Minimalistic, story-driven games can be quite memorable and fantastic. The lack of gameplay requires you to have a laser focus on the story and characters, and the subtle gameplay can bring a visual element that no other medium can provide. Three Fourths Home isn’t one of these, sadly. While the visuals are striking and minimal, the story and writing have so much potential, but they are let down by a short and disappointing ending.
You play a teenage girl named Kelly who is driving home in a violent storm in rural Nebraska while talking to her family on the phone. Gameplay consists only of holding down a button to continue driving and choosing a few dialogue options. Holding down a single button for the entirety of the game is a really dumb idea. It introduces hand cramps and constantly breaks your focus on the story. You can honk your horn and turn off your lights, which is entirely pointless, and you can’t move the car at all. You can also choose to turn the radio on and off. There is no spoken dialogue in the game, but this requires you to make up voices and visuals for the game in your head. This may sound really dumb to most people, and some might argue that you should just read a book, and in this specific context, this would be a better medium for this story.
Choices in dialogue don’t seem important at first, but your response to your family plays into how they react to you on the phone. I guess multiple playthroughs could be worth it as there are a couple of different endings, but with how mundane the gameplay is, no one will want to sit through the hand cramps to make it worthwhile. I had issues with the controls, causing me to choose the wrong option as well. You need to skip through dialogue with a button to advance each line while holding down another to keep driving, and some times you wouldn’t know that a dialogue option would be coming up and you would just advance forward.
See, with minimal games like this, you need some sort of gameplay hook to keep it interesting enough. Three Fourths doesn’t do this at all. The mom, dad, and brother are all interesting characters, and you slowly learn about this family dynamic through this phone call. You learn about why you “ran away,” what kind of person the dad is, whether or not this is a broken home, etc. The dialogue is tight and interesting enough to keep you glued until the end, that is, if the hand cramps don’t send you packing first. I also wish more was going on visually. Occasionally, a background object will be brought up in the conversation, but it’s just black-and-white visuals without any type of payoff. The visuals, gameplay, and everything else are just an excuse to call this interactive story a game, and it does the bare minimum to qualify as that.
Most games like this have a story that ends in sudden tragedy to flip the entire thing on its head and stun the player, but this one doesn’t really do that either. If it did and the pay-off was incredible, all of this could be worth it, and there are plenty of games similar to this that pull that off. As it stands, Three Fourths Home is a well-written story in a terrible game with an even worse gameplay mechanic.
Tongue-in-cheek comedies about the Cold War are something I quite enjoy. Movies like Austin Powers that make fun of the time period can be downright hilarious. CounterSpy tries this with the player working for an unknown neutral agency called C.O.U.N.T.E.R., and everything they do and their plans are all spelled this way with no actual meaning. You play either the Americans or Russians’ bases to steal sets of plans to stop nuclear weapons from destroying the moon. The goal is to keep the DEFCON level as low as possible (5), and if it reaches zero during a level, a one-minute countdown starts, and you need to find the computer to finish the level to stop it. Thankfully, if it does reach zero, the level ends, and you start from DEFCON 1 again.
The only way to lower the DEFCON level is through passive items or getting officers dressed in white to surrendy by pointing your gun at them. This can make having to repeatedly repeat levels very difficult. The levels are randomly generated each time, but that doesn’t mean the difficulty doesn’t increase. You will need to search more rooms while plans for weapons and items are hidden better. More guards will appear and there will be more open areas. These can be the most difficult to navigate, especially when security cameras come into play. The green ones can be shot down with weapons, but the orange-armored ones can only be taken down with explosives. You can dodge and roll your way through a camera’s cone of vision, but you need to be fast. I found the randomness of levels to be frustrating, as a lot of guard patrols just don’t line up to be able to be stealthy. A lot of times, you will need to mow down every guard, and some levels can be multi-tiered. Thankfully, the alertness only lasts for that section of the level. Once you go through the door to the next section, the guards don’t know you’re there.
