Don't want to mod your Game Boy/Pocket/Color/Advance? Here's how I made an external light that actually works!

Nintendo's Game Boy line is something very close to my heart. Over the course of my life, I've owned and enjoyed every iteration of the plucky handheld, from DMG to Color to Micro, and everything inbetween. As anyone who grew up with the earlier versions of the Game Boy will atest to however, the complete lack of an internal light was always, to put it politely, something of a hindrance. Various third-party companies tried to step in with numerous solutions, and these ranged from the bulky, battery-powered add-ons produced for the DMG to the small, flexible worm-lights that everyone with a Game Boy Color seemed to own.They all had one thing on common though; none of them really worked. Whether it was due to the light being, so small and focused that it merely illuminated one tenth of the screen, or because the light was so dim that it could give Paris Hilton a run for her money. The struggle for 90's kids was real.

Oddworld Adventures - Game Boy - Review

I’ll never forget my first experience with an Oddworld game. Soon after the release of Abe’s Oddysee in 1997, I found myself sat, huddled around an old PC monitor with a friend as we watched the opening cut-scene, open-mouthed. FMV cutscenes in video games were still fairly new at the time (at least to a console gamer like myself) and I was completely transfixed by the richly, detailed world and cinematic quality storytelling. 

Pocket Soccer - Game Boy Color - Review

Living in the UK, I’ve always had a hard time in not being a football fan. It’s pretty much a given here that everyone you meet will at some point ask you which team you support and my usual reply of “I don’t follow football” usually kills the conversation quicker than if I’d have thrown a Nazi salute at them.

Legend of the River King – Game Boy Color – Review

In the late nineties the world was gripped with Pokemon fever. The game had already found huge success in its native Japan with the release Pocket Monsters Green & Red, before taking the rest of the world by storm with the release of Pokemon Red and Blue. Those of us in the UK however had to wait until 1999 before we could get our hands on the games but by then we had already been initiated from afar thanks to increasingly tantalising reports from the gaming mags of the time. Game Freak’s light hearted JRPG had well and truly struck a chord with younger gamers and its fiendishly addictive premise of catching, trading and battling the titular creatures became an obsession for school-kids everywhere. Of course it didn’t take long for other developers to begin frantically trying to tap into the craze by creating their own rival games.

With HD-Rumble on the way I want to pay tribute to where it all began; the N64 Rumble Pak

As we look forward to an exciting future of HD-Rumble with the Nintendo Switch I thought now would be the perfect time to look back at one of the pioneers of force feedback technology; The N64 Rumble Pak.

What the 'NX' Needs is... (Nintendo Switch predictions revisited)

Almost a year ago, I decided to try and counter the many calls for Nintendo to make a high-end, 'gimmickless' gaming console. Now, in the wake of the full Nintendo Switch reveal I thought it might be interesting to revisit my thoughts and predictions for the NX and subsequently give my verdict on the Nintendo Switch's divisive presentation.

Know your roots - Is it important to play the original game in a series?

Every gamer has the system they look back on with rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Typically it’s the console we cut our teeth on and experienced our favourite franchises the first time. It’s easy to hold the games on these systems in high esteem and think of them as the best of their respective series just because they meant so much to us the first time we experienced them. 

My foray into gaming began on the Super Nintendo and Gameboy and really took off with the release of the N64. Many of the franchises I love today I first played on these systems and to this day I think of many of them as the best of their kind. But many of these series have older origins which I was never able to experience at the time due to either being too young or in some cases, not having even been born.