Goodbye Game Boy?

via gamesradar

Readers, let's try and work something out together. See, we went out and splashed a penny shy of $70 on a brand new Game Boy Micro last month, despite the fact we've already got another, ooh, five or so machines that can already play GBA carts. Why did we do this? Seriously, we want to know. After all, surely the Game Boy brand is deader than the much-neglected GamesRadar potted plant?

In a recent interview, Reggie himself conceded that there was only one more holiday season left in the Game Boy Advance, a glum forecast that still looks woefully optimistic when you consider Nintendo has dropped support for their smallest child like a hot sausage roll.

Additionally, the third-party publishers we spoke to regarding GBA support were non-committal at best. Only Square Enix seem particularly interested, with a few Final Fantasy remakes and a proposed sequel to FF Tactics in the pipeline - despite the fact that in December 2006, the GBA outsold the Wii, with 850,000 units snapped up. Clearly, the console itself does still have a future. And not just as a "gateway console" for younger players to buy, which the endless stream of depressingly conservative licensed cartoon-games seem to be geared at.

But if you walked into your local Best Buy and strolled over to the forlorn GBA department, you would be forgiven for thinking that's all the Game Boy has left to offer anymore. And it's understandable that, for all its success, people are abandoning the format. Greedy-eyed publishers look at the DS sales and see the larger margins, while smaller developers are often locked out because the prohibitive costs of the Nintendo license discourages some of the quirkier ideas from ever being more than a napkin scrawl.

I hope the GBA will not die soon, it's still a great handheld.

I do not see this as entirely a bad thing. Considering the popularity of the Gameboy Advance, and the fact that there are non-mainstream third party developers who already created tons of homebrew and a few commercial games for the system, chances are there will still be people developing games for this system years after its last hurrah.

The price of used Gameboy Advance games will also drop after awhile, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of games that most of us have not played yet so we will not quickly run out of games to play.

The Nintendo DS can still support the Gameboy Advance format, so we can not say that the ability to play Gameboy Advance games will soon be unavailable. The Gameboy Advance will not die unless most gamers choose to let it die. It will just live on in a different form.

The GBA came out in 2001, I remember getting it as a Christmas present from my wife. I have bought well over 25+ commercial cartridges for it, the GBA Player (for GameCube) and a 64 MB flashcart. In terms of numbers of hours that I've used it, I would say that it was my most "played" games machine ever.

The homebrew scene for the GBA is excellent, even if it has slowed down. Even if that scene completely stopped, you almost have unlimited possibilities for gaming because of the emulators made for it (PocketNES, Cologne, etc). I would even argue that the emulators for the GBA are superior to those made for the GP2X.

Perhaps in a couple of years, you won't be able to buy anything for the GBA at games or electronics stores. But as long as there's an internet, your favorite console will never really die where people can form their own online communities.