Год производства: 1966

О забавном котенке по кличке Агапыч, который никогда не боялся оставаться дома один. А чтобы ему не было скучно, хозяин привязал к стулу смешного неуклюжего медвежонка. Долгие зимние вечера они проводили вместе…

Автор сценария – И. Виноградова (дикторский текст)
Режиссер – Л. Яровенко
Оператор – В. Мамонтов

Analysts, developers and former Nintendo staff look back at the why the platform holder dominated the portable gaming space for over three decades.

Since the Game Boy’s debut in 1989, Nintendo has operated a twin-pillar games business: home consoles and gaming handhelds. The discontinuation of the 3DS, and lack of a direct successor, marks the end of an era, one in which the platform holder not only dominated but expanded the games market.

Ubisoft’s brand director for international brand strategy Shara Hashemi says Nintendo’s handheld business “revolutionised the games industry”, starting with the original Game Boy, which persisted alongside multiple home console generations. Think about it: the Game Boy launched one year before the SNES arrived, and by the time it was replaced by the Game Boy Advance, the PlayStation 2 was already on shelves.

The pioneering device — and its Color iteration — went on to sell over 118 million units worldwide. And Guha Bala, co-founder of Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit developer Velan Studios, observes that Nintendo’s impact on handheld gaming stretches back even further.

“Nintendo defined handheld gaming as a play pattern starting with Game & Watch in the early ’80s,” he says. “Portable gaming has played a huge role in the content I’ve enjoyed playing and making for most of my life. It was a totally parallel industry to console gaming for more than 20 years.

“But that changed fundamentally with the advent of mobile games on the App Store in 2008. While I love mobile experiences, they are quite different from handheld games.”

Mat Piscatella, executive director for games at data firm NPD, says Nintendo’s portable business “had a massive impact on the industry in several ways.” Among them was the creation of a prime entry point for a crucial audience: children.

“Nintendo’s portable platforms gave many kids a way to connect and engage with games at a younger age, helping them then transition into other types of gaming as they aged, helping make the market what it is today,” he says.

“The portable platforms also gave many developers and publishers a less risky way to bring products to market, with lower development costs and faster timelines than AAA console development, for example.”

Unrivalled

Nintendo’s achievements in the handheld space are all the more remarkable given how rivals Sega and Sony have failed to match them, despite numerous attempts. While Nintendo was dethroned in the home console space over the years, it proved to be untouchable when it came to handhelds.

The top three best-selling handheld consoles in terms of units in the US are Nintendo machines — DS, GBA and 3DS respectively. Sony’s PSP achieves a respectable fourth place, although it’s worth noting that Game Boy had a full six years of sales before NPD began tracking in 1995.

Further down the ranks are the ‘also rans’: Vita, Game Gear, Sega Nomad and Neo Geo Pocket, all of which were unable to rival Nintendo’s handheld might.

“No other company seemed to be able to repeat the magic that Nintendo started, and each much larger system died out,” says Zebra Partners’ Perrin Kaplan, who spent 16 years heading up marketing at Nintendo of America. “I have no doubt that the iPhone app store took a hint from Nintendo when Apple realised games for phones could be a thing.”

Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad adds: “Nintendo’s most successful consoles have been able to pair innovative hardware with its IP in a way that provides unique game experiences for players. This has always been the secret to Nintendo’s success, and [it’s] why Nintendo invests so much to ensure hardware such as the DS or Switch provides unique ways to play, is affordable, and has software to take advantage of its features.”

Bala agrees that the minimalist approach to handheld gaming enabled Nintendo to stay ahead of the competition. By selecting components that allow for a more accessible price point, the company turned its platforms’ limitations in terms of raw power into real benefits for players. Case in point: the choice of two-tone displays for the original Game Boy, which improved battery life and made it easier to use in daylight.

“For an experience on the go, that was crucial,” he says. “Contrast that with competitor handhelds where faster clock speeds and more demanding displays drove down battery life and places to play. Other systems were about putting a console system in your hands, rather than recognising that an amazing portable game experience deserves a device devoted to just that purpose.”

During his time at Vicarious Visions, Bala and his team demonstrated this with a myriad GBA and DS games, many of which converted console experiences into something best suited to handheld. For the GBA launch, Vicarious developed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which simulated the 3D gameplay of the console versions in a 2D space. Similarly, the studio created the Guitar Grip for the DS’ GBA cartridge slot to enable a portable Guitar Hero.

