A Geekette's Handy-Dandy Guide to HGDs

(Handheld Gaming Devices)

    There are a few handheld gaming devices out there nowadays to buy: the GameBoy AdvanceSP, the GameBoy Micro, the GameBoy DS and DS Lite, and the Playstation Portable. Well, this handy-dandy little guide on HGDs (handheld gaming devices) comes from a certified geekette, who's played with 'em all, and who's taught people of a wide range of ages to play with just the right HGD for their experience level. Call it a geekette thing that I gotta spread the gaming joy...

    We'll start out with Nintendo and a quick look back at where they were years ago with their GameBoy line (of which yours truly has EVERY single one since they ever came out). Nintendo was the first to break into the HGD foray with their black and charteuse green screened GameBoy, a heavy, boring gray colored piece of machinery about the size of a walky-talky. The only color on it were the two A-B buttons in a grape purple color to the right bottom side of the device. (I got so bored with the color of mine, I painted an intricate design on it in acrylic paint. I know - ahead of my time and wrong medium...). The GameBoy played games of a small, square thin cartidge design, 8-bit, black and charteuse green graphics, and tinny music and sound FX. But... The public went crazy for this little fandangled contraption, as they'd never seen anything like it before. It soon became the hottest thing to have and to play with.

    But the public soon became bored with the absence of color, and started to complain. And so a rival of Nintendo released its own HGD. Sega release the Seag GameGear, a full color 16-bit HGD that worked with cartriges. This HGD was ahead of its time, but the big downside to it was that it had many less games available to play and being made for it, as most makers were making them for GameBoy format; and the cost was much higher for the advanced technology.

    To combat this new rival, Nintendo developed its new GameBoy release - the GameBoy Color. The games were now 16-bit color, like a NES deck, and plenty of games were being released for it. And as a bonus, Nintendo made a neat adapter for their new SNES desk that could plug in GameBoy games to the SNES deck and make them playable there, as well. (Yeah, I had one, too.) And to make matters worse for Sega, the price was competitively much lower for consumers. The public ate it up and Seag's GameGear bit the dust.

    Time marched on quickly, and Morgan's Law reared it's head (that says technology doubles every 18 months). Gamers, geeks and the public became restless because Nintendo released a new console, the Nintendo64, a 64-bit advance graphics gaming system for higher power 3-D game world rendering, to compete with the wildly popular and graphically advanced Playstation from new gaming rival Sony. and they wanted an HGD that would compare as equally wiht the console's advanced graphic's capabilities.  And so, Nintendo worked on the problem and came up with: the Gameboy Advance: a 24-bit full color and stereo sound HGD that the public and geeks ate right up. And, keeping in tradition, the games it took remained cartidges, but not the square ones this time, but half as small rectangles that held much more information.

    The public liked the Advance very much. And more and more games were created for it. Nintendo then took a wild turn and vetnured into the CD game format with their new console, the GameCube, to combat Sony's incredibly popular Playstation 2. But The GameCube also had an adapter available that allowed you to play ALL GameBoy games on the GameCube as well. (Yeah. I had that one, too.) But the sony Playstation 2 has held its own, and has a much larger library of games for it than the GameCube.

    So Nintendo focused more on its HGD market for a bit by improving its design. It wanted the Advance to be sleeker and easier to use, and less expensive to buy, and therefore increase the sales. so it went back to the drawing board and came back out with it's current day reincarnation, the Gameboy SP:
    The GBASP at first came in only one color: Chrome. But very soon after it came in a multiple colors: metallic red, metallic blue, purple, green, and black, to name some of them. It also had new features, like a larger viewing flip-top closeable viewing screen and a reachargeable lithium battery with a battery charger. It was also MUCH smaller and compact, and cost less, which the public appreciated even more. The GBSASP has become one of the most popular HGDs ever.

    I usually recommend the GBASP as a great beginner HGD because there are some nice easy beginner games made for the device to teach corordination and button control (i.e "Tetris," anyone?). I recently taught my 4-year old nephew how to play HGDs with my old GBASP - I just gave it to him, gave him a bunch of easy games to have, showed him how to play, and by the end of the day, he had it down. In fact, he loved it.

