You know what one of my favorite Nintendo accessories is? The Game Boy
Player, a device that connected to the bottom of a GameCube with a
slot for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games. You
plug the cartridge, pop in a special disc, and then can play whatever
is on the cartridge on your TV with a controller. And it looked good.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was one game people constantly said
needed to be played on a Game Boy Player, and I don’t disagree.
But I’m here to talk about two games specifically. Advance Wars 2, and
Super Mario RPG: Super Star Saga.
Those two games are what gave me the most mileage out of that Game Boy
Player. And by mileage, I mean over a hundred hours. For Advance Wars
2, it has three ways of playing multiplayer. First, you can use the
link cable and play with someone else who owns the game, for a full
experience. Second, you can do single cartridge multiplayer. A gimped
version of the game would be downloaded to the other system and you
could play that way. Of course, that sucked, but if you were the only
one carrying the game, what could you do?
The final option was single system multiplayer. You could just set up
a multiplayer match, decide exactly how many humans and AI were
playing, spawning where, starting with what, etc. Then you could pass
the GBA around and take turns.
The Game Boy Player enhanced this last mode. Every controller plugged
into the GCN while the GBP was in use counted as player one. This
basically meant that everyone could have their own controller, gather
around the TV, and take turns while rooting for each other. And
Advance Wars was the type of game where you could have epic,
multi-hour struggles over multiple fronts and with multiple people. It
was a great extra feature, I felt at the time.
Later, I got Wavebirds, and now my brother, my best friend, and I
could just roam around a room, playing games on our GBAs or computers
while taking turns with an epic battle going on the big screen.
Then came Super Star Saga. See, I love co-op games. Can’t get enough
of them. Super Star Saga, being a more direct sequel to the SNES
classic Super Mario RPG, was unfortunately single player. Despite the
fact that in battle, you controlled Mario and Luigi separately. I
think you know where I’m going with this.
My brother and I played through the game co-op. In the explorable
areas, whichever Mario brother needed to leave would be the one
controlling the movement, but we still needed to do things like time
jumps together. When it came to battles, we each took care of our own
dodging, and would have to work together extremely well to get combo
attacks off. It was difficult, but very fun, and extra rewarding.
Well, that’s the end of my short anecdote about gaming in other
contexts. Hopefully you’ll get a bunch of others that go in different
directions.
I purchased the Super Gameboy which was the Gameboy player for the SNES. People thought I was crazy. But if I am home, why do I want to play on a tiny screen when I have a big screen?
We don’t need Gameboy players today. What we do need is the ability to play handheld games on the Nintendo home console. “But they weren’t designed for the home console, Malstrom.” Oh, they are now! The Gamepad is like a handheld.
If fear Nintendo will force us into two different accounts. One account for home consoles and another account for handheld consoles. It should just be one account. I don’t see why we can’t play Gameboy games at home. After all, Nintendo made multiple players which allowed it.
One of the reasons why I had a Super Gameboy was that I had a ton of gameboy games. Many of these games were in Japanese and cannot be found anywhere today. My friend lost my new Zelda: Link’s Awakening so he paid me back by giving me like 30 Gameboy games (some of which whose quality was questionable. At that time period, the one Zelda game was seen as equal to 30 Gameboy games haha).
One of my all time favorite games (all time meaning by thirty years) is Lode Runner. There was a Hyper Lode Runner available on the Gameboy and you could make your own levels as well. I played the crap out of that game.
Your idea of turn based gaming with Gameboy games on a big TV is a really neat one. Unfortunately, Nintendo hates you and likely won’t allow you play virtual Gameboy games on your Wii U.
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