If buying old games is a disease...

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I want something that can actually play Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble for instance, and my other GBC games... I've still got two original GBs in fine shape, but with the GBC broken and the GBA barely working, the GB Player is all I've got for GBC games now really... of course I only have like twelve, since I lost one and two broke, but still.

... oh, I've noticed a bunch of my GB/GBC games dying on me over the past year... Kirby 2, DK Land, Survival Kids (GB/C), Kirby Pinball (though that might have been a 'flipped it on and off too fast a bunch of times by accident' problem)... I know that they have batteries, but when before the only game that had had save issues was Mole Mania, it's odd that so many more happened in a relatively short period of time. Of course, why are my five Genesis games with batteries all seemingly okay while three or four of my six or seven battery-backed SNES games randomly erase savedata? I don't get it... why do some batteries die after just five or six years (like that six or seven year old copy of Survival Kids) and others are still fine ten or fifteen or more years later (for NES games with still-functional batteries)?

Anyway, Fire Emblem (GBA) also erased itsself, which is really annoying, but I don't know if that's a battery or flash memory game and can't check without opening the cart, and either way no way should any GBA batteries be dead yet, especially a three year old one, so I have no idea what happened there... the same thing that happened to my Mario Bros. Deluxe cart that rendered it useless one day when I went to play it, perhaps (read: nothing I could tell -- it just stopped working)? Stupid game! (I've had other GB games randomly erased before, too, I think it's happened to Link's Awakening several times... nothing to do with the battery as far as I could tell, my GB games just seem to like to mess up...)

Anyway, to the point. I can see why Nintendo dropped GB/GBC compatibility from the DS: they want to avoid compatibility with systems which are starting to fail because of things like old batteries. Of course price is part of it too, but I bet that was a consideration... the Micro too. As for what I want... uh, good question. Do I want a GBC, so that I can play Bionic Commando: Elite Forces without having to do the annoying workaround every time I turn it on so it doesn't crash when I go into a stage like it will on GBAs otherwise (and to properly play Tilt n Tumble, too!)? A SP, for general GB/GBC/GBA play? And a DS? But that's three systems, what am I supposed to do, carry them all around? No... yeah, it's kind of annoying. Even the GB Player and Super Game Boy aren't completely independant, because of Nintendo's stupid decision to not add in Super Game Boy modes for games that supported them... if I want to play 2 (or 4, if I ever find a multitap) player Bomberman GB, I can only do it on a SGB...