1UP's Retro Gaming Blog is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the original Nintendo Game Boy this week with a series of personal reflection articles that are soaked in nostalgia and warm fuzzy memories. Longtime PTB readers know that I love that sort of game-related writing, as everybody has their own unique story to tell. Do yourself a favor and read through the 1UP crew's happy recollections and rediscoveries.
- Falling Hard for the Foot Clan and Passing Along the Xtreme Game Boy Torch (Kurtis Seid)
- A (Far Too) Personal Look Back at 20 Years of Game Boy (Ray Barnholt)
- Game Boy: The Cure for Boredom (Richard Li)
- A Girl and Her Brick (Jade Kraus)
- An Introduction to Super Mario Land 2, Further Adventures in Mario Land, and The Mario in Super Mario Land (Jeremy Parish)
And as long as I'm pointing you at Game Boy love, let me direct you to an article I wrote for GameCube Advanced nearly five years ago in which I dig into the little system's library and hold up the ten best and five worst games in Game Boy history based on my own experiences. It's Game Boy: Best of the Best. There's also a piece I wrote about the bulletproof case that my father turned into a fantastic complete one-of-a-kind Game Boy carrying case. It's part of the A Boy's Memories roundtable discussion also from the old GameCube Advanced days. Then there's The Handheld Games of Summer in which I reminisce about the annual tradition of choosing a new Game Boy game to accompany me in the backseat of the car during childhood family road trips. Finally, there's the Secret Origin tale of the day I bought Gremlins 2: The New Batch and faced a difficult decision. I loved that little gray Nintendo brick as a kid and young teen, wonky Light Boy magnifier peripheral and all. I only wish it still worked as well today as the day I first slipped Super Mario Land into it in 1989. The LCD screen suffers from an excess of vertical columns of dark dead pixels that make gameplay a crushingly difficult task. Nevertheless, there's no way that I'm giving it up or disposing of it. That Game Boy has been to more places than some people ever have.
