Gamer's Adventure

Game Boy’s 20th anniversary has been honored with GameSpite Quarterly No.1 Game Boy x 20 Years = Retrospective, or a retrospective on 20 years of Game Boy. Following the collected writings on random games contained in GameSpite Year One, Vol 1., GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 begins GameSpite’s quarterly release as a professionally done fanzine-like publication with this Spring issue focusing on the specific topic of Game Boy.

Quarterly No. 1 is reminiscent of Game Over, a book detailing the early video game history of Nintendo, sectioned into different eras of Game Boy’s life. Beginning with a foreword on Nintendo’s success and how Game Boy kept Nintendo afloat, the introduction mentions how no one really noticed it was Game Boy’s 20th anniversary and sets the tone for the rest of the book at respecting the handheld as an important gaming platform. The book continues to preface every era’s section with a look at Game Boy’s competition including Lynx, Game Gear, WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket, and how it outlasted them all.

Each section of GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 contains articles on specific games like the previous GameSpite, but with much nicer formatting. Articles start with the title displayed in a pixeled font, followed by the boxart for the game, and two screenshots (printed in black and white like the rest of the book which is fitting for Game Boy) with a lightly brightened blown up screenshot serving as the background. At first I didn’t like the smaller text size over the first book, but prefer it now as it keeps the articles to a compact, Game Boy like size, that don’t take up that many pages to get through making for bit sized readings. The cover looks nice with multiple images of Game Boy layered on top of one another that reminds me of the advertisements Game Boy had early on.

The book touches on how Game Boy succeeded by using simple technology to create a handheld that had a long battery life thanks to having a non-color screen, and a variety of 3rd party support. The first section talks about the early games like Super Mario Land, and Tetris and how the blocks actually have names, and how early console conversions had varied results with a portable Gradius with easier difficulty to make it manageable to play on a handheld, and the shortcomings of The Castlevania Adventure. In the next part the articles talk about the second Game Boy Castlevania making up for it’s predecessor, Operation C adding many innovations to the Contra series that would go dormant until Contra 4, and Metroid II as R&D1′s ambitious sequel to the original NES game.

Towards the end its mentioned how the Game Boy was revitalized by and literally became Pokémon, and how Zelda: Link’s Awakening packed so much adventure into hardware inferior to the SNES. Throughout the book there are a few choice topics on the Game Boy Camera, Kirby’s Dreamland, a 4 page comic on Game Boy’s history, and the puzzle game Daedalian Opus that has a weird localized boxart and title. Rounding out the book are a few unrelated Game Boy topics on game length for an aging gamer, Fable II, and Castlevania: Order of Ecclessia for DS which seems appropriate enough as the Game Boy gave way to Nintendo’s dual screened handheld.

GameSpite Quarterly No. 1 can be purchased for $12 at the online Blurb store, as well as a hardcover version featuring bonus content, and articles from the issue can be read at GameSpite.net. Also available is the just released GameSpite Year One, Vol 2., available with the same content in both softcover and hardcover versions, containing the other half of writings from the first year of GameSpite.