The Gameboy(Pocket/Color) had a lot of good games, but they were heavily outweighed by the shovelware. As a kid, I loved my GBC, but it really was a pain to find games that were worth playing. The majority of the good ones were the
Dragon Quest re-releases, and the
Pokemon games, which were themselves basically
Dragon Quest clones with a collecting gimmick. Special mention also goes out to
Final Fantasy Adventure better known in Japan as
Seiken Densetsu, and more recognizable to Americans as the prequel to
Secret of Mana, as well as the Gameboy Color version of
Metal Gear Solid, which was released to the rest of the world as
Metal Gear: Ghost Babel. That last one was really impressive, being a completely new
Metal Gear game, taking place in a "what if" world where
Metal Gear 2 never happened. It played a lot like the MSX version of
Metal Gear 2, to boot.
However, as much as I love my old Gameboy Color, the Gameboy Advance was the first Nintendo handheld where the quality games really outweighed the shovelware. Whereas a truly good game was a major find on the earlier products in the Gameboy line, there was guaranteed to be at least one good game on any given rack of GBA games. Looking back on my collection, there wasn't a single bad game in it, which is more than I can say for almost any other system I've ever owned. The DS continued this legacy, with plenty of great games nestled in with the shovelware; I can't wait to see what the 3DS has in store for us.
Edit:
tahrey said:
Yeah, the Gamegear was my first handheld as well. Unfortunately, and as much as I loved it, it ate batteries like nobody's business, and was too big to fit in a pocket, meaning it really failed at being a portable system. It was decent for long car trips, assuming you had a car adapter and the AC adapter port hadn't been damaged through use -- something that was really easy to do, and the ultimate reason I no longer have a Gamegear -- but there wasn't much point in trying to play it while waiting for or riding the bus, as the batteries died faster than the ones in my old Furby. I did spend plenty of time with that thing, plugged into a wall, playing
Sonic 2,
Super Columns, and
X-men. Incidentally, that remains to this day the best version of
Columns, and it's really a shame that it never got a release on either the Genesis or one of the later Sega collection compilation discs. I think it got a release on a special
Columns collection, but there aren't many people who love
Columns enough to buy just that series for a modern system.
