Merry Christmas.

I hope everyone got everything they asked Santa for.

This post isn’t board gaming related at all. It’s about a little “project” I’ve decided to do that sees me jumping into a time machine and revisiting my younger years and video gaming history.

It all started Tuesday when I saw on social media somewhere (most likely Twitter) some art work related to the video game Nebulus from Hewson Consultants.

Now I’m old enough to remember it coming out originally and playing it in the eighties in its 8bit form. But I had a vague impression that it got released on home consoles that included the Nintendo GameBoy. It was probably an old Retro Gamer I was remembering.

As always a couple of minutes on Google and Wikipedia confirmed that there had indeed been a version for the GameBoy. But it had been renamed Castelian for some reason.

Five minutes later a Castelian cartridge had been purchased on eBay. Which means it’ll be with me most likely in the New Year. If I’m lucky before then.

I thought wouldn’t it be cool to revisit some of the old GameBoy games I own while I was waiting for Castelian to arrive.

Finding my old games was the easy bit. The hard bit was remembering where my handheld consoles were. Eventually I found them after some digging around. I even managed to find the correct chargers!

While I put my GameBoy Advance SP (GBA SP) on charge, along with my 3DS lite I sorted through my games collection to select a handful of games to play (see photo below).

I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this earlier in the year. I could have been playing these during the lockdown.

As I was going through my GameBoy collection I could swear I had Robocop for it. But it was not to be found. Maybe my mind and poor memory were playing tricks on me.

But another visit to eBay saw a GameBoy version of Robocop on its way to me.

Christmas Eve afternoon saw me fire up my GBA SP with Tetris for the GameBoy plugged into the cartridge slot.

Tetris was bundled with the original GameBoy back in the day. It was a classic combo that sold insane numbers. There is an amazing chapter in the book Game Over by David Sheff that goes over the saga of how Nintendo got the license for Tetris and teamed it up with the GameBoy.

For many it was the only game they played on the GameBoy. It was a portable Tetris player.

For me GameBoy Tetris is the definitive version and the yardstick later versions are judged against.

It’s easily been a decade since I’ve played this version. So to clear 75 lines on my first attempt wasn’t too bad for this aging player. My next couple of games I was in the eighties for lines cleared. Back in my younger days I had reached over 120 lines. But that’s with the tetrominos falling at a silly speed.

The music for Tetris on the GameBoy by Hirokazu Tanakais is still iconic and catchy as ever.

While this “project” is going on Tetris is going to be a game I keep coming back to for a break.

Another classic on the GameBoy is Donkey Kong.

Like so many games (and this will be a recurring theme during this “project”) I never completed the game but got pretty far into it.

I like Donkey Kong. It’s an interesting take on the arcade classic.

Donkey Kong starts off with the four levels from the arcade original. And to be honest if they had just recreated the arcade game I would have been happy. But they didn’t.

After you complete the fourth level you start to work through 97 new levels! However although the over all aim is still to rescue Pauline, on each level you now have to collect a key to open the door to advance to the next level. These new levels remind me more of old Spectrum and C64 platformers like Manic Miner or Chuckie Egg.

A nice touch is the ability to save your progress at regular intervals. It aids progressing through the game.

It took a couple attempts before I was sailing through the classic arcade levels without losing a life. It’s amazing how even after all these years it all comes back to you. But the game is still a joy to play.

I’ll write some more on Donkey Kong in the next post about this “project” as I progress through more of the levels.

Until then stay safe.