By Jayson Will Hill
In its continuous quest for the ultimate in handheld gaming portability, Nintendo has once again retooled the Game Boy Advance … and the results are pretty impressive.
Sporting a sleek, silver-colored metal exterior, the diminutive handheld is only 4 inches wide by 2 tall and 0.7 inches thick. It weighs in at a featherweight 2.8 ounces. The screen is a backlit 2-inch affair with excellent clarity. Nintendo claims it is the best quality screen ever on a Game Boy system. After seeing the Micro’s graphics, I have to agree with them. Controls very closely mimic the original Game Boy Advance layout.
With styling more akin to the original Game Boy Advance than the newer SP, the Micro may at first look like a throwback to earlier times. While the styling may at first look like a miniaturized original GBA, the tech says Nintendo has listened to their consumers and may have finally put it all together. As mentioned before, the screen is backlit – not unlighted or frontlit. Further, the screen brightness can be adjusted by the user to compensate for a variety of lighting conditions. Nintendo claims the Micro will play all the same games the SP will. There is even support for standard headphones. The unit is powered by a built-in, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, though the provided press materials gave no rating on how long the battery is expected to last under normal play conditions.
In an attempt to further add sex appeal to their new handheld, the Micro will feature removable face plates that will allow the owner to customize his system, much as he has become accustomed to restyling his cell phones with after-market face plates. In a world where so many people are looking for a way to express their unique personality, the appeal of this feature should not be underestimated.
Bottom line, the Game Boy Micro is one impressive piece of hardware. Nintendo may have finally gotten the Game Boy hardware right (Though with 28 million GBAs sold, it appears many already thought they had it mostly right while at the same time every Game Boy system since 1989 has seemed to have some major flaw in it.) with a good, backlit screen that displays color, headphone jack and maximum portability with great styling.
Nintendo has set a fall 2005 release for the Game Boy Micro. What it does not seem to have set yet is a price point for this little beauty. At this time it is hard to tell if the Micro is meant to be an upscale version of the GBA that puts it into competition with the drop-dead sexy Sony PSP or whether this is a less expensive model that is meant to open up the GBA line to a more cost-conscious market segment. As we leave the hoopla of E3 behind us, I’m sure that Nintendo will continue to feed the news pipeline with new details and we will know the story soon enough.
