Playing Habits

When it comes to hobbies, how one participates will fall somewhere along a spectrum between a wide/shallow mode and a narrow/deep style. For example, I have a friend who has what I call “hobby ADD,” because he finds a new obsession and is super into it and excited to talk about it . . . for like 4 weeks. And then he moves on to a new hobby. The end result is that over time he develops a really wide and diverse set of skills/knowledge that can be useful in future endeavors, but it’s not something that he ultimately becomes a true expert/scholar at. The expression, “Jack of all trades, master of none” applies very much in this case.

Meanwhile, I have another friend who has basically 2 things he likes, and if it’s not those two things then he’s not interested in having a conversation. But he is deeply knowledgeable about them and can answer any question about them.

I fall somewhere in between, where I have a couple of things I do deeply and a lot more that I do superficially. But what I want to apply this analogy to is how I played each system in regards to their games. In this case, playing wide and shallow would mean playing/finishing a wide variety of games once or twice, and playing narrow and deep would be playing the same three games many times over.

With the NES, I feel that I played both widely and deeply. There were about two years between the time when the NES was released widely enough to where the populace was aware of it and the time I got one for Christmas, and during that period I was limited to playing at friends’ houses or convincing my mom to rent one (the whole system) for a weekend from a grocery store. Once we got an NES, I felt like I needed to catch up to my friends who had been playing these games for a while. Because we had access to a video rental store (literally 50 yards out my front door) we could easily rent a large assortment of games for $2, so we often did. We also traded with a few friends to get games that required more than a weekend to finish. So between ultimately owning around 15 games, trading with friends, and renting from stores, I ended up getting quite a few titles under my belt in the roughly two years between getting the NES and the SNES, and felt like I hit all of the major games/series in that time. Of course, once I got the SNES I still played the NES but over time it was used less and less.

When it came to the SNES, I was an early adopter which has both advantages and drawbacks. The obvious advantage is that I have access to the new system and can play it to my heart’s content, and that I was now in the enviable position of owning one and my friends would have to come to my house instead of the other way around. However, the disadvantage is that there’s always a limited number of games at launch, and everything is full price (later adopters might get bundles/discounts and have a better selection of games, by contrast). It also means that I only had one friend with whom I could trade games (Jake), and he already had the one that I owned (SMW), but he was nice enough to let me borrow some (like Ultraman) because he trusted me. 

One other disadvantage to early adoption was that it took a while for the rental stores to catch up and have a selection of SNES titles. They were probably a little annoyed that they had to run out and buy licenses/games for a whole new system and might have been a little hesitant to invest the money. So it meant that for the first year or so, I had a very small library and limited options to play other games and had to play the little library I had over and over. But once the SNES caught on and stores had more titles I could expand my horizons a bit. I don’t think I played as many titles on the SNES as I did the NES (paradoxically while owning it for a longer time period before upgrading) but a lot of the games took longer to finish (I’m thinking specifically about Square's RPGs). One thing that hampered my ability to get some things was that I gave up my paper route after the 8th grade, and didn’t have a replacement source of income until just after 9th grade, so for that year I was somewhat limited on my ability to buy/rent stuff on my own. However, I think I definitely got my money’s worth out of that system and while I did miss a few titles (ChronoTrigger and Super Mario RPG come to mind), I was pretty satisfied. I also invested in a few accessories - the Super Scope and the Mouse, and the Ascii Pad.

With the Game Boy there were several limiting factors in play. Firstly, while we weren’t early adopters (meaning that many games were available by the time we got one), there weren’t really a ton of avenues for playing things outside of our personal library. Stores didn’t rent them (I assume because they were too easy to lose/damage) and I only knew of two other friends who had one with something I wanted to play. 

So while the selection was limited, I didn’t feel like I missed out because a good chunk of the Game Boy games were just ports of NES games that are more easily played on the TV (Tetris, RC Pro-Am, Dr. Mario) or slight adaptations of NES games I already had access to (Mega Man games, Kid Icarus). The few that were considered a legitimate entry/sequel (such as Zelda: LA, Metroid 2, SML2: 6GC, etc.) I either owned or got to play from borrowing.

