Game Boy Color Review

The Game Boy Color is not an ambitious machine and it never needed to be. Nintendo doubled the processor speed, quadrupled the memory, dropped a color screen into almost the same shell and kept every cartridge sold since 1989 working, which meant an enormous library existed on the first day it went on sale. What arrived afterward is the case for the thing: Pokemon Gold and Silver, still the high point of that series for a great many of the people who played it, Link's Awakening in color, the two Oracle games, Wario Land 3, a Metal Gear Solid that had no business running on this hardware, and a Shantae that turned up so late it became a collector's item.

Nintendo kept a nine year old platform selling by owning the best portable software in the world. The hardware is where the grades give way. The screen is still not lit, so playing at dusk means angling the thing toward a lamp exactly as it did on the original. The processor is modest even next to the Neo Geo Pocket Color. And Nintendo had held color back for years while rivals shipped it, purely because the monochrome model kept selling.

It is a conservative machine. It is also one of the best value purchases in the history of the medium.