteries... the original GB was awesome with batteries. :)

The only bad thing really is that while I still have two official AC Adapter/Battery Pack sets, I can't use them as AC adapters -- the system resets or turns off with the slightest touch. The battery packs are both dead and won't hold a charge anymore. Supposedly a dead (out of charge) official battery pack can't be effectively used as an AC adapter or something, but I have no idea why... strange. Oh well, at least the batteries last a long time.

Of course, not all games are really playable on the blurry green screen; some work great, but others are tough... don't try Donkey Kong Land on the original GB, it's awful (it's so hard to make out the enemies...)! But the Mario Land games, or R-Type, or anything that doesn't scroll like Zelda, those play perfectly... you just have to try them and see how well various titles look on the original system.