David Yarnton, who served as general manager at Nintendo UK for nine years, says the platform holder’s IP was another key advantage in the handheld space. As Yarnton puts it, “it’s hard to compete with Mario” — a claim backed up by NPD rankings that show the four best-selling handheld games in the US to be Mario titles, with the plumber headlining seven of the top 20.

Jo Bartlett, former Nintendo UK head of communications and partnerships, agrees: “With Nintendo consoles, it was never about the tech spec. It was about storytelling, the characters and the Nintendo magic. There was such a broad catalogue of high quality games, and they kept them coming.”

For Piscatella, the data shows the power of Nintendo-exclusive franchises — and there’s one IP in particular that really made a difference. It will surprise no one to learn that the US’ top 27 best-selling handheld games in terms of dollar sales are all for Nintendo platforms. Nor is it a surprise that all of these are published by Nintendo, and it’s even less surprising that 17 of them are Pokémon titles.

“Sometimes things are difficult to analyse, other times there’s Pokémon,” he says. “Other factors surely contributed. Pricing, branding, and so on… but one portable business had Pokémon, and the others did not.”

Dual-Screen Sensation

While the Game Boy undoubtedly set the course for Nintendo’s handheld success, the Nintendo DS has perhaps the greatest legacy. It stands as one of the most successful consoles of all time, with 154.02 million units sold worldwide — second only to PlayStation 2’s 155 million sales.

But more than that, it opened the games industry up to new demographics in ways that few platforms had managed before. True, the original PlayStation and its successor expanded the audience for traditional games experiences, but the DS provided something for all ages — for players from five to 95, as Nintendo used to say.

“Nintendo has been laser focused on games for everyone, devices for everyone, no intimidation of something ‘for gamers’,” says Niko Partners’ president Lisa Hanson.

Ubisoft’s Hashemi adds: “The DS opened up new ways of playing with its dual controls and touch screen. Games designed for the DS gave the console great casual appeal, and introduced many people to the video games industry… It brought a user-friendly versatility that made gaming accessible to a much wider audience.

“DS games were unlike any other games on competing consoles. The technology allowed for pet simulators that you can care for with a stylus, or for puzzle games that you can quickly and intuitively interact with.”

It was an opportunity that Ubisoft, like other companies at the time, seized. From 2007 to 2014, over the course of both the DS and 3DS, the Assassin’s Creed publisher published close to 50 Imagine titles and over 30 Petz games. The former were each themed around different careers that appealed to young girls, while the latter were a revival of the classic PC pet simulators Catz and Dogz.

“We saw an opportunity to widen our audience to a younger female crowd with the DS,” explains Hashemi, who was instrumental in launching many of these titles. “Before the DS, the majority of our games appealed to young adults, mostly male. It’s not that girls were not interested in these games, it’s just that there were no games targeted to them specifically.

“We conducted lots of research with tween girls to discuss their hobbies and interests and what they would look for in a video game. That’s where we saw a gap in the market and came up with the Imagine line.”

With new interfaces and audiences came new franchises. For those who might not be interested in Mario, Zelda or Pokémon, Nintendo offered Professor Layton’s logic-based puzzles or the more straight-faced Brain Age/Brain Training (depending on your region). Even Ubisoft’s Petz could be seen as a reaction to the huge success of Nintendogs.

Nintendo’s own pet simulator stands as the second biggest-selling DS game of all time, with 24 million units shifted worldwide — beaten only by New Super Mario Bros’ 30 million. The first Brain Age was fourth with nearly 20 million sales.

However, driving unconventional games experiences to such heights wasn’t easy; Kaplan recalls that “marketing games that weren’t well-known franchises was a bit challenging,” while Yarnton remembers hearing doubts even from his own team members.

“I remember having seen a demo of [Nintendogs] at head office, a lot of the hardcore gamers in our team poo-pooed it,” he says. “I had to laugh because weeks later, when we received samples, you could hear people talking to their puppies all across the office — the hardcore were converted.

“I had such great expectations for Nintendogs and its potential that when I put our forecasts and orders into Japan, they didn’t believe them. Needless to say, we exceeded these many times over.”