Cover is your best friend in this game. Yellow arrows on the cover will tell you which way you will face, and lining up your shot is important. The longer you pop out of cover to aim, the quicker guards will notice you. Guards are pretty dumb, and cameras won’t even notice dead bodies, so shoot them out to your heart’s content. This is the only saving grace for the randomness of these levels. If this was a more realistic stealth game, it would feel impossible to finish. However, I still wound up getting each side to DEFCON 1, so I had to constantly restart a level once the countdown timer started. It’s futile to try to run to the exit in 60 seconds unless you’re already close. If you quit the mission, you just restart back to where you were prior to that level.
Once you do get all the launch plans, you can continue to play either side to get more weapons and item plans and lower the DEFCON level as much as possible. The final mission will start on the side with the highest level, so this can lead to a lot of frustration unless you really want all of those weapons. I honestly felt the game got pretty tedious towards the end and just wanted to get the game over with. I didn’t feel the need to continue playing, as the randomness kind of ruins the fun gameplay elements with poor guard patrol patterns, making it impossible for really perfect stealth runs. The Vita version suffers from frequent slowdowns when the action starts. The game will pause for a split second, causing accuracy issues when shooting.
Overall, CounterSpy has all of the elements of a fun arcade-like action stealth game, but the randomness of the levels makes it hard to get that perfect run, which can discourage the player from wanting to collect all the weapons. The tongue-in-cheek humor does the job just fine, and the controls are well thought out. Just be prepared for some frequent restarts.
Dead to Right: Retribution was a surprising sleeper hit. The series never got the backing it deserved and is, sadly, another dead franchise lost to time that will probably never be revived again. Reckoning tried to take Retribution and squeeze it down to a handheld form factor, but it just didn’t quite work out. That’s not to say Dead to Rights couldn’t make a good portable game, but this wasn’t it. It’s a quick, cheap cash grab with no thought or effort put into it.
There is zero voice acting in this game, so the “story,” if you can even call it that, is narrated by a few lines of text and a cutscene. I will describe one level, and then you can copy and paste that about a dozen times, and there’s the game. You run around using the lock-on feature to kill enemies in boring, drab, and cramped levels and just blast them with whatever you have. It doesn’t matter what you use, as the game automatically switches weapons once you run out of ammo. Ducking behind cover is pointless, as you can’t shoot out from it, so your best bet is to run around like a madman and mow down everything in your path. That could be fun, but here it’s not. The camera swings around every which way, so cycling enemies is pointless as you will also cycle through explosive objects like cars and barrels, which are handy for large crowds.
This just continues forever. Some areas have fewer enemies than others, but once you shoot your way through, you kick down a door and move on to the next boring area to continue this process. Weapons range from silenced pistols, machine guns, and even a heavy.50 caliber machine gun, but who cares? Dual-wielding is always the way to go for one-handed weapons. You want to do the most destruction as quickly as possible. Enemies chew through your health with larger weapons, and life and armor pickups aren’t very common. There are no throwables like grenades, which would have come in handy as well.
There’s one gameplay feature in the console version, and that’s bullet-time. You can dodge and slow-mo your way through enemies, but I found this pointless as the environments are too cramped for this. You can send your dog Shadow out to get a one-hit kill, but the bar needs to refill. I saved this for large groups of enemies. Every so often, a boss will be thrown at you, but they all play and act the same. Just mow them down until they die. The entire game can be finished in under two hours as well, and then there’s a multiplayer mode that you can even subject your friends to.
Overall, Reckoning suffers from the same issues many PSP games did. A lack of a second analog nub means no camera control, and no one wanted to write a smart camera that could follow the player or change the controls around to work better. The game looks incredibly ugly, probably one of the worst-looking games on the system, and it’s repetitive, boring, and plays nothing like the console version.
