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Last week was the
Nintendo Game Boy's 25th anniversary. It's a weird experience, realizing that the hunk of plastic and silicon I used to play with in the back seat of my parents' car is now a quarter of a century old. If the Nintendo Game Boy were a person and not a handheld video game system, it would be old enough to buy booze and maybe not get carded. Old enough to settle down and start a family of its own. I'll spare you the ubiquitous "Game Man" jokes--okay, I'll admit it, I'm just jealous that I didn't think of it first--but the whole thing is so weird that I'm almost in denial about it. 25th anniversaries are things that happen to stuff from my parents' generation, like
Abbey Road or, I dunno,
Star Wars. Could it really have been 25 years ago that I first played
Tetris and
Super Mario Land? (Well, no...I'm pretty sure I didn't get mine until a few years after launch. But you know what I mean.) Am I really this goddamn old?
The answer is yes. Yes, I am. Old enough, in fact, that upon hearing the announcement last week, I felt the irresistible nostalgic pull to return to some original Game Boy games. My first thought was to dust off the aforementioned
Mario Land, but that game is so short and breezy--a half hour to beat at best, if you're a 2D Mario vet--that it really shouldn't require a special occasion to revisit. Instead, I decided to try a Game Boy game I've never played before, 1991's
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters.