Yarnton also observes that the success of the DS steered Nintendo for the next decade, and set the stage for the most successful home console in the company’s history.

“A lot of people say that Wii was a big risk in launching such radical controllers,” he says, “but I think DS paved the way for people to be able to play games with a different interface and it introduced so many new users to video games because it was so intuitive to use.”

The age of the app

For the 3DS, the platform holder faced a much more challenging market. Having dominated the portable games scene for more than 20 years, Nintendo faced the unenviable task of selling a dedicated handheld at a time when that wider audience could access games on a far more ubiquitous device: their phone.

The 3DS launched in early 2011, three years after Apple launched its transformational App Store. Casual gamers had also shifted towards other platforms such as Facebook, thanks to hits like the original FarmVille. Meanwhile, Sony was aiming for hardcore gamers with the upcoming release of PlayStation Vita.

Nintendo also faced obstacles of its own making: the difficulty of communicating that 3DS was a new platform, rather than a DS update in the vein of the Lite and DSi, and positioning glasses-free 3D as a key selling point.

Yarnton recalls that, as with the original DS’ dual screen setup, the 3D effect “seemed a bit weird to some people… but with sampling, once people played it, they got it.” However, shortly after the 3DS’ launch, the team had to tackle some hostile press when UK tabloid The Sun ran an article claiming the 3D was making people sick.

“Overcoming this misconception and reminding people that the 3D was optional, safe, and not just a gimmick took a sustained effort,” says Bartlett. “A few years later, The Sun ran a piece about how the Nintendo 3DS was the best console ever — it was a moment of real vindication.

“We also found that a lot of people were still happy with their Nintendo DS so didn’t feel the need to upgrade straight away, which was a testament to the longevity of the hardware. The steady stream of top-rated games changed their minds, but it took some time.”

There are doubtless still units in the channel, but with the 3DS now discontinued, it’s unlikely to rise much further above its current lifetime sales of 75.9 million. It’s a respectable total, especially given the shift towards mobile, but still leaves the 3DS — including its 2DS, New and XL varieties — as the lowest-selling family of Nintendo handhelds, falling short of the Game Boy Advance’s 81.5 million.

With this in mind, and the long-established dominance of smartphone gaming, could we ever see a dedicated Nintendo handheld again?

Kaplan points to the success of the Switch Lite as proof that demand still exists: “There is a market for millions who love a standalone games portable system. I’m one of those millions for sure. So, never say never.”

Meanwhile, Hashemi believes Nintendo could always tap into the children’s market with a cheaper, more robust handheld: “As a mother to a seven-year old, I am always reticent to give my iPhone to my daughter. I would much rather have her play on a handheld with selected games tailored to her. She would love the Imagine games.”

Earlier this week, analysts told Bloomberg that Nintendo could continuously refresh the Switch, iPhone-style, to further grow its audience. If so, the Lite could play a role in this.

NPD’s Piscatella agrees that there’s no telling how the Switch will evolve, but doubts a dedicated handheld could be released in the same way again.

“The tech is at a place where separating a portable is no longer necessary to have a market viable product,” he says. “Today’s video game consumers seem to be preferring flexibility with content engagement, so I’d expect other solutions to be preferable to a dedicated portable platform. But things change.”

Ahmad and Hanson of Niko Partners observe that, while Nintendo’s dedicated handheld line has come to an end, the company’s philosophy of integrating hardware and software means handheld gaming will continue to play a role in the company’s future — the Switch being a prime example. The analysts fully expect Nintendo to continue at least offering the option of portable play in some form.

Bartlett concludes that Nintendo’s track record of setting itself apart from the rest of the games market, particularly since the DS and Wii, takes nothing off the table.

She concludes: “Part of the magic of Nintendo is never being able to predict what it’s going to do next, or how it will capture the imagination of gamers, so who knows what it’s got up its sleeve?”

Enjoy the sights and the graffitti as Nelson, photographer Liz Lizard and her family, Michael Musto and Albert Crudo take the subway from Union Square to Coney Island on June 20, 1987.

An all new mystery for PC adventure fans to unravel.

Trace Memory (known as Another Code in other territories) follows in the footsteps of classic PC adventure games such as King’s Quest, Myst, and Broken Sword. While the genre has been around for ages, originating in purely text-based journeys, games in this style have all but disappeared in the past decade. Now, with touch screen input making point and click controls on handhelds more accessible, Cing and Nintendo are revisiting the genre with an all-new mystery.

