A Gaming Memory: My Nintendo Game Boy

So yeah, I had one of these for awhile.

I got it my junior or senior year of high school, sort of as an impulse buy. The good news, maybe, is that it's one of only two video game systems I ever bought entirely on my own, and the only one I bought first-hand as such. The bad news for sure is that I never really used it as much as I would have liked or had thought I would.

Part of the reason for that, I'm sure, was that it didn't come bundled with a game, as most other systems at the time had. Maybe that was because I was buying what one might call a G1.5 Game Boy at a time when the original model was being phased out in favor of other, more modern models. These were, I believe, the Game Boy Pocket and the Game Boy Color, which were smaller and/or with color displays, respectively.

I could have bought games for it, I suppose, but I never really got around to that for actually quite a few reasons. One of those reasons was, as I suggested before, the timing of it. Not only was Nintendo rolling out more advanced models at the time, 1995 or so would have been at about the same time I was starting to get ready to go to college for the first time, so I was holding onto my money at the time, as well.

Not buying any games for this thing is one of those things in life that I actually kind of regret, now that I've even given the unit itself away several years ago. Now that it's all said and done, I even know which games I should have bought for it. They were in two series: Final Fantasy Legend and Final Fantasy Adventure. These were the predecessors to other series that have gone on to be just as famous and at least as good as the series they were initially branded as to sell them here in North America.

The fact that I never bought any of them for myself, instead just renting them, is probably why I'm always getting them confused in my own mind. One went on to become the SaGa series, the other went on to being the Mana series, perhaps better known under the Seiken Densetsu title, one of which I did a Text Play of starting at about this time last year.

Whichever one allowed the player to modify the characters into things like mutants and cyborgs based on what dropped items they used after battles is probably the one I would have gotten into. I'm not entirely sure why that's the one I remember from having rented it once, but there you have it.

In the end, I have my regrets about not doing more with the Game Boy I once owned and then pretty much gave away, but that's just how things turn out.