First-person shooters were new to me when Red Faction launched in 2001. I didn’t have a gaming PC growing up, so games like Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake were nearly foreign to me. Red Faction was an overhyped game full of development issues and overpromised ambition. The “Gen-Mod” destruction model is half-baked and barely there. The visuals are dull and boring (even for the time), and the story doesn’t go anywhere at all. Not to mention zero character development. I rented this game and got bored with it maybe an hour in, and I can see why.
Sure, the game looks much better on PC, but there’s not much to really look at. Even for the time level, the design in shooters was fairly dull. Very few had interesting things to look at, such as Half-Life or Halo. Red Faction is just browns and reds with boring caves and industrial buildings. You are on Mars, by the way. You are part of a rebellion group called the Red Faction, who are miners uprising against the overbearing government. You are trying to fight your way to the top and stop a deadly plague that’s killing the miners. This story starts and stops here. It doesn’t go anywhere; there’s nothing to spoil. You end up finding the cure, and that’s really it. The voice acting is actually really good for the time, but the only thing that kept me playing was pure curiosity to finally see this game through to the end.
There are quite a few weapons in this game, but most aren’t found until the last third of the game. You have your standard array of guns. Submachine, assault, precision, sniper, pistol, rocket launcher, and rail driver There’s also a heavy machine gun and grenades. It’s a standard list of weapons we’ve used in so many shooters, and Red Faction doesn’t do anything interesting or fun with them. The shooting in this game feels pretty good and holds up well today, but the enemy AI is terrible, so don’t expect much of a fight. There are vehicles you can pilot in this game, but they aren’t anything fun or interesting. They shoot bullets or rockets, and a lot of the time I would end up stuck in weird physics glitches.
The game isn’t very long. You can finish it in under 4 hours, and thankfully there’s a quick save feature, which I suggest using often. Enemies are run-of-the mill faceless military dudes, and there’s an occasional weird creature thing to mow down in the caves. Environmental detail is what you can expect from this era. Rooms are equipped with an occasional table, chair, or monitor. Nothing stands out or looks interesting in this game. Destruction is boiled down to blowing open a wall to get to a button (there’s a lot of button pressing in this game), and that’s about it. The occasional chunk of wall breaks off, but this is far from what Volition was touting back in the day.
Red Faction is at least a solid shooter. It’s fun while it lasts, and the last act throws new enemies and weapons at you, and there are two whole boss fights in this game. Vehicles don’t feel great to pilot, destruction is minimal, the story has a strong premise but goes nowhere, and the visuals are pretty bland. I did find the stealth section of the game pretty fun. Trying to find your way around without being spotted is like a giant puzzle, but that’s all there is that changes things up. In the end, if you never play this game, you aren’t missing out on gaming history.
With retro gaming becoming as huge as it is—bigger than ever!—the Analogue Pocket has found itself to have received the status of a unicorn over the last 3–4 years. The Pocket was first announced in late 2019 as a first wave of pre-orders. I personally missed out and was ready to wait for wave two—and then COVID hit. All throughout the pandemic, the Pocket was released in very limited batches, but only for those who pre-ordered during the first wave. Open pre-orders eventually came, but shipments would take over 6 months. Analogue has just finally caught up over the last few months, and hopefully they will be in stock in their store soon. With that said, the Glow in the Dark Pocket was their first limited edition version, and I somehow magically got one. I’ve sat in line for special edition releases of other types of electronics before and have never had any luck. You click the add to cart button, and usually you are put in a virtual line. This time I was greeted with a complete purchase page, and I jumped for joy.
Now that you know how hard it is to find this thing, you can imagine how excited I was to finally get one in my hands. These things have been scalped online for years for 3–4 times the price. The Glow in the Dark Pocket sits on Mercari and eBay for $500–$800 as of the time of this writing. The dock goes for as much as the pocket is new. It’s insane and completely unfair. I did order a dock and Game Gear adapter, as those are readily in stock on Analogue’s site as of this writing, but I also pre-ordered the other three adapters for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, TurboGrafx-16, and Atari Lynx.