The story centers on Ashley Mizuki Robbins, a thirteen year old girl who is being raised by her aunt, Jessica. She has grown up believing that her father and mother died when she was young, and is shocked when a package containing a strange device (oh c’mon, it’s a DS – called “DTS” in the game) arrives in the mail from her father. She then journeys to Blood Edward Island, an abandoned family estate where her father has apparently been doing research all these years. However, her father is not at the shore to meet her when she arrives, and in her search for him, she encounters D, a ghost who has wandered the island over fifty years without any recollection of who he once was. The two travel together, searching the estate for clues leading to D’s past and Ashley’s father.

For those who haven’t played this type of game before, it’s important to note that there is no real action in the game whatsoever – no running through death traps or executing combos against the undead. The gameplay consists primarily of finding clues to advance the story and solving simple but challenging puzzles.

When exploring, you’ll use the stylus or cross pad to guide Ashley through 3D areas on the lower screen, and detailed 2D close-ups will show on the upper screen as you move around. Any time you’re in a place that you can study in detail, you can press the magnifying glass icon to move the still down to the lower screen. The stylus can then be used to tap on items in the room and get further information or closer looks.

The DS hardware does allow for several new variations on the genre. Aside from the simple point and click exploration, the touch screen is also used to interact with puzzles, toss items to the upper screen, punch keypads, or scrape off plaques covered with rust. The microphone is used a few times in some basic ways, and even the DS’s ability to sense when it’s closed is used in gameplay. A nifty camera feature utilizes the dual screen arrangement to superimpose one picture you’ve taken over another, combining two parts to find a much needed clue.

As the US title suggests, memory is a key element in the game, not only in the story, but some of the gameplay elements as well. Unlike most adventure games which allow you to pick up just about anything, whether it seems useful or not, Trace Memory often will force you to remember where things are by not allowing you to pick up an item the first time you examine it. A fireplace may not hold any clues at first, but go back later, and you’ll be able to pick up some much needed charcoal. In addition, the game has a multiple choice quiz, oddly enough, at the end of each chapter to help keep you from forgetting important plot details that you’ve learned.

One adventure game trait Trace Memory does carry faithfully is obscure puzzles. While most puzzles take just a bit of thought to figure out, there are a few that everyone is just about guaranteed to get stuck on. The clues just don’t do it. (Too bad I can’t give examples without spoiling them.) There is one spot that I will spoil where the precision of the touch screen works against the player: you can easily think you’ve examined everything in this china cabinet, except you forgot to tap on one single glass that happens to be the item that you don’t know you’re looking for. It’s a cabinet across the room with no other dishes of significance. I touched the items all around it and in every little window, and then ended up searching the rest of the island to try to figure out what I had missed. These kinds of frustrations are pretty standard for the genre, though, and the game doesn’t suffer too much for it.

The only other minor complaint is that the constant in-game presence of the DS/DTS may detract from the experience more than draw you in. It’s a launch title gimmick, featured in a game that released late in the US. Treating the DS like some secret device while having messages recorded on DS cards scattered about the house just seems silly and hard to get past at times.

Being a mystery makes Trace Memory a little easier to spoil than most games, so there’s not a much else that can be said. It doesn’t take a heck of a lot of time to finish, but you can run through a second time for some slight variations and extra plot details. This is a cool little adventure, especially for anyone who misses this style of gameplay. Hopefully, adventure game fans can look for more titles like this to come.

Cats can be happy in apartments, but the space needs features that enable their natural desire to climb, jump, hide, and scratch.

New York City’s comprehensive code for animal welfare restricts when horse-drawn carriages can operate and bans the sale of the fatty liver of a force-fed duck, foie gras.

Washington state just adopted a new law that will enhance the life of egg-laying chickens, requiring that they live in an environment with “enrichments” like scratch areas, perches, nest boxes and areas to take the dust baths chickens so enjoy.

These bills, both passed in 2019, are part of an ongoing effort to codify the rights of animals, an area of the law I have studied and written about for 30 years. My next book, which will be published in 2020, develops a group of seven legal rights that I believe an ethical society should adopt to protect animals.