Looking back, I also feel that we played the Game Boys "wrong," meaning that we mostly used them in our house as the consolation prize when someone was already using the TV that had the NES or SNES. We didn't take them on medium length car rides or keep them on our person for when we would encounter situations where they would be useful (like DMVs, waiting rooms, etc.)

The VB isn’t really worth talking about in this conversation. I ended up with 5 games, which is almost 24% of all titles. From that point of view that’s the highest percent of titles per system I own. But I mainly played Mario Tennis, Red Alarm, and Golf. I didn’t have anyone to trade with (literally - I still don’t know anyone else who has one to this day) and there were no rentals.

But starting with the N64, I felt like I got cheated out of some of my investment. Like the SNES, I was an early adopter and was paying for everything myself (at the time I was also collecting comics and cards, which ate into my game budget). It made it difficult to procure the extra controllers (which were a little spendy) and it took rental stores even longer this time to start getting N64 games. The other problem I ran into is that I knew there was a hard date where things would be interrupted. I had my first year of college and a 2-year trip abroad happening about a year after the N64 released. And that 2.5 year gap is right when the N64 hit its sweet spot in terms of good/popular games. So I felt that I was around for the launch and the first wave of decent games, then got to see the final act, but I missed out on a lot of the good stuff in the middle.

While it’s true that there was less 3rd-party support for the N64 so there was a comparatively smaller list of “essential games,” and it's also true that most of the essentials were 1st-party titles, I still can think of about 10 games that I would have bought without question if I had spent those 2.5 years with a job under more, shall we say, "regular," circumstances. In particular, I missed out on Smash Bros, F-Zero X, Paper Mario, Mario Party, some of the Rare titles (Banjo Kazooie/Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day) along with the hours of playing time. It also happened to be the last console that there was really any easy way of rentals. Stores stopped renting out to disc-based consoles because discs aren't as robust as cartridges.

Gameboy Advance - This is definitely a narrow and deep one. I mostly used it as a way to play the Zelda Oracle games and as the "Tingle Buddy" for Wind Waker on the GC, at least until I got the GBA Player for the Gamecube. But basically the Oracle games, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, X-Men Mutant Apocalypse and Minish Cap. I didn’t have anyone to trade with except Mitch/Brady (who lived 5 hours away) and like normal GB, there were no rentals. There are definitely a bunch of games that I could have bought, but a lot of them were SNES re-releases and other remasters of games I had already played, so their expense couldn't be justified by a college student with a new family. In that way, these SNES remasters were sort of like the NES ports of the original Game Boy that I didn't feel compelled to own. And like the original Game Boy, I also played this handheld "wrong," in that I mainly played it around the house, and only took it outside on longer trips to California for the most part. 

Speaking of being "poor," the Game Cube spanned a lot of the same time period as the GBA and so it had similar issues. We got it about 3 months after it released, which was roughly a year after getting married. This console was relevant during the majority of the time I was attending college and usually also working in some capacity, and also coincided with moving houses, having a couple of kids, and dealing with a lot of responsibilities in the church we were attending. In other words, there were plenty of things that kept us busy and poor, so I couldn’t buy a lot of games, and had to play the ones I did own multiple times when I got the time. So this was definitely a narrow but deep type of play. There were 5 main games I played - Rogue Leader, Wind Waker, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and the Lego Star Wars games. Near the end of its life, I did get some more games that were used so it looks like I ended up with a good set, but the collection was pretty meager for most of the time it was relevant. I did get to borrow a game from Brady here and there, but there were no rentals that I could find. 

DS - This one's easy. I didn't get one the whole time it was relevant. I only got one after getting a 3DS and it was only because my daughter decided to upgrade her Christmas present of the red Mario DS to a purple 3DS. And I've never owned a DSi (at least until I started collecting systems). 

Wii - This console came near the end of my time at college, so I ended up with a few more games than the Game Cube, but not by many. Besides the Zelda titles, the main things we had were several Guitar Hero games, several Lego games, and a lot of the things like Wii Play/Wii Sports. So it was a bit wider than the previous console, but we had multiple games in the same series. But one thing that I will say is that we had more accessories for the Wii than other systems - multiple Wii remotes (including Motion Plus and Nunchuks), the Wii Fit Board, and guitars for Guitar Hero. Had we not gotten those accessories we could have put the money to at least 4 other full price titles. This is also the first system where we could download digital games and we had a few of those. 