Unboxing
The box itself is rather heavy. It’s a premium package with a nice little QR card inside a tiny little envelope that gives access to the quick start guide. I would have loved to see a physical manual, but these take up a lot of room, and things change over time. You don’t want to ship devices with outdated manuals, but I digress. The pocket itself has a screen film and a film over the back of the unit itself. When I picked it up, I was surprised at how heavy it was. This is what I’m assuming, with the battery taking up most of the bulk. The plastic shell is really thick, and the overall feeling is very minimalistic. This isn’t a flashy system with different colored buttons, weird laser cutouts, RGB buttons, or anything silly like that. This is a very serious-looking device, but it’s sleek and sharp, similar to Sony’s design DNA from the PSP. There’s a power and volume buttons on the left, a microSD slot on the right, a GameBoy link cable, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom. The rear has a ridged texture, the cartridge slot, the Analogue logo, and shoulder buttons, and that’s your setup.
I’m happy to see the pocket has stereo speakers. That is useful for GBA games that have stereo output options. The front gives you unlabeled face buttons, a D-pad, a FPGA logo, and three little buttons at the bottom acting as Start Select and the Analogue or Home button. The 3.5″ LCD screen is vivid and colorful, but it has a high resolution of 1600×1440. So you’re gaming in 1440p on a handheld. Pretty cool. The FPGA does a fantastic job of upscaling everything.
Software and OS
When turning on the device for the first time, you are greeted with a tutorial on how to navigate the OS and what each button does. This is a really cool thing, and more consoles need to do this! Remember, this has no wifi or Bluetooth chip inside of it, so it’s not spending all of its time getting you to sign up for some service like current-generation consoles do. Once you drop into the OS, it’s just a simple black-and-white list. You can play the cartridge currently inserted or play an open FPGA core (more on this later). view the library, Memories (save states and screenshots) go into Tools for developers and tweak settings for each built-in core. There are also settings inside to dump the memory cache to the SD card and various other advanced things, most likely for troubleshooting. The OS is very basic and simple, but it doesn’t need to be anything else. Sadly, there is no custom OS right now for a more advanced user interface, even if you do want one.
Playing Games
This is why you have one, right? Let’s start with the original GameBoy games. Each core has a filter you can use, and this is important to get the feeling of the game right. Instead of a million useless ones, Analogue gives you three for each core. Their own analog filter removes scanlines, grids, and smoothing. You just get raw pixels, and this is how we play older games on the Switch or any other device running emulators. It looks sharp and utilizes the hardware of the pocket. There are also original modes that add scanlines (which don’t look half bad but darken the screen a lot) or add the original grid back. There are also color filters for the GameBoy Light, Pocket, green, and red from the Virtual Boy. GameBoy Color is the same without the color filters but adds a different scanline option. These filters only work on original cartridges and not emulated games, so keep that in mind. Systems also have options for different display ratios, which is nice. GBA games will have borders, but you get used to them. The sound is amazing, and some cores have different audio options to tune everything to your liking.
When it comes to actually playing games, they feel great. The pocket is nice to hold in the hands; the button mapping can be customized and moved around; but the Dpad isn’t perfect. It’s not the best when it comes to rolling your thumb around. It’s a bit stiff, but it gets the job done. The face buttons feel nice, with two convexed and two concaved, similar to the SNES controller, but the three small buttons at the bottom are tiny and hard to press with bigger fingers. While the buttons aren’t 100% perfect, they are fine for 8 and 16-bit games. We’re not playing competitive shooters here.