    And now we have come to present day and to today's current HGD wars between Sony and Nintendo - great for consumers and geekettes like me - and headaches for the engineering minds at Nintendo and Sony.  There are  Three HGDs out there today vying for our short attention spans: the Nintendo GameBoy DS and DS Lite, and the Sony PSP (yeah - all three here with me).

    The Sony PSP came out of the gates blazing around the same time Nintendos GameBoy DS did, but with a lot more fanfare. Sony did an excellent job with the marketing campaign. And so, the American public was a lot more hungry for the PSP than for the DS at shipment time.

    The Nintendo DS stands for Nintendo Dual Screen, because it has two screens you flip open to seen, like a wallet. The top is a viewing screen, the bottom is a pressue touch screen for input, by pen stylus (that the original DS comes with only one long one, and the DS Lite comes with two smaller ones) or by finger. the first DS is actually pretty heavy. It's bulky and the sound quality is okay. It can play DS catridges and all GameBoy games as well in a secondary cartridge slot on its base. It keeps the date and time, and it is personalized with your favorite color and nickname, and you can do a Wi-Fi handwritten or typed chat with pictures in the come-along "Pictochat" program, and multi-player game link-up, but that's it. Interestingly enough, it's the hottest thing in Japan right now. Especially the DS Lite version.


    The DS Lite, the DS' little brother, is much more stremalined and compact. It's smaller in its over all dimensions. It weighs far less and comes in three colors: Onyx (black), Ice (white) and Blush (pink). The screens are larger and they are illumuniated brighter. The sound quality is much better, and the pen stylus won't get lost as easily, as it is tucked away in a much better, and more camouflaged and locked away spot than its predecessor. And the buttons have been put in diffferent positions so your hands don't cramp up as easy from long hours of game play, as with the predecessor. It, too play all the former GameBoy games, but this also has a non-functioning plastic cartirdge you can slip into the enpty Gameboy cartridge bay, to keep it protected from dust and debris when not in use, as a bonus. And there aremore and more games being created for the GameBoy DS/DSLite every month, as it is an ever growing in popularity HGD with its unique touch screen feature and advanced graphics capaability. It should perform into the future well. Personally, I think the DS Lite is a blast!

   We should note Nintendo's little venture into micro-sizing HGDs. They shrunk down their GBCs to try and grab more cash from consumers. They thought tiny-little GameBoys would be "cute" I guess. So they came out with the current GameBoy Micro. How small can they go? Look at the picture...


    The DS Lite's tough competitor is the graphics and features abundant warhorse, the Sony PSP.


    Personally, I love this device. It has the graphics capability of a PS2 within your hand, and the capability of a multimedia device as a bonus. The features include W-Fi support for browsing the Internet, chat support, multi-player game-link support, it cam store and play MPEG files, .WAV sounds, .PDFs docs, .AVI movies, .JPGs and .GIFs picture images, it's personalized with your nickmname, age, color, date of birth, location, time and zone, current date, wallpaper - a basic overall theme you can choose! The PSP is basically a mini computer that's devoted to playing games and movies from little UMD disks - brand new formats of CDs of about, oh... 2-1/2 inches in diameter in a protected plastic shell made specifically for the PSP. They are real compact and they hold TONS of information. They can hold an entire movie and or entire game on one tiny disk. And they're very inexpensive. About $30-$40 per new title. Nintendo DS cartridge games brand new will also run you around $30-$40. The PSP is more popular here in America than in Japan. And more and more games and movies are being released for this HGD per month. More so than the DS/DS Lite.

    Personally, I like my PSP more than my DS Lite, because it has more features, and the graphics and sound outclass the DS Lite by far, but I'm glad I have both. Both have good and interesting games being released for the two platforms to keep consumers interested, with the PSP having a slight edge, by my judgement, in the game department for variety. The PSP sytem itself is currently more expensive than the DS/DSLite, but technology costs, and the DS/DS Lite isn't inexpensive either. But both systems are great buys, either way. It just depends on what you're looking for in an HGD.

I hope this guide helped answer some of your questions about Handheld Gaming Devices (HGDs). Thanks for reading!:-)