Introduction

Pinky raising game count

Late last month, Nintendo announced that it had increased the GameCube library by 750 percent. There are only a few ways to make this possible. If the GameCube only had one game on it, Nintendo could achieve this enormous expansion by releasing another six and a half games – but that is not the case. Nintendo could also have dug up all those nasty E.T. cartridges (or Superman 64, if you will) and made them GameCube compatible – but that is not the case, thank heavens.

Nintendo pulled the old ‘bring the portable games home’ trick. Just as the Super Game Boy enabled a Super NES to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, the Game Boy Player allows a GameCube to play nearly the entire range of Game Boy games all the way back to 1989. And it is because of these 1300+ Game Boy games that Nintendo is able to boast a 750% growth in the GameCube library.

What’s the big idea?

The idea behind the Game Boy Player is to be able to play the very same games that you could on your Game Boy Advance on your television at home. Nintendo figures that the GBA SP is just perfect on the go, but gamers would rather go for big screen action at home. Of course, there are instances where you would like to take your GBA to places in your home where you wouldn’t have a TV… but we won’t go into that.

What we will go into is how the Game Boy Player performs in relation to a portable GBA and if it is ultimately worth the $50 US ($70 CDN) asking price.

Box shot top front

Box shot top back

Box shot front

The Game Boy Player package includes the add-on hardware and a start-up disc. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can have your Game Boy Player in any color, so long as it is black. Those of you with Indigo purple and Platinum silver GameCubes will have to live with the two-tone color that the Game Boy Player will add to your machine. On the other hand, it melds in so well with the Jet black GameCube that you may not even notice it on at first glance. If you really want your friends to notice that you shelled out the extra 50 (or 70) bones for a GBP, then there’s nothing wrong with having a non-matching color to accentuate the addition.

Back in Black