But on the other hand, once I installed Homebrew on the Wii, it breathed a whole new life into it. We used it to play old NES, SNES, and GB/GBC/GBA games that I never got to play as a kid and as an easy way to play the classic games without having to rely on ageing hardware. Overall, I would classify the Wii as more narrow/deep, but it became more wide/shallow with the Homebrew.

3DS - This one started out sort of narrow and deep but it has evolved into a very wide and deep library. I got it roughly a year after release, so there were several decent games I could have gotten, but at first I used it to catch up on the two DS Zelda games (PH and ST), the DX version of Link's Awakening, and Four Swords Anniversary Edition. For a good while it was only those 4 Zelda games. But over time, I would expand the library (and the number of 3DS systems) with enough titles that my 18 game case was full and so were my kids' cases. These included the DS games we got as well as the 3DS games. In the household, we probably have around 40 game cards, which is pretty decent, besides a lot of digital titles. It felt more like the original NES to me in that we had a lot of the "must haves" and plenty of other games so it's a wide and deep console for me. This console also happened to hit its heyday right when I started earning more money and we were more financially stable, so I was willing to spend a little more money. 

Additionally, when we got Homebrew on our 3DS systems, it opened up avenues to easily play a lot of the retro games without needing to drag the GBA and a case of cartridges around. I still play it quite a bit and hope to keep doing so. 

Wii U - In contrast to the 3DS, this one is both narrow and shallow. I actually have like 4 physical games for it that I've never played, and several more digital games that I haven't touched. I mainly used it for the two Zelda HD remakes and playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy. My kids played Smash and Mario Kart 8 on it quite a bit, as well as a few other games, but it wasn't nearly as used as all the other systems we have had. 

The Switch is interesting in that I have played a few games (mainly Breath of the Wild and Octopath) quite deeply but I have also bought quite a lot of digital titles when they were on sale. Many of these games I have only played through once and probably won't pick them up again, but I was glad to have played them. During the NES/SNES days, I purchased games I knew to have replay value and rented the rest. As there are no rentals these days, what it's become is waiting for a game to go on sale for $5 and buy it digitally. I figure that's what a rental probably would have cost, except that I actually get to keep it. So instead of looking at my library with sadness that I spent money on games I'll never play again, I see it as a long term rental with the option to play it again should I choose to. 

The Super Game Boy

The Super Game Boy was an adapter that let users play Game Boy games on the SNES. It was great for a few reasons.

Firstly, playing it on a TV obviously gave it a bigger screen. Multiple people could watch without crowding. Plus, it was lit up instead of needing sunlight or good indoor light to see so it was easy to play at night or in the dark.

Secondly, and this was probably the biggest advantage, is that the SNES controller was easier to hold than the Game Boy. For those with larger hands, finding a comfortable way to hold the vertically oriented Game Boy without overlapping fingers was difficult. Plus, it was possible to change the button orientation to \ instead of / . That might not seem like a big deal, but it’s much more comfortable to get both buttons with a single thumb.

Thirdly, adding color just made them seem better. It removed the “puke green” background, and colorizing them almost (sorta) made them seem like a regular NES game.

Every game could be given 4 different colors, since the Game Boy could display black, 2 shades of gray, and white (meaning clear, or where no dot was displayed). There were 32 preset palettes, or users could customize their own. Some of the other features like custom borders, animated borders, and being able to draw added some nice touches, albeit unnecessary ones for gameplay.

To duplicate the correct dimensions of the GB, the SGB didn’t display games in full screen. Instead, it had a border around the game. The default border looked like a Game Boy, but there were about 8 other choices. If left alone for long enough, the borders became animated.

At this point, there were 3 kinds of Game Boy games:

Type 1: Regular, ordinary, 3rd party games - of which there were literally hundreds (like Mortal Kombat, Castlevania: The Adventure or Pac-Man).

Type 2: Regular games that Nintendo knew were popular, in-house games made by Nintendo themselves (like Kid Icarus, Kirby, or Yoshi). The list of these games is probably fewer than 40 games.

Type 3: Games that were specifically optimized for the Super Game Boy (like Donkey Kong ‘94 or Space Invaders).

