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Hey there Master Malstrom,

good to see you’re back. I’ve missed your writings while you were on holiday, but it seems you’ve come back with lots of things to write about, which is always a good thing. Anyway, I’m writing to tell you about portable gaming. No, not the 3DS or even the Vita.

You see, when I was a kid I went to the shopping center one day with my mother and saw a Classic Gameboy for sale in an electronics store. At that point I had already had an Atari and was having fun with my Sega Genesis, but the idea of a portable system really seemed nice, thinking back about it. Well, at least I’d have something to do while waiting on the dentist or the doctor. And oh, that box! And it came with Tetris, what more can you ask? I was sold on it immediately.

After bugging my mom for a while I managed to convince her to buy it. Man, Tetris was really amazing! What about Super Mario Land? I hadn’t had a Nintendo console up to that point (was more of a Sonic fan, really), but was that game good. One month later, Pokémon Red/Blue was advertised on a videogame maganize i regularly bought and the game seemed great. I got Red, my friend got Blue and we had so much fun I don’t even know where to start.

Fast forward a little bit, to the Gameboy Advance. I got that too… after so much fun with my Gameboy, what could go wrong? Indeed, playing Super Mario World, A Link to the Past and other classics was priceless. Even Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, though not nearly as good as Super Metroid, had their fair share of fun. Then some guy broke into my house a few years ago and stole my Classic Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and N64. That guy KNEW what the good stuff was… he even left my road bicycle there, untouched! I was very sad, understandably, but got over it.

I didn’t get hooked to the new portable consoles, after that. NDS, PSP, and now the 3DS and Vita all seem to “miss” something I can’t exactly point out. Maybe it’s the same that’s missing from the new home consoles (PS3, X360 and so on), and that’s why I can’t find them as fun as the 8-bit and 16-bit classics. I left portable gaming, or, it left me.

I did get a Wii in the meantime though, as I’ve wrote about it in a previous email.

Ok, back to portable gaming:

Well, lately I’ve been thinking about buying a smartphone. I’ve always had a “it only calls” kind of phone, but seeing all my friends with their shiny iPhones and Galaxies… it really seemed like a useful addition to the daily life. Browsing the web, checking emails… the games though, oh boy… it’s good they only cost 1 or 2 bucks at most, ’cause they suck bigtime. Nothing I’d be willing to spend money on, that’s for sure.

That whole “tactile experience” you talk about is so very true. You can’t play well if you can’t “feel” what the character is doing, in your hands. Those touchscreen games are a fun experiment, but they don’t last. I’ve seen some sorry people trying to play versions of platforming games with smartphone touchsceens and it plain simply doesn’t work. “Map this button to this part of the screen”… yeah, keep trying that.

Then, last week I saw a friend of mine with the new (at least here in Brazil, for all I know it could’ve been released for a while there in the US) Xperia Play. I thought, “well, it’s just another smartphone”. But he showed it to me, and it has… buttons? And gaming buttons at that, with decent quality. He showed me some racing game, 3D and all, seemed OK. Had some PS1 “classics” (gotta laugh at that) available as well. But then I thought to myself, since it’s an Android, it should have a bunch of additional software available, so I ventured a guess: “it doesn’t have any emulators by any chance, does it?”.

It does.

I went to see some videos on youtube and it turns out there’s emulators for practically any old console over there for the Android. And, with buttons (even though it’s that stupid Sony d-pad, but I can live with that), it’s finally possible to play that in a portable sort of way. I got so pumped up with the possibilities, i bought the phone soon after. I’m still waiting for it to be delivered, but I’m already planning which games I’ll play on my holidays. Definitely some Pokémon. And Mario. And Sonic, why not? Fun times ahead.

So, finally, I’m seeing some way for us “retro” (actually, abandoned) gamers to return to portable gaming. I don’t like where the 3DS is going, and the Vita’s probably not going to fulfill my needs either. Both have proprietary operating systems that won’t make it possible (at least not easily) to run custom software like those emulators on them. So, I can buy a general-purpose smartphone with a gaming-like interface and play the old, good stuff as I please.

Call me when you’re making something as good as the Gameboy, Nintendo. Until then, keep making that 3D stuff you like so much, but don’t count on my money.

Keep up the good work, Sean. Cheers!

Remember when you would go into a video game store and felt like it was Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory? Everything in it was marvelous. You could (and did) spend all day there. You had only a little amount of money but there was so much good stuff to choose from. (Or you did what I did and rented the entire freaking NES game library. For weekends, I’d come in with a stack of like thirty games hahaha. I still remember playing Mega Man 1 for the first time and thinking, “This is pretty good. There is something missing about it though.” When I played Mega Man 2, it was “GD$GG#FGDY” and I couldn’t stop playing it. Bought it after I turned in the rental.)With Gameboy games, there used to be all this great stuff to choose from. The only theme of the Gameboy games was that they were designed around portability in mind. But what I find so alienating about the 3DS is that the library is designed around the theme of ’3d output’ which not only do I dislike, it places the process of the game over the content. The formula is a franchise where you are supposed to buy it because of ’3d output’. The franchise doesn’t offer a new content offering. If Metroid was for the 3DS, it would be ’3d output Metroid with more maternal instincts written by Sakamoto’. (In fact, we kinda got that with Metroid Fusion which seemed like an absurd side story whose purpose was to focus on Samus’s ‘inner dialogue’. Blech.) We would not get Metroid II but rather Metroid 3d. Video games are about games, not about special effects.

“Gameboy games are trash, Malstrom,” chuckles a hyena-looking reader. “That’s just nostalgia talking for ya! Hahahaha!”

Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, some NES era Gameboy games include the Super Mario Land games, Metroid II, Final Fantasy Legends, Kirby (the first one), Gargoyle’s Quest (anyone remember this?), the sport games, the NES-lite games like the Castlevania/Contra/Gradius incarnations, classic arcade games, and these are all games I readily play today. Those little cartridges were also quite charming.

The DS did poorly at the start also due to the ‘theme’ of ‘integrated hardware and software’ within the library. Remember all the games that ‘had’ to have dual screen or touch screen mechanics even though they didn’t add anything? Everyone hated them. The DS library really became exciting when the games were more content differentiated instead of utilizing the hardware’s capabilities. In other words, no one cared that Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow was going to be on the Gameboy Advance and wasn’t exactly designed with the DS in mind. New Super Mario Brothers, minus the mini-games, didn’t need any of the DS’s ‘functions’ in order to be interesting. We want games, not special effects.

Anyway, today when I go into a game store I feel depressed. There is nothing on the shelves that looks interesting except maybe a few games. The Game Industry likes to hide itself under one or three game sales numbers (like Modern Warfare 3). But there isn’t much activity going on with the non-AAA games. Where are the cult hits?

One thing I fondly remember about the original Gameboy was the nice grip. Remember the ridges on the sides? Sure, the screen was crap, but boy did it feel nice in your hands. Today, game portables are too fragile and too thin. It is like they are designed for display on a table instead of being held in your hands. I never got cramps playing the Gameboy as I did playing the DS. The Gameboy was larger and felt more comfortable in your palms. You could grip it. The DS and especially the 3DS feel like it would snap if you gripped it. You have to hold it like holding a feather. But that sucks because gaming is about mashing buttons. You can’t mash buttons on a feather without being very delicate. And then your hands begin to cramp.

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