Customization
Just recently, the open part of the FPGA was released, and emulated cores are now available. Any 8- and 16-bit system can be run to your heart’s desire now, but you lose access to those fancy screen filters and resolution settings as a result. They also play perfectly, though. I played through SNES, Genesis, NES, GameBoy Color, and GameBoy, and they all ran perfectly fine. Some Genesis games that need six buttons use the shoulder buttons, so it’s a bit awkward, but you can play these on the dock with a controller, so that can help eliminate that problem. Getting some emulators working like the Neo Geo is a royal pain because you need specific ROMs and BIOS files to get anything to run. But once you do, it’s worth it. I wish the OS itself was more customizable, such as having a wallpaper or varied themes. Startup images would be fun too. Maybe one day the OS will open up, or someone will hack it and give us that option.
Overall, the Analogue Pocket is a retro handheld gamer’s dream. You can play any games you currently own or emulate them on the microSD card. While it took years for the FPGAs to become open source, they are finally here, and if you have been holding out, this is the time to get one. This thing is great for those who love both worlds. Physical cart-owning purists and those who don’t own a single cart and just want to emulate. While we will never see physical adapters for certain systems, you can still rock both worlds and have all of your 8 and 16-bit favorites on the go. The battery life is great, the buttons feel good minus the Dpad, and it has all the modern trimmings for a reasonable price.
Horror games from the 1990s to the mid-2000s hold a special place for me. These games were genuinely unique in the sense that they focused so much on the atmosphere that they may have been shunned in critic reviews, sold poorly, and generally ignored during their time, but we have come to love them later on. Horror games have rarely been made the same since. Fatal Frame was a very unique series that took the genre to new heights with interesting gameplay mechanics that steered away from guns and running away from things. Your Camera Obscura was your weapon and puzzle solver, and the first game won gamers over, but it had unfair difficulty and had clunky controls. The second game fixed a lot of this and was later upgraded further for Xbox. This would also, sadly, be the last game in the series on Microsoft’s green beast of burden.
You play as new characters this time around. Twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura You are trying to solve the mystery of the “Crimson Sacrifice Ritual” in All God’s Village, a fictional town in Japan. This isn’t a journalistic setting; instead, just two girls are playing in their favorite spot when a dam collapses and Mio falls. The original sacrificee wants revenge and her own twin sister back, and you both are prime candidates. The story is rather interesting and very dark and creepy. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as it surprisingly had more depth than most horror games of the time. Most of the story is told through texts you find (there are a lot) and not so much in cut scenes. There are crystals you can now pick up and listen to on your radio, and these are rather haunting. I enjoyed these quite a bit. The voice acting is surprisingly decent (for the time), and the voices of the dead can really make you feel uneasy.
Of course, the main attraction is the Camera Obscura. Once again, you use this to kill ghosts and see things that aren’t there. It’s more refined this time around, with better controls. You can switch to proper FPS controls, which makes playing much easier. Upgrades are more robust, as are equipped add-ons. You can find add-ons throughout the game, with some being passive and some requiring you to charge your camera. You can equip up to three add-ons and swap between them while in camera mode. These range from Blast, See, Stun, Slow, etc. These can be upgraded along with your basic functions, like in the first game. Finding passive ghosts and taking photos of them (if you’re quick) can give you Spirit Points as well as fighting spirits. You need spirit orbs to slot in to be able to advance to the next upgrade level. Each power has three levels. I highly recommend upgrading your basic stats first. Spirit Points are more plentiful than in the first game, which is a good thing.
Just like in the first game, your goal is to take a photo as close to the spirits’ faces as possible to be able to take a Fatal Frame shot. There is a meter that powers up around the circle in the center, and when it hits red, you need to be quick. There is a red flash at the top that tells you when it’s best to use a power-up. On rare occasions, you can get a two-photo combo for massive damage. There are film types in this game, and thankfully the weakest is unlimited. This means you won’t ruin your game (like in the first one) if you run out of film. The game will just become insanely hard. Higher types are plentiful, and I never ran out, but I recommend saving the Zero film for the final boss. There’s less than 10 in the entire game. I also found healing items incredibly plentiful, and I never ran out.
