This is the eighth post in a series called “Hungry Goriya Used Acquire” that serves to highlight the contents of a large game collection I procured from an old high school friend of mine, Joe. Read here for the backstory.
I’ve decided to amalgamate the acquisitions for original Game Boy and the Game Boy Colour into one post since to me, they’re hardly distinguishable and are rather natural extensions of one another. Joe really, really seemed to like GB/GBC stuff, so there’s lots of really fun and interesting stuff to talk about here. Off we go!
For starters, we got a boxed Game Boy handheld console. The box is in immaculate shape, and so is the unit itself. I was strangely excited to find the crappy headphones that came with it tucked into their slot inside the box’s styrofoam interior. Getting a functioning Game Boy is excellent news since my own personal Game Boy from childhood’s screen fell off in recent years. It looks as if it just completely came unglued, but because of its state, I haven’t picked it up in a long while. Time to huddle under a lamp near an outlet into the wee hours of the morning playing Link’s Awakening! Oh to be 11 again.
Along with the console itself, we acquired some boxed games. The most exciting for me from the bunch was Pokemon Yellow, though it was missing its manual. Though I had never before heard of Faceball, along with the boxed copy below, we also ended up with three additional loose copies of the game. Joe had been planning to have some sort of Faceball tournament at some point in his life, but it never happened. Maybe I can realize his dream.
The number of loose games was substantial. Among some great common titles were some pretty interesting ones like Great Greed, an uncommon RPG that is apparently really good, Ultima II: Runes of Virtue, as well as Metroid II: Return of Samus. What I thought was really convenient is that the only duplicate game we got here was Nemesis (far left). Everything else was brand new to us!
We also got a few interesting attachments (if I can call them that) for the Game Boy. The first was the Game Boy Camera. I was pretty excited to get this because I’ve always wanted to try it out. I saw it inside the Game Boy at first, but it turned out that we also got its box and manual. There was an after market cable produced to transfer the photos to a computer, but the box it came in was empty and we never did track it down. I’m sure they’re out there. We just have to find them!
Another accessory we got for the Game Boy was the Barcode Boy Set. The version I have is from Japan. I don’t think I understand how it works entirely and haven’t had tim to test it out yet, but the premise behind it was that you could scan cards with barcodes into the system, and some barcodes would generate a character for you to play as, whereas other barcodes could be for enemies to battle, or for different kinds of buffs. Sounds easy enough, right? I think the strangest part about all this is that you were encouraged to find barcodes from every day items to scan in to see what they might generate. I bet scanning a barcode from a Sega game would probably generate some kind of unfathomable horror.
Even more interesting is that they also released a successor to this for the Super Famicom called the Barcode Battler. I forgot to include it when I talked about SNES stuff, but I thought I’d include a photo here since we’re on the topic. I’m not sure what changed between the two releases, but it must’ve been popular!
For the Game Boy Colour, we got a number of handheld units in a variety of colours! Below you can see the mix that we got. The purple one (leftmost) has been modified, though I haven’t shown a photo of it here. It’s modded to hook up to some sort of external power source rather than AA batteries. The purple one is my favourite and I would like to see it become unmodded, but it’s not looking good. The battery terminal plates were not in the lot of stuff. All of the GBCs turn on and seem to be in good working condition with the expected scuffs and scratches from regular use.
We received more boxed games for the GBC than for the original GB, again with a mix of common games and some uncommon ones. Revelations: The Demon Slayer being an Atlus game automatically makes it coveted, but I was also surprised to see Legend of the River King 2 and Resident Evil Gaiden here in such great condition. Other notable things here were the two Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 games, which are like a Pokemon game in a Dragon Warrior universe with a lot of breeding involved. All in all, this lineup of beautifully maintained boxed games will be great to add to my exploding Game Boy collection.
Lastly, we got some loose GBC games to round everything off. I haven’t had a chance to look into a lot of these titles just yet, but I had a brief run with Mr. Nutz and have become very excited to try out Power Quest. Robots fighting seems like a good time! Remarkably, only the Game & Watch Gallery 3 cartridge was something we already had. All the other games were completely unique to us, which seems almost surreal considering how much we already had for these handheld consoles.
Thar she blows! I hope you folks are enjoying these posts as much as I’m enjoying putting them together. I’m just thrilled with the games we received here, and I still have lots more to share in the coming posts.
Thanks for reading, as always.
-GG