Den of the Cyphered Wolf

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Why I Stopped Playing Gameboy

So a couple days ago I made an offhand comment that the reason why I'm not so much into Pokemon is because I don't have the disposable cash to buy a Nintendo Gameboy 3DS and even if I did there are a million things that I need more than a Gameboy.

Then I realized. I still had my Gameboy Advance and knew more or less where it was. Seriously the great search took about all of 20 minutes.  So now the question I have to ask myself is why hell did I stop playing Gameboy in the first place.

Well there are a couple of reasons. Older retro gamers are going to slap me for saying this but my golden age is the PS2/Dreamcast/Xbox/Gamecube era. And at the time Gameboy couldn't compete for my attention and funds.

Okay I was a spoiled brat but when I was a young child let's call it 9 I negotiated a formula with my parents for determining my allowance size. Grade Level * Level of School= Allowance. When I was a young child it was pretty small. 5 bucks starting. It was enough so that on Fridays after school I could buy a soda and a slice of pizza from the corner store before TGIF.



Good times, good times. (Everything I love is closed now, though something else might have moved in.)

But after a while that grade level multiplier kicked in, right around 2000 in fact. The trade off was that it was expected that I would mostly buy my own goodies with that cash. And between DVD's, PS2 and Xbox games, anime, and fantasy novels. Gameboy just got edged out.

Today Gameboy has a reputation for probably being the most diverse of the "devoted" gaming consoles, and in retrospect that was probably true even back then, but at the time I viewed it as a nerfed system that had the advantage of being portable (My same beef with laptops now. Spend the money on a faster processor and larger harddrive people. It'll last longer too.).

I lost my original advance but eventually bought an S.P. and found it had rechargeable batteries.  Now I see the advantage of that. Batteries are a money sink but back then it was a pain.

Like I said the primary reason I had it was because it was portable. I could sneak Gameboy Color into my backpack and play it during lunch and on the school bus. And if it died I just kept a few spare batteries on me. But with Advanced S.P if the battery died it died. And even if I found an outlet it meant I couldn't move for like two hours taking away the whole portable handheld thing it had going for it.

The way I saw it if I was going to stay on my rump I might as well get "the full experience".



So rather than spend money on Gameboy games I spent it on other stuff.






Right now I don't game so much because I don't have the type of money I had back then but I think I eventually will so I still keep up with things. It looks like the Gameboy 3DS might actually be the best of the last generation if you look at things a certain way.

I'm going to sound like an old man but there was something for everybody in my day. And the promos I'm looking at seem more and more samey. Even the games I've played I like seem like they have had their controls nerfed to appeal to more and more systems.

GTA V's controls in particular are a clunky mess as the game tries to be about 15 different smaller games. In Crimson Skies flying was awesome. In GTA it makes me want to throw the controller at the screen.

I don't know. These are just thoughts that went through my head as I was searching for Metroid Fusion.

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