game boy – The Knight Shift

A few weeks ago I found my Game Boy Advance. Still in pristine condition after being in a really nice case all this time. Vintage game consoles seem to be enjoying a renaissance lately, like systems that play Atari and Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges on high-def television sets. And this particular Game Boy Advance holds a special place in my heart, it having been a gift for Christmas eighteen years ago.

I still had a bunch of cartridges on hand: Game Boy Advance ones as well as for the classic Game Boy and the Game Boy Color. They all still work great! Except for one small problem…

The cartridges that utilize battery backup have almost all run dry.

Battery backup in game cartridges goes back at least as far as the original The Legend of Zelda for the NES. After choosing to save a game it would use the built-in ...

Game Boy: Toughest product ever?

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Slashdot has a neat discussion going on, which was inspired by this article at CNET about the most durable gadgets made. And right now wide consensus is that the original Nintendo Game Boy might be the toughest product to ever hit the market. There’s one neat story about a Game Boy that was dropped into a lake and was on the bottom for a week before a guy in SCUBA gear recovered it: after drying out for a few days, it worked fine. I personally know of one guy who thought he’d lost his Game Boy after it went flying out of a car window in a minor fender-bender. He found it a few hours later at the bottom of a paved spillway: not a scratch on it! And then there’s this Game Boy (pictured at right) which saw hostile conditions in the first Gulf War. It’s now ...

Nintendo moving to retire Game Boy

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GameDaily is reporting that Nintendo is apparently set to retire the Game Boy brand name … at least for now. The Nintendo DS has become such a strong component of Nintendo’s gaming strategy that it’s almost completely overshadowing the original Game Boy line: something that wasn’t predicted when the DS hit the market a few years ago.

Since the first Game Boy model went on sale in 1989, the line has sold a staggering 200 million units, from the original “spinach-green screen” Game Boy to the Game Boy Advance SP Mark II.

I bought my first Game Boy – the original – in 1993 to play on the plane during my trip to Belgium. I played the heck out of that lil’ unit (still have it in great condition too) and accumulated quite a library of games for it. Then the Game Boy Color came out in 1998: the moment ...