For normal games (type 1), after the SGB booted up, the game played like normal. The SGB selected the default palette, which had black, white, and two shades of orange. Once the game loaded, additional palettes could be selected, or one could be custom created. Some of the pre-made palettes had higher contrast or specific combinations (blue/red or green/brown, etc.) and most had some shade of white and black.

For games like Type 2, the SGB loaded like normal, except that it picked a particular built-in palette for the game. So when loading Link’s Awakening, it picked a color scheme with green/brown, or a red/yellow/green palette for Metroid II. This was a feature built into the SGB to recognize that a specific game had been inserted.

Games like Type 3 had a specific logo on the box/game that indicated that it was optimized. These had a custom border that would come up, and would often be in full color. The game was able to use some of the SNES hardware to improve sound. For example, in Donkey Kong ’94 Pauline screams when being taken by DK. On a Game Boy, it just sounds like a high pitched computer bleep. However, on the SGB, she actually screams, “HELP!” in English.

The SGB would let you change the borders and palettes from the optimized ones if you wanted to, but it was best to just use those because of the improved quality. 

   

4 years after the Super Game Boy was released, the Game Boy Color came out. Along with the newer hardware came 2 kinds of games, distinguishable by the color of the plastic of the GamePak.

Type 4: Game Boy Color games (in clear plastic)

Type 5: Cross Compatibility Game Boy Color Games (in Black Plastic)

Game Boy Color games (type 4) could only be played on a Game Boy Color (duh), and were in full color. Because they lacked the little notch in the corner, it prevented people from turning them on in a regular Game Boy. If a GBC game (type 4) is put into the SGB, it displays a nice message that informs the player that the game must be played on a GBC.

But the black ones (type 5) could be played in either system. If played in a GB, it had a black/white four color palette as expected. But if played in a GBC, they would be displayed in full color. Black cartridge games were optimized for the SGB with custom borders, but depending on the game, it would either display full color or just pick one of the preset palettes.

Games that were optimized for the SGB were treated like a type 1 or type 2 game by the GBC, unfortunately, and didn't have any kind of enhancements. 

Additional Resources:

The Gaming Historian reviews the Super Gameboy

My Experience with the Game Boy

The Game Boy came out in 1989 but it was a few years before I got one. While some kids were getting a Game Boy for Christmas to add to their NES, we were just getting the NES (the purpose of this statement is not to complain that my parents were not spoiling us enough – just to establish the time frame). We got Game Boys in Spring of 1993, about a year and a half after getting the SNES.

Until that time, I had a couple of occasions to play one here and there, but not for very long. It wasn’t until we actually got Game Boys that I really got to play it often. Two of my brothers and I share consecutive birthdays, and when I was in 8th grade about to turn 14 (1993), my parents decided we were going to take a week off of school and go to California to do the whole Disneyland/Universal/Sea World thing. To keep us occupied during the plane rides, car trips, and long lines, my parents bought 3 Game Boys to use between the 5 of us (really 4, since the youngest wasn’t really old enough to play). Initially they bought the ones that came with Tetris, headphones, and the link cable. But soon after they returned two of them for the basic set since we didn’t need 3 copies of Tetris. The only downside was not being able to do 2-player Tetris. But along with the systems, they got 5 more games: Yoshi, RC Pro-Am, NFL Football, Mega Man 3, and Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters. In my mind I paired them into 3 groups: Sports (Football/ProAm), Puzzle (Yoshi/Tetris), and Platformers (MegaMan/KidIcarus). They also got rechargeable battery packs for us so they wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money on batteries. They weren’t official Nintendo equipment, and they stuck out from the back of the Game Boy, but it was actually good for me. It made the “circumference” of the device bigger and I could interlock my fingers more comfortably.

My dad pulled a cruel prank on us and told us about the Game Boys about 6 weeks early but told us we couldn’t use them until the trip. To be honest, I was looking forward to the Game Boys more than the Disneyland trip. We snuck them out here and there and got caught once. My mom admitted to playing Kid Icarus once or twice just to see what the fuss was about.

At home we set up little charging stations with the battery paks using little slots on our bunkbeds that happened to be the right size to hold the batteries, and the cords were held in place with masking tape (kid engineering at its finest).

After the initial novelty wore off a little, we didn’t play them as much as the SNES. I don’t know if it’s because we got a later run of them, or if we just got lucky, but the “puke green” colored background was actually more of a, “bespeckled gold” color on our models.