My biggest complaint is the backtracking and navigation. It’s hard to figure out where to go next. There are obscure objectives, and some things won’t trigger until you enter the correct room. This is a much bigger game than the first. With three large houses and the village itself to explore, I had to use a walkthrough throughout most of the game because I just kept getting lost, but that’s par for the course for survival horror games of this era. I found the visuals to be fantastic, even by today’s standards. Great textures, models, and lighting are amazing. The Xbox really shows off what the series can do here, and it’s a shame the third game never got a port.
Overall, Fatal Frame II is a fantastic upgrade over the first. Just make sure you have a guide handy. The controls are much improved, the camera system is more robust, enemies are actually fun to fight this time around, and bosses are challenging. The story is interesting enough, and the lore is creepy and unsettling. The atmosphere alone is worth playing through this game for. Haunting music, a few jump scares, creepy ghost designs, and insanely unsettling throughout.
A murder mystery. A supernatural thrill ride. A past that haunts you. These are many things, Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac have to deal with. Carnby’s best friend, Charles Fiske, is found dead off the coast of an island. You are sent to investigate, but your parachute is damaged on impact, and you must fight off strange creatures from another dimension while trying to find out the fate of your friend. The story here is surprisingly deep and involved, but not very interesting. It’s akin to a sleepy mystery novel that keeps you hooked just enough to keep reading but then quickly forget about it shortly afterwards. The New Nightmare is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place due to the timing of its release. It came out just before the beginning of a new generation of consoles and kind of feels like it has a foot in each generation.
I do have to state that the visuals are very impressive right off the bat. For a Dreamcast game, the pre-rendered backgrounds would be mistaken for a PS2 title, especially when using VGA. They are bright, crisp, and well detailed without that 32-bit sheen that older “tank-style” horror titles had that used pre-rendered backgrounds. The lighting effects are well done, especially when using your flashlight, and the monster designs are surprisingly not very scary or interesting. They feel like generic sci-fi creatures from a B-grade midnight premiere on the Sci-Fi (yes, not SyFy; get that out of here) Channel. The atmosphere is really tense, and there are a few jump scares scattered throughout the game, but overall it does a great job of giving you a haunting, impending doom feeling.
Back to the whole one foot in each generation business it still has pre-rendered backgrounds, tank controls, and a tiresome inventory system. Thankfully, there aren’t a lot of items to pick up, as there are few puzzles in this game. Most of your pick-ups are weapons, ammo, saves, and first aid. You can combine and split objects, but I only had to do this once as Edward. I got tired of having to do a quick reload by going into my inventory screen and manually reloading there, as there is no reload button. You must wait until you are out of ammo first. This would be nice to have, as you eventually learn how many shots each creature type takes and can count them that way. I also hated how much the views and angles flipped around. I appreciate the more modern take on cinematic angles and camera views, but this game could have easily been 100% done in real-time on the Dreamcast with no issues. When fighting some creatures, you get knocked into another angle, and the screen pauses to load for a split second, making you disoriented. This especially proves troublesome during the final boss fight.
I did like how the game doesn’t skimp on ammo, but you must preserve it in the beginning and be smart. I easily missed the shotgun the first time around and had to restart, as you don’t get much revolver ammo in the game at all. The majority are shells. I wound up in a hallway with zombies, zero ammo, and 200 shells. Thankfully, it was only 30 minutes of gameplay before I could get to the shotgun again, but this is another foot in the previous generation. I like the better map with an actual dot on screen showing you where you are, but certain angles and lighting make things hard to see. Some items sparkle, but I would see sparkles through walls that were objects in another room. It doesn’t help at all.
