12th March 2013, 9:58 PM
Quote: You wanted a power adapter with your portable device? Hah! They didn't start doing that until rechargeable batteries became the norm, necessitating it. And of course the VB is portable! Why recall with fondness resting the legs of the VB on my own legs during long car trips. I could get in 5-10 minutes of very shaky hard to balance gameplay before my neck hurt and I went back to playing Gameboy!Hah... I've never tried that, but that sounds about right. :)
Seriously, the VB was probably doomed to fail, but I do think that it'd have helped if Nintendo had not pretended that it was a handheld. Include the AC adapter with tap in the box; battery box optional (either don't include it and sell that separately, or include it but without batteries... doesn't matter, you shouldn't really be using that thing anyway). Also don't sell the thing as a full-scale console the equal of the GB or N64, but as an interesting piece of tech which can do some unique things that other systems can't, most notably 3d. Ie, scale down expectations. Also, don't give up on it after six months! Yeah, people didn't like it much, but that it was abandoned so quickly definitely did not help. For instance, I wanted a VB, but decided not to get one (during its actual life) because i'd heard that it was failing, and i didn't want to spend my, or our, money on a doomed system, no matter how awesome VB Wario Land looked, and it looked awesome. It would have sold more if they hadn't given up on it so quickly.
Or alternately they could have just cancelled it until full-color headsets were technically feasible, but by that point I don't know if they'd have wanted to release a 3d headset, and the VB is cool so it'd be too bad if it had never existed.
Quote: The gameshark does require special software. Mine still had the CD (and a silly little video tape of instructions done in a painfully 90's style). I went online and found some repositories for the newest version of the software, but it'll still require some doing. USB adapters don't seem to work with the program, so you need a native built in old school printer port. Once it is all set up, you just plug the device into your computer and start the program. The cheats are essentially stored in one huge file, so every time you make additions or changes, it has to reupload the whole block back onto the device. It is still more convenient than doing it manually through the device's own interface though. Keep in mind there's space limitations. Flash memory at that time was still very low, so there's not much space to work with at all. Oh, and the program can also update the device firmware.Fortunately I do have a printer port, but yeah, not that software... I'll need to find it. And a printer cable. I think there might still be one lying around here...