I later bought Metroid II: Return of Samus used from the card shop, then added Super Mario Land 3, Donkey Kong ’94, and Space Invaders to my collection. Obviously I got The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it came out.

After having those for a while, I bought the Super Game Boy Adapter. After that, I rarely used the Game Boys, as it was easier to play it on a TV (unless said TV was already being used or I was away from home). I guess I didn’t appreciate the portability aspect of it, as we only brought them on special occasions, like long trips. Mostly I thought of it as another console that happened to be smaller. To me the biggest advantage to having a Game Boy was not that I could take it on the go, or that I had portable versions of my favorite games, but just that I could play certain games that I would be otherwise unable to play.

For example, puzzle games like Yoshi, Dr. Mario, and Tetris were pretty much straight ports on the Game Boy, albeit with fewer colors. Games like Mega Man and Kid Icarus were slightly different from their NES counterparts, but similar enough that a casual observer would think it was pretty much the same. If given the choice between playing a game on the NES or Game Boy (provided they were similar), I would always choose the NES. I liked playing the games where a chapter of the story happened to be on the Game Boy (i.e. Metroid 2, Zelda 4, etc.) rather than a Game Boy translation/port.

I didn’t take the Game Boy with me to my first year of college or Japan (obviously), nor did I really do much with them when I got back. However, I kept track of most of the games (at least the good ones like Metroid and Zelda). I was aware of the recent updates with the Game Boy Pocket but wasn’t super impressed - not enough to warrant buying one. The Game Boy Color came out when I was in Japan but I wasn’t really allowed to play it, nor did I have much inclination as I just assumed it was a 4-color adaptation, like how the Super Game Boy worked and didn’t think much of it. When I got back to the states, my friend bought a Game Boy Color to play Link’s Awakening DX. I didn’t pay much attention to it seeing as how I already owned that game. But looking back I wish I had noticed how much of an improvement it was. 

When I left to live on my own I didn’t take one of the Game Boys with me (something I regret now). I figured that I had the Super Game Boy and left the others for my brothers. Years later when my kids got to be old enough to play games, we had a bit of a renewed interest in playing these older games. My younger brother Matt also happened to have a co-worker who was getting rid of a bunch of GB accessories which he gave to me. So I ended up with a really big case, a magnifier, and a battery pack. This has been great to keep all of the GB and GBC games I've acquired over the years. 

The Game Boy

The Nintendo Game Boy debuted in 1989, and it was the most successful handheld game system of all time until it was surpassed by the DS much later. It was a meant to be a portable NES, in essence. It had an 8-bit processor and a sound chip that was less capable than Nintendo's flagship console. The graphics were made by a dot-matrix grid that could handle 4 colors: White (by which I mean “clear,” or nothing displayed), light grey, dark grey, and black. But even with just 4 colors it was remarkable how clear some of the graphics stayed. Nintendo had produced the “Game & Watch” series of handheld games in the early 1980’s, and were similar to the line of Tiger handheld games, but unlike these earlier games, the Game Boy featured interchangeable games.

The name, "Game Boy" probably evolved from an earlier Japan-only mascot Nintendo had used in their early days: Diskun (pronounced "Dis-coon"). The Japanese language often borrows words from other languages and attempts to pronounce them as close as they can. Examples include, Baiorin (violin), Beesubooru (baseball), and Bideo Geemu (video game). Incidentally, "Famicom" is short for "Famirii Conpyuutaa" (Family Computer), much the same way "Pokemon" is short for "Poketto Monstaa" (Pocket Monster). Because their word for "disk" was "disku," it only took one additional written character to make it into "Diskun." 'Kun' is a title/suffix that Japanese appends to young boys, much the way 'San' is attached to grownups (think Miyagi calling him Daniel-San). Essentially it translated to "Disk Boy," so when the handheld came out, they called it a Geemu Boi, or in English, Game Boy. 

While other portable game systems were horizontally oriented, the Game Boy's form factor was vertical. It featured a small 2.6” (diagonal measurement) screen and the same buttons as the NES (D-pad, Start, Select, B, and A). It had a mono speaker on the front and a volume dial on the side, but when headphones were plugged in to the jack on the bottom, the Game Boy put out stereo sound. It took 4 AA batteries and had about a 30-hour life. There was also a power input jack on the left side to connect an external battery pack or AC adapter, as well as a contrast slider to adjust the darkness. Finally, there was a red light indicating power that would dim if the batteries were about to die. 