If you conserve well during the first disc, you get many more weapons later on and tons of ammo, and you can just blast away. However, the game tries to guide you a bit better, similar to how modern games do. Puzzles will sometimes be two-way communication over the radio with hints or instructions you need to follow or clearly needing symbols for a code lock, but you can use an item to follow clues and trails to the symbols you need. It’s a great step in a new direction, as I love these games’ atmosphere, story, creature design, or anything else but navigating their frustrating, labyrinthine, and obtuse maps. Backtracking is also not super horrible here. There were only a few times I needed to go from one end of a level to another, and it was the final time before moving on to the next major area. I do detest the limited saving system. You need to find Charms of Saving, and there are only around 20 in the whole game. Thankfully, the game is done in less than 5 hours, and if you are careful, you won’t die and can spread them out. I only used about 10 during my whole playthrough.
Overall, The New Nightmare isn’t a reboot of the game (we were graced with that horrible beauty just a few years later), but a step into making the traditional point-and-click adventures console-friendly and trying to make them more modern. The story and characters are interesting enough to push you through the game, but mostly they are forgettable. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the visuals are awesome. There is so much pushing and pulling in two different generations that the game falls into typical 32-bit supernatural horror trappings but also tries to break free of some. There are plenty of weapons and ammo; the auto-aim system works well; the puzzles are not obnoxiously obtuse; and backtracking is minimal. Overall, The New Nightmarehas aged better than many games of its era thanks to trying to push in more modern directions. This is a great way to spend a Halloween or dreary evening.
This was the first handheld I ever had. I got it for my 7th birthday, along, of course, with a copy of Tetris. I remember the copy of Tetris having a cigarette burn mark on the top of the cartridge and being stained yellow. I’ll never forget that! Sadly, I only ever owned two Game Boy games. The other was Galaga and Galaxian, which I found at a thrift store. Despite only having this game for the longest time, I played it a lot. I remember that green screen burned into my memory and the sound of the theme song chirping away in the background. I wish I knew just how many awesome games there were for the system back in the day, as I missed out on a lot.
And for 80s hardware, the system is quite impressive. Being such a small 8-bit system is really something else. The worst part about the system is the awful screen. There is no backlight, and it’s monochrome in green. People gave the Game Boy hell for this and still do it to this day. The Japanese market got an improved Game Boy Light with a backlight, but it was never released here. The system is quite chunky, but that can be a good thing. It has some weight and feels good in the hand, even today. There’s a contrast wheel and a sound wheel, as well as a link cable port. This thing took four AA batteries but didn’t burn through them as fast as people think. This wasn’t the Game Gear after all. The batteries could last as long as 30 hours. Not having a CFL backlight had its advantages.
The system also had a headphone jack, and the speaker was good enough. Systems are only as good as their libraries, and the Game Boy had some great additions. Sadly, there was also a lot of garbage on the handheld. Some developers didn’t know how to optimize the hardware and made ugly games with sluggish controls and animations. While others defined the system. It may be hard to go back to the original hardware today, especially when newer Game Boys play these games with better hardware. I recommend modding this system with an IPS screen and maybe swapping out the shell. A lot of these yellowed over the years, and the plastics became brittle. However, I will praise the large screen, as it’s easy to see the sprites on the screen.
Overall, the original Game Boy’s worst problem was the terrible screen, but the batteries lasted a long time, it sounded pretty good, and the screen was at least large. It may be hard to go back to an original Game Boy today, but anyone who is curious or wants to own one is encouraged to modify it with modern hardware and make it more enjoyable to play today.
Colors: Carbon Black, Solid Silver, Blue, Platinum Silver, Clear, Crystal Yellow, Camo Blue, Crystal White, Stone Blue, White, Pearl Blue
MSRP: $69.95
Everyone has played at least one Game Boy in their life, but the more obscure handhelds that tried to compete just didn’t get enough attention. It sounds odd that SNK, of all companies, would try to release an 8-bit handheld to compete with the Game Boy Color, but they tried, and they did a good job. Their first-party lineup on the system was incredible, and they really pumped quality into the little handheld. There was some third-party support from Sega, Capcom, and Namco, but it just wasn’t enough. SNK was having a hard time getting Western support for the system, as it just didn’t appeal to that audience.