Freedom from cruelty of course makes the list. U.S. law has required this since New York first passed an anti-animal cruelty law in 1867. Today, all U.S. states have laws that prohibit the infliction of unnecessary pain and suffering. Modern law also protects the physical well-being of animals in human care by requiring they receive food, water and often veterinary care.

But a full life requires more than basic survival, so I propose some new rights for animals in my book. Perhaps most importantly, I argue that animals need a “right of place” – that is, access to sufficient physical space to live a natural life.

To be comfortable, content and to find their place in a social hierarchy, animals require space. Conversely, if an animal has too little space, then its home becomes a jail, a stressor, a frustrating moment that continues indefinitely.

On the Right of Place

Living on a farm with five different species, including chickens and dogs, has convinced me of an animal’s right to place, too.

This space has two components. First, there’s its size – is it big enough to suit an animal’s needs? Second, there’s the content of that space – what’s inside that space that the animal can make use of?

Different animals have different space needs. Consider, for example, a Great Pyrenees dog – a breed genetically predisposed to guarding. For over a decade, my family’s farm has been watched over by five of these large, amazing dogs.

When on guard, the Great Pyrenees have the regal look of white lion. On a given day on our farm, they will independently wander over 30 fenced acres. Without fences, I am sure these dogs could patrol an even greater range, but letting the Great Pyrenees wander her maximum range is usually not desirable. Natural and human-made hazards pose a risk to the uncontained dog, and the dog might pose a risk to others.

An optimum option for the Great Pyrenees is several acres of fenced-in land, which allows the dog to investigate its natural features while guarding against intruders.

If that same amount of land were paved in concrete and surrounded by a brick wall, it wouldn’t suffice. To exercise her natural capabilities, the Great Pyrenees needs trees that provide shade, plants to sniff, perhaps a place to dig and things to watch.

Nor would confinement in a city apartment give this animal the room or features she needs to exercise her instincts.

A Place for Farm Animals

Pigs are at least as complex an animal as dogs, studies show.

Ideally they would live in open fields of many acres with other pigs. Instead, many are kept in the cement and iron confinement of industrial agriculture, in stalls the size of their physical body.

The vast majority of commercial chickens, too, lack the space in which to live natural lives. For their entire useful life, egg-laying chickens are often kept in battery cages that holds six hens in a four-square-foot space.

As the free-range movement has brought to light, it is possible to give egg-laying chickens a better life without significantly increasing cost. Chickens don’t actually require much space. Some of the chickens on my farm have total free range and yet seldom wander more than 100 yards from the barn where they are fed and go to roost at night.

But, as Washington state lawmakers recently acknowledged, chickens do need a space that meets their needs. Washington’s quietly created bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee in May, effectively guarantees a chicken’s right of place.

Companion Animals

So what about your pet, you ask? Are you respecting its right of place?

It all depends on the pet.

Our family has had a number of poodles, and we’ve found that young standard poodles, being a smart and high-energy dog, will want the opportunity to run like the wind and be challenged mentally. An elderly miniature poodle, however, may be content in an apartment with daily walks.

House cats, meanwhile, are often thought to be satisfied with apartment life, as long as they have places to climb, hide, perch and scratch. But a confined habitat may actually cripple some felines’ instinct to hunt. Behavioral scientists haven’t studied cats enough to fully understand their needs.

Frankly, people don’t yet know how yet to satisfy every individual animal’s right of place. We need more information from science.

Nor is it clear, beyond the most egregious cases, when the law should intervene to ensure that pet owners are meeting their animals’ needs. This, I contend, is the next frontier of animal rights law.

People bring these animals into existence. So I believe people owe them a dignified life, a right of place on this Earth.

Debunking the ever-silly argument that amounts to nothing more than a game of numbers. The sad thing is, they fail at their own game.

It is high time we stopped putting up with bullshit.

Nearly 7 years after the fact, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.), a division of the Commerce Department, finally released their report on the collapse of Building 7 today.

(pay careful attention to the sound on this. There are very few videos of the collapse of Building 7 with sound.)

We are told by N.I.S.T. that the cause of the buildings collapse was a standard “open” office fire caused a critical connection to fail due to what they call “heat expansion”, and that when that critical connection failed, it caused a domino effect with other connections, resulting in the perfectly symmetrical failure of the structure, starting with the center columns, resulting in the building falling and ending up in a perfectly neat pile, no bigger than it’s foundational foot-print. I don’t think so.

