Wii Features

The launch of the 3DS is just a few days away – so to celebrate, our weeklong retrospective of the best games on Nintendo’s previous handhelds continues. And this time, we’re actually focusing on a system from fewer than 10 years ago: the Game Boy Advance, a tiny powerhouse that singlehandedly defined portable gaming in the first half of the ‘00s. Released in June of 2001, just three years after the Game Boy Color, the GBA immediately kicked its predecessor in the proverbial teeth with games that weren’t just in color, but looked like sharper versions of Super NES games with better sound and – gasp! – occasional polygons...

Leading up to the launch of the 3DS this weekend, we’re celebrating the best games on each of Nintendo’s many handhelds. We’ll hit ‘em all, from Game & Watch to Nintendo DS, but today we’re focusing on a bit of a side step system – Game Boy Color. First released in 1998, the GBC finally dragged Nintendo out of the black and white doldrums it had forced upon us since the original Game Boy. The backwards compatible handheld added a smattering of color to the existing Game Boy catalog, plus offered rich visuals for brand new games and even a slight bump in hardware power...

With the 3DS less than a week from launch, it can be easy to forget that the handheld – while extremely impressive – isn’t Nintendo’s first attempt to make a 3D system. After its success with Game & Watch and the Game Boy, Nintendo launched its third portable system in the mid-‘90s, when virtual reality was seen as the future of gaming. Envisioned as a successor to the Game Boy, the Virtual Boy would deliver true 3D gaming at an affordable price. It would also be widely considered the single worst piece of hardware Nintendo ever produced, if not the worst game machine ever produced, period...

Nobody likes to admit it, but gamers are different people when they're playing games. Those normally sweet and considerate boyfriends, girlfriends, housemates, sons and daughters are not so accommodating when the console's switched on. These are the worst things you can do when someone's playing a videogame. Innocuously, of course - setting fire to them or selling their cat on eBay is malicious. These are not.

Yesterday we reminisced about the best Game & Watch games in the countdown to the 3DS’s launch, but today we look at the system that made the handheld world wholly Nintendo’s. In the years between creating Game & Watch (1980) and 1989, Nintendo had gone from arcade hopeful to ruler of the home console market with the NES/Famicom. At that time Nintendo had decided it could take its next logical step into the world of pocket games, marrying the tech of the NES with design aspects of G&W, and what they came up with was the Game Boy...

Just what in the hell is going on with Mario and Peach? It was so simple back in the old NES days of Super Mario Bros. She got herself kidnapped, he went after her with the help of Luigi, and all ended happily ever after. Or so we thought. The thing is that it didn't really. It's become ever more apparent that since that first rescue things have only ever got messier, dirtier and more manipulative in their relationship. Far from the innocent damsel and hero set-up that appeared to be the case in 1985, the relationship between the two of them is now a complicated and twisted story of the user and the used, the ego and its victim, and the puppet-master and the slave.

With Nintendo’s handheld future on the horizon, let’s take a moment to think about its past. As the 80s began and games like Space Invaders was becoming the hottest things around, Nintendo not only started work on their own arcade games, but also found a new market by repurposing newly cheapened calculator tech and making the first must-have handheld videogames in the form of Game & Watch...

The games industry moves at the pace of an Olympic sprinter, but it doesn’t always go forward. It’s more like a drunken Olympic sprinter. Sometimes it goes forward, sometimes diagonalish, or backwards, or into a public fountain because oh my god wouldn’t it feel sooo good to go swimming right now?

Nobody really expected Lego Star Wars to be as good as it was, or to sell as well as it did, when the game dropped in 2005 - but developer Traveller's Tales surprised us all by turning what should have been the ultimate crappy licensed game into a fun, well-designed runaway hit. Since then, the Lego-game dynasty has grown to include Indiana Jones and Batman, both based on existing Lego toy lines, and both fun despite being essentially the same game...

Almost every game movie Hollywood produces has sucked. From the Wizard to the newest Resident Evil, it's a wonder they keep trying. However, when gamers and game makers team up with documentarians, the results are fantastic. The following seven films, all documentaries, understood gamers and gaming culture better than any scriptwriter...