The power switch was on the top of the unit and was a mechanical slide which caused a small plastic tab to cover the upper right corner of the games, which had a small notch to allow for this. The idea was to mechanically prevent games from being pulled out while the system was turned on. Each game came with a small plastic case, but like the black NES sleeves they were often lost.

On the right side was the jack for the GameLink cable, which enabled 2-player games on a select number of games, and required both parties to have a copy of the game. There was also a four-player adapter that worked with a handful of games, but it still meant that each person had to have his own system, a copy of the game, a cable, and someone had to bring the adapter. 

The Game Boy came bundled with Tetris, a GameLink Cable, and a pair of headphones. Later a slightly cheaper package was sold that omitted everything except the Game Boy console itself.

Every time the system was turned on, a familiar “ding” played while the Nintendo logo slid down the screen to the middle. The screen background color was known as “puke green,” and in later models was more of a speckled gold color. The screen was not lit, so it required good indoor lighting or being played outdoors. After-market adapters that magnified and lit the screen could be used to play at night. Other accessories included the Game Boy Camera (a rudimentary digital camera), the Game Boy Printer (a thermal printer resembling today’s receipt machines to be used in conjunction with the camera), and the Transfer Pak (an adapter that allowed the Game Boy to be connected to a N64 controller to transfer data between systems).

Soon games featuring the usual Nintendo cast (Mario, Samus, Mega Man, Link, etc.) were being sold, as well as portable versions of classics. Other franchises, like the Kirby and Pokemon line of games, began on the Game Boy.

The system was bulky enough that it made it difficult to carry in a pocket unless it was an adult-sized pocket, or a very big kid-sized pocket. But it fit into backpacks easily, however, and kids could take them to school (provided their teachers didn't see them). Later Nintendo would release a slightly slimmer version of the Game Boy that was easier to keep in one’s pocket called the Game Boy Pocket, as well as a front-lit version (but only in Japan).

Other systems competed against the Game Boy, but due to blurry graphics and short battery life (like the Sega Game Gear, for example), the Game Boy dominated, even against color game systems. It was very popular, even among celebrities and some parents. 

It was superseded in 1998 by the Game Boy Color, which featured basically the same sound and graphics level as the original model, but could do color as well without sacrificing battery life and required only 2 AA batteries instead of 4. It also included an IR connection mode to replace the GameLink Cable, but only a handful of games took advantage of this feature. It could display up to 32 colors at once, but what was really interesting was how it was backwards compatible, something no handheld had done up until that point. To celebrate the addition of color, the system was available in six colors colors initially, though some special editions would later be released. 

If a regular game was put into a GBC, it would automatically be colorized (similar to what the Super Game Boy did). But the difference was unlike the SGB, the GBC assigned different colors to background and foreground elements. The default palette (also accessible by pressing UP + A at the startup screen) set the background colors to black/blue/green/white, and the foreground colors to black/red/white/clear (so it looked like 6 colors were used). Other palettes were available (up to 12 different variations) by pressing certain button combinations when the system was booting up. Also, like the SGB, certain in-house games had special palettes customized for them. For example, Metroid II defaulted to a blue background combination while the sprites were all red and yellow. It made the games even more colorful than the SGB, and made them practically just as good as new GBC games.

GBC games were housed in clear plastic that lacked the corner notch that older games had. This mechanically prevented them from being played in a standard GB unit. But quite a few games were made to be cross compatible between both systems. They were shaped like regular games, but featured black plastic instead of gray, indicating that they could be used in both systems. When put into a standard GB unit, it displayed 4 shades of black/white like any game. But when put into a GBC it would display in full color.

Some games (like Link's Awakening) were re-released with a special color version, usually dubbed "DX," for deluxe. Unfortunately, games that had been optimized for the SGB did not have any kind of enhancements when played on a GBC. SGB games would basically behave like a regular type 1 or type 2 game. 

Over 1000 games were made for these two systems, though not all were released in all parts of the world (many were only available in Japan). But it would be replaced by a newer generation of handheld in 2001, the Game Boy Advance.