On May 5, 1988, The Interstate Bank building in L.A. burned for 3.5 hours and gutted 4 floors completely. It DID not collapse into a pile of rubble. Perhaps because for some reason, the “heat expansion” didn’t happen prior to 9/11.

On Feb. 13th 2005, in Madrid Spain, the Windsor building burned for over 15 hours at temperatures that reached over 1,400 F.

It burned so brightly that it illuminated Madrid all night. In the end, only a few floors failed on the upper level, and it still had enough structural integrity to support the massive construction crane that was on top of the building.

Nope. No “heat expansion” here.

The next day, this is what was left of the building. It took months to demo the building afterward, one piece at a time.

I wonder how much that costs? I bet Larry Silverstein knows.

This is the horrible inferno that was building 7. According to N.I.S.T.,

According to N.I.S.T., this is what destroyed building 7 of the WTC complex. Building 7 was newer and better designed than the previous 2 that I mentioned above. It was actually hand selected to be the home of the Office of Emergency Management because of it’s “bunker-like” design. Theoretically, this building was to be used in the event of a natural disaster in New York; like a massive earth-quake or a war of some kind. Yet, one little office fire caused it to end up like this;

Buildings 5 and 6 of the WTC complex stood between the North tower and Building 7. When WTC 1 (the North tower) collapsed, the debris cut Building 6 in half and severely damaged Building 5. The resulting fires burned for nearly 9 hours.

Yet, strangle enough, neither of these two buildings collapsed into their own foot-prints.

Building 5 burned out of control for nearly 9 hours; Building 6 was almost as bad.

So. I think it’s time we stopped letting our government agencies get away with lying to the American people about things that matter. Just a few weeks after the FBI released their make-believe story about Dr. Ivins being the anthrax killer, N.I.S.T. released this complete bullshit (not to mention, John McCain trying to tell us he doesn’t know how many houses he owns. I can believe he doesn’t know who the President of Russia is and whether or not Iran is training al Qaeda, but if there IS one thing this prick DOES know, it’s exactly how many houses he owns.)

I wouldn’t be surprised if we did attack Iran very soon. That will take people’s attention from nes like this, and make it harder for people like myself to question the “official story”, since, of course, we are supposed to “shut up” when we are at war.

N.I.S.T. knows this load of crap can’t hold up under the light of day for very long. Apparently, they had finished this report months ago, but for some reason, they withheld releasing it until now. With the naval build-up in the Gulf right now, it seems obvious to me that they were waiting for just the right time to release it, and then some other, bigger news story will drown this one out.

The battery-chugging handheld is 25, and while it failed to match the sales of the Game Boy, it remains a special piece of SEGA history.

I’d love to stand here before you today and tell you I was on the right side of history. But the truth is, I wasn’t. I was Betamax. I was HD-DVD. I was that boy band that went up against Girls Aloud in Popstars: The Rivals.

I was, to be precise, the kid at school who had a Game Gear instead of a Game Boy.

October 2015 marks 25 years since SEGA released the Game Gear in Japan. It was a hastily cobbled together thing—basically a Master System CPU crowbarred into a black box—but you would have been hard-pushed to know that simply by looking at it. A sleek if not particularly svelte machine, the Game Gear was the epitome of early 1990s SEGA cool. With a backlit screen capable of displaying 4,096 colors (that’s, like, all the colors), Sega’s technicolor dreamboat seemed well poised to challenge the dominance of Nintendo’s primitive by comparison Game Boy system, with its monochromatic screen that could only display four shades of baby sick.

As we now know, SEGA’s portable didn’t put up much of a fight. With 11 million units sold worldwide, the Game Gear was far from a failure, but handheld consoles are judged by a different standard, aren’t they? And the standard of the time just happened to be the Game Boy’s 118 million worldwide sales.

The reasons the Game Gear took such a shellacking are well documented. Firstly, it had a thirst for power that even the Lannisters would think was a bit much, slurping through six AA batteries in just four hours. The Game Boy could squeeze around ten times that amount of playtime out of just four.

