10 Essential Game Boy Games pt.1

The original and chunkiest.

This is the one I actually owned. Not this actual one, of course. One just like it, though.

 The Game Boy Pocket was my very first console. Before I owned a Mega Drive, or a Master System or a Super NES or an N64 or even a humble original Game Boy, I owned a green Game Boy Pocket - a Christmas present in 1998. It came in a pack with a pouch and a copy of Super Mario Land and I loved it to bits. I had never really felt like I was missing out on anything in particular by not being part of the console race, being the dedicated PC gamer that I was, but the allure of Mario and chums proved too strong to resist, and I was very happy with my newest piece of gaming hardware.

Over the years, I have often come back to the humble, monochrome Game Boy. It is a marvel of technological wizardry: a compact, 8-bit Zilog Z80 powered handheld that might have seemed simple of the surface, but as the years went by we were shown exactly what it was capable of: by the time the last wave of monochrome titles were coming around in 1998/99 - a whopping nine years after the machine's initial release - the classics were coming thick and fast and the machine was doing things that those who had been around for the launch would have hardly thought possible.

So, if you're coming to the good old Game Boy now, what games should you get? What are the essential games that need to be in anyone's collection? Well, with this series, I hope to answer that question. A few ground rules: first, only "grey" carts count, so no GBC titles here: they'll be for another list. Secondly, I'm trying to focus on games that I would - and indeed do - still play today. Poke'mon Red may be the Game Boy game on which I racked up the most hours back in the day, but today I would struggle to recommend it to anyone: not through any fault of its own, but rather because it's been so thoroughly superseded by not only its sequels but also a definitive remake on the GBA. This is not a list of historical curios, its a list of games that still hold up more than 25 years after the machine's launch. So, let's kick it off with a classic from none other than Konami.

#10 - Nemesis

Konami were very early supporters of the Game Boy, with their first game for the system being The Castlevania Adventure. A little while later, however, through their Ultra/Palcom subsidiary (the name varied depending on where you lived) they brought Gradius to the machine, in the guise of its sometimes-name in the west, Nemesis.

The horizontal shooter is a genre I have a checkered history with, and indeed there were several versions of Gradius itself that I tried and failed to get on with in the past. Nemesis, however, I never had any problem with. Perhaps the difficulty is toned down, but whatever the reason, I always simply got on better with this version than any of the series conversions of sequels on other formats.

For those unfamiliar with Gradius, the concept is relatively simple. It's a direct descendant of Scramble, and maintains three elements from that game: fly to the right and shoot is the core gameplay mechanic; there are missiles that bomb the ground as well as a straight shot for flying enemies; and the levels evolve from open air combat to tight, twisty caverns as you go along. So far so standard, you might be thinking, but then Gradius/Nemesis hits you with its unique element: the power-up system.

Where in most games you will simply power up your weapons by picking up one item, and your shields with another one, and your speed with yet another one, in the Gradius series there's simply one generic power-up orb, and a bar along the bottom, with each slot on the bar representing a power-up. Each orb progresses the bar along one space, and you stop it when you get to the power-up you want.

It's not complicated, but it does take a lot of getting used to. It also means that powering up can take some time: your fully equipped ship uses three speed, three missile, two satellites and a force field, not to mention your choice of either double shot or laser cannon. There's certainly few other games quite like it (excluding, of course, the sequels and spin-offs of Gradius itself) and when you are fully equipped and powered up, it's a really rewarding feeling.

But this unique strength of the game is also its Achilles' heel. Die once, and you lose all your power-ups, dragging you back to your plodding, single-shot standard ship (named, incidentally, the Vic Viper). A single satellite (known as "options", for reasons that escape logic) takes five power-up orbs, and not every enemy drops them. When you die, you're probably in a fairly intense area, and being suddenly underpowered and un-shielded means you'll probably die again quite quickly (even moreso because you're also too slow to dodge a lot of stuff any more). This means that the loss of a single life in this game is an incredibly harsh punishment.

This is a broad complaint about the series in general, and one that I know puts a lot of people off the games. All that said, however, the strengths of this game more than make up for it. I found it a bit easier to recover in this one than in most of the other games in the series, for a kick off. Secondly, the game is excellent to look at, especially for an early GB title. The pace is a little slow, but this is actually a good thing for two reasons: one, it makes up for the small playfield, and second, it means the game doesn't have too harsh a difficulty curve.

The music is excellent and the sounds are all listenable. You can choose to start on any of levels 1-5, with two difficulty options as well (this was Konami's way of getting around a lack of a save function in several of their early GB titles: both Castlevania and Probotector/Contra have this feature as well). The real benefit of this feature is that it plays so well into the handheld nature of the titles: where console games are designed to be played for hours at a time, handhelds can be pulled out on the bus, and played for five minutes. Being able to pick your starting level means that this game is perfect as a pick-up-and-play title, able to be played for five minutes or an hour and be just as enjoyable either way.

This is, for me, the Game Boy shooter. An absolute classic of its system and a perfect introduction to the Gradius series, not to mention a great way to start your Game Boy collection.