What was Nintendo thinking when they made the Game Boy Advance. Hubris. Shoulder buttons? On a handheld? Tower of Babylon. Icarus. The GBA was entirely too Advanced. It creaks under the weight of its own silicon. The wide color gamut of the screen offends my sensibilities. A gaming handheld doesn’t need to be blazing fast or cutting edge. I might even go as far as to say it should not be those things, and that the very idea of an Advanced gaming handheld is at odds with what I want from a specific kind of device. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how important gaming handhelds are to how I like to live my life, and about what kinds of games fit best into that kind of lifestyle where I’m treating video games in the same way an archetypical bench-sat pidgeon-feeing old woman might treat a paperback. That old woman’s paperback is not Advanced, and if it were, that would ruin it. It does not have should buttons. Games meant to be played on a handheld should be designed with this lifestyle in mind. This is a fundamentally different activity from playing a game at a desk or on a television. I can stand in the kitchen and struggle against Pokemon Pinball’s dogass physics while I wait for my curry to reheat. I might be outside and need to rush to avoid a storm. Fuck it I might be playing Tetris DX while I’m driving, what are you gonna do about it?

I haven’t been around as much as I’d like to be online lately. I consider the internet to be more my home than meatspace a lot of the time but the last few weekends have just been jam packed. I actually went and saw Lip Critic, Soot opened for them, that was pretty great. Still working my way through One Piece. On some new meds. I’ve been trying to eat less fast food.

I’ve settled into this kind of miraculous meditative loop for the last week or so where I’ll get home from work, immediately start the rice cooker, hop in my pajamas, and watch exactly three episodes of Twin Peaks. I’m not planning on writing about Twin Peaks, I’ve just been enjoying it quite a lot. Halfway through the night’s first episode, the rice cooker pops, which is my queue to hop up and reheat a bowlful of curry from a big pot I prepared days in advance. And while it rotates, I stand in the kitchen, and tap away at my handheld. I have an Anbernic RG 35XX Plus running Knulli Gladiator II and it’s a real treat, a budget device that doesn’t break a sweat on PS1 games. Despite that overhead, I find myself using it almost exclusively for Game Boy Color recently, so in the same way I’ve chosen horror hardbacks as the one type of book I allow myself to collect and CDs as the one type of music media I allow myself to collect, I think the Game Boy Color cartridge is going to be the one type of physical video game I allow myself to collect.

Just as a quick aside, I want to express that I am somewhat conflicted about reproduction stuff vs OEM. On one hand, I like to tinker and my job is technically repairing electronics, so I believe on a fundamental level in the value of restoring and preserving the original hardware that Nintendo manufactured to run this hardware. That feeling is motivated by a sense of responsibility not to be wasteful, but also as a small gesture of preservation and doing my part to continue pushing forward the things that I think make life special from a cultural standpoint. You know, Game Boy games.

On the other hand, Nintendo isn’t making these things any more. And while I very strongly believe that if Nintendo released a modern Game Boy Color with USB-C and a backlit screen, they would make a lot of money and everybody would want one, Nintendo doesn’t make cool decisions that will obviously make a ton of money, they make awful frustrating decisions that somehow make just enough money to convince them that making awful frustrating decisions is good actually. Jesus fucking Christ it wasn’t even that long ago that those demons released an electronic product in the shape of a Game Boy that was compatible with a cartridge system and it was just shitty Hit Clips. At least Alarmo was a funny bad decision. Like Alarmo is like a joke product. The person that approved that for mass production is a hilarious human being. The Alarmo is one of the funniest jokes ever told. But the fact that Nintendo made new plastic electronics in the exact shape of a Game Boy and a Pokemon cartridge and decided that this new plastic electronic should in fact not be a device that plays video games but should instead play audio files is genuinely like being hit with a wave of soul-obliterating razor sharp malice straight from Nintendo specifically for me.

I also picked up a reproduction copy of Pokemon Crystal off of AliExpress, it claims to have working RTC to support the in-game clock functionality (Crystal has a day/night cycle) which, if true, is fantastic, because prices for physical Pokemon games have been out of control for a long time and that’s definitely a realm where I think quality reproduction cartridges are important for accessibility. Pokemon Crystal’s day/night cycle is actually what spurred all of this on – the real-time clock functionality doesn’t work properly on the emulation device I use because when I’m not playing it, I turn it fully off to preserve battery. The device doesn’t even keep time correctly, which is never a problem because I don’t use it as a clock under any other circumstances and the battery life is really nuts with this small compromise. But it’s a compromise that effects what is probably just objectively the best Pokemon game, and despite being objectively the best Pokemon game, I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask $150 for it. Japanese copies of games are generally much cheaper, but it’s not the kind of thing where I can just buy a much more reasonably priced Japanese cartridge and carry on like I did with Mario Golf. Maybe this is just my queue to start learning elementary school-level Japanese again so I can save money on video games. That seems reasonable.

I actually don’t have direct firsthand nostalgia for the Game Boy Color. I was a GBA girlie, my first Pokemon game was Ruby. But now in 2026, for some reason, Game Boy Color games just look right. They look like they’ve always existed and can never age. I don’t know what it is. GBA games look fantastic, but they’re at a point where it’s just approaching the quality of watching anime on a television to a certain degree, at least with the color gamut. I just wanted to take this little bit at the end here to talk about the GBC games I’ve been most enjoying. I’ve mentioned Pokemon Crystal and Pinball, but the Pokemon TCG and Puzzle Challenge games for the GBC are also fantastic. And Pokemon Picross exists, despite never being officially released, and I understand that it’s possible to take homebrew ROMs and flash them to blank cartridges so maybe I’ll go to the trouble of making some custom carts. I sure would love physical copies of Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish and Walfie’s Nonograms, two of the finest picross games that have ever been made. I’d really like to get my hands on the three Dragon Quest games that are available for the GBC and they don’t seem too awfully pricey. The Legend of Zelda Oracles games are another case for “well maybe we just start learning Japanese again” because they’re stupid expensive in English and very reasonably priced with better cart art in Japanese. Alright, I know what I’ll do. I’ll download a Japanese ROM and see exactly how much I struggle. Maybe it’s easy. Maybe I already speak Japanese and I simply must try to awaken this latent ability. Love you bye mwah~