Secondly, Nintendo garnished the Game Boy with a typically strong first-party lineup. You might have been forced to play Super Mario Land and Tetris via vom-o-vision, but it was the Gear’s underwhelming launch titles, such as Super Monaco GP and dull-as-Downton Abbey_-ditchwater match-three puzzler _Columns, that looked sickly in comparison.

All of which placed the Game Gear in a marketing no-man’s land. It didn’t have either the mainstream or the hardcore kudos of the Nintendo alternative, and it wasn’t even the hipster’s handheld—the impossibly exotic back-end of CVG magazine’s reviews section was reserved for the games of ultra-niche formats such as the PC Engine and the Atari Lynx.

But the Gear’s saving grace, as mentioned, was that it was able to absorb some of that SEGA coolness by osmosis. Advertising campaigns compared the Game Boy’s bile-hued screen unfavorably with the Gear’s, and that, coupled with a reasonable $149.99 price point, managed to hook in a few million suckers with more money than sense.

SEGA’s advertising didn’t mess about when it came to trashing the competition

And those suckers included me. In April 1992, I was the fresh benefactor of a burglary payout. The insurance company sourced me a replacement Amiga, but in those days you could only find games by mail order or by chance encounters in stores, and they really couldn’t be arsed to trawl every Tandy in the land in the hope of finding a tatty copy of Chuck Rock.

So I received a lump sum for my software collection instead (fitting, as I always felt I was entitled to monetary compensation for playing through Rick Dangerous II), which I decided to invest in a handheld console. And given that 1992 saw Sonic at the peak of his popularity, my eyes hungrily looked past the Game Boy’s rich library and towards the blue hedgehog instead, naked as the day he was born but for his gloves, sneakers, and enough attitude to bring down a government.

I couldn’t plead ignorance as an excuse for my own personal #gamegeargate: magazines, the shop clerk, even my own mother tried to dissuade me from doing the dirty deed. And, naturally, everyone else was proved right, as the Game Gear’s comically short battery life rendered it unfit for purpose. Long-haul flights required a master class in restraint and forward planning, and when playing it at home, the Gear’s battery lust meant I was tethered to the wall via the AC adapter as if the star of a E L James novel.

But wait, because this isn’t a tale of regret. Far from it. I was happier with my purchase than the Game Boy could ever have made me. As a games writer, friends often come for advice, asking things like, “Everyone says I should get a PS4, but I really want to play Forza 6.” And I always tell them to go with the console they want to buy deep down in their gut, because whatever its flaws, you’ll make it work because you want to make it work.

And so it was with me and my Game Gear. And if you wanted to work with, rather than against the system, then the console’s internal similarities with the Master System meant there was a much wider range of software to choose from than common perception dictates. In its early life, the Game Gear was blessed with numerous Master System ports, adapted slightly for life on the small screen—which was no bad thing, as this was an era when Sega was lavishing as much attention on their 8bit systems as it was the 16bit Mega Drive/Genesis.

Ports of contemporary games such as Streets of Rage II, Road Rash, and Gunstar Heroes squeezed an incredible amount of juice out of the Game Gear’s aging processors, while other series were given more drastic makeovers. The handheld Sonic as an example is almost unrecognizable from 16bit Sonic, but is arguably the better game, with more focus on precision platforming than the speed-obsessed Mega Drive game. Plus, having to search out Chaos Emeralds in the wild, rather than having them awarded through special stages, added a level of exploration that just isn’t there in the “proper” version.

Genuinely great Game Gear exclusives were thin on the ground, but they did exist. I have a particular soft spot for SEGA’s unique portable version of Shinobi, an action-platformer with an open-ended structure that was clearly inspired by the Mega Man series, and was so tough you could knock out a rhino with it.

I still have my Game Gear; it sits in a quiet corner of my spare bedroom, and I whip it out for a quick blast every now and then. It’s a miracle it still works apparently, as Game Gear innards are prone to corrosion, although the console needs to be held at an angle, otherwise the AC adapter loses connection and the system powers down. It makes for the most tense and exciting game of Ax Battler I’ve ever played, I’ll give it that much.

I’ll probably never get rid of it, even when its insides do eventually succumb to the ravages of fresh air, because the Game Gear represents a small, relatively obscure corner of gaming history packed full of hidden, underrated treats that’s uniquely mine. Everyone and their dog knows about Tetris, but the Game Gear library? That’s something only I, and a few million others, a mere handful by commercial measures, got to savor.