The system itself is the successor to the short-lived black-and-white Neo Geo Pocket. The Pocket Color was ahead of its time, being the first 16-bit handheld system on the market and beating the GBA to the punch by a few years. While it still suffered from not having a backlight like many handhelds in the 1990s, it still had a clear and crisp screen. There wasn’t much in terms of I/O, like the handhelds of the 90s, but there was a link cable for multiplayer. What made the Pocket Color unique was the clicky control stick. It was the first handheld to have an analog stick, and it was meant to emulate an arcade stick. I love this thing and wish more handhelds had it, even if it is really noisy, but man does it feel good and is perfect for fighting games, which the Pocket Color was famous for.
There are only two face buttons (A and B), a soft power button, and an options button. That’s it. It’s a pretty rudimentary system, and I’m surprised it had so few buttons despite having a lot of fighting games on it. You can imagine that these games are very simple at their core, which they are. The display is slightly larger than the original Game Boy at 2.7″; however, the system does have a sub-battery that’s used for keeping the clock, as there are a few built-in apps on here. This was also the first handheld to do this. There is a calendar, horoscope, world clock, and alarm setting. I’m not sure why you would leave your NGPC on all night to use as an alarm, but it’s there. You can pick a background color as well. It’s very simple and basic, but it’s there and is cute.
A system is only as good as its library, and the NGPC is widely loved for its small but high-quality library. Only 82 games were ever released, and a surprising amount were released in the West. The games were fun, had great visuals, and just played and ran well; however, they are insanely expensive. Most complete games will cost, on average, $100 a piece. It’s also recommended to modernize the system by installing a drop-in LCD mod. This makes the system much more enjoyable, and you can play in the dark!
Overall, this is the little system that could. There are a few Japanese-only games that have fan translations, but you need a flash cart to play them, and they are expensive (about $100). You also must like SNK games to really enjoy this system. The King of Fighters, Neo Turf Masters, Samurai Shodown, Metal Slug, and games of that nature If you love those classic arcade games, you will also enjoy this system.
I remember MK3 very fondly as a kid. I remember seeing ads for it everywhere. Specifically, a cardboard standee in a Walmart with the giant logo My parents had a friend bring the Saturn version over once during a really bad storm. I remember seeing the arcades as well. I wound up renting it for the Super Nintendo and had a blast. I mostly loved the much darker and more mature tone the series took. MKII felt more cartoony and stylish, while MK3 felt like it pushed the first game’s realism even further.
Sadly, it does not transfer over to the Game Boy version. I don’t know why they bothered at this point. Probe dropped the ball after the pretty decent MKII and made MK3 just about as bad as the port of the first game. Back are the smaller sprites, sluggish animations, unresponsive controls, and weird speed issues with jumping animations. Animations seem to speed up and slow down, making the game just slightly better than a Tiger Electronics version. The control scheme is mostly intact, which isn’t that bad, but we also get the running mode, which is useless on such a tiny screen with a low frame rate. A new developer took the helm here and went with a 512K cart this time, which could still be bigger. Sure, we get four stages, but they’re ugly, and the music stinks too.
Once again, we get quite a few cut characters. Liu-Kang, Stryker, Nightwolf, Kung-Lao, Jax, and Shang Tsung are all missing. That’s nearly half the roster. Every character has their babality intact, but only a single fatality and mercies were kept in. It honestly doesn’t matter how insanely slow the game plays. It feels like everyone is wading through mud. It’s just so unacceptable at this point, as many Game Boy games look and play so much better.
There is nearly no redeeming value in playing this atrocity. It’s the worst version of the game, and at this point, 8-bit versions should have already stopped. We’re almost into 1996. 32-bit systems have been here for a couple of years now. The Game Boy is already almost 7 years old. I can only say this is for people who are curious about or are collectors of Mortal Kombat games. Otherwise, stay away.
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Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.