The Game Boy Era Is Over

[mollipen]

The Game.com was terrible hardware, not interesting. NGPC was too, really.

I wouldn't call the NGP terrible... I would just say that the B&W model should never have existed. Had SNK got the NGPC out first, and before the GameBoy color hit, they might have looked less like a GameBoy knock-off, which is how the ended up being seen.

But both GameGear and Lynx were much, much better hardware than Gameboy

GameGear was terrible. People bitch about the PSP not lasting long enough battery wise, but it's a god-damned DS compared to the GameGear. The unit was way, way too big, and the screen was abysmal. There was no good angle where the entire thing was of even color and brightness, and there was no position when setting brightness that was ever "right."

The Lynx, yes, a fabulous piece of hardware, but one that was doomed from the start. I wonder if it could have done better had the revised version been instead what we got at launch.

and both had better game libraries than the Gameboy, especially for the first 2 or 3 years of their run.

As somebody who owned both during their first 2/3 years, I can strongly say HELL NO. Do you ever remember how many games there were for the GB, and how many actually good ones there were?

[Frogacuda]

No way. The gameboy just had way more shit released for it because 4 to 5 times the amount of games were published for it in the same time period.

I didn't say larger, I said better.

[Frogacuda]

Do you ever remember how many games there were for the GB

Like a million

and how many actually good ones there were?

That came out before like 1993? None that I can think of off the top of my head, honestly. I guess the first Super Mario Land was alright. And Tetris, of course. Other than that I'm drawing a blank.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

The biggest problem I had with the Game Gear was the crappy screen.
It was nice that it was color and backlit, but any movement on screen was usually blurry. Even worse, when you would press the button right next to the screen, it would blur that side of the screen.
Still, game for game, I enjoyed the Game Gear much more than the Gameboy.

[Frogacuda]

Even worse, when you would press the button right next to the screen, it would blur that side of the screen.

Your GameGear was broken. Mine is 15 years old and doesn't do that.

[SpoDaddy]

There's some serious revisionist history going on here. The reason Game Boy always won was because it had better games that were better suited to portable play. What are all these great Game Gear and Lynx games everyone's crowing about? My best experiences with Game Gear were tethered to a power outlet playing watered down ports of Genesis games I already owned.

The Nomad failing is what really hurt; if it took off we could have had new Genesis games for the rest of the 90's. It has the best library of any portable ever, to this day, but it's just too big and too much of a power hog (even worse than Game Gear).

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

I've literally messed around with about a hundred Game Gears over the years, and I've yet to see one that didn't do that.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

There's some serious revisionist history going on here. The reason Game Boy always won was because it had better games that were better suited to portable play.

um, no.
Tetris carried it for quite some time, and then teh pokemans showed up. My memory is foggy, but I'm pretty sure pokemon saved the Gameboy from a death knell.

My best experiences with Game Gear were tethered to a power outlet playing watered down ports of Genesis games I already owned.

As opposed to the watered down ports of NES games?

[Grave]

I've literally messed around with about a hundred Game Gears over the years, and I've yet to see one that didn't do that.

That's funny. Mine doesn't do that.

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

I just grabbed one out of our case (a sexy blue one!) and popped in Tazmania.
Sure enough, when I pushed button 1, the right side of the screen flickered.