Bizarrely, it appears that the Game Boy is reliving its glory days and partying like it was 1989. What's that all about, then?

Oh baby - here comes the fear again! 

PAGE 2

Since the launch of Game Boy "Color" at the end of last year, a staggering 6 million of the little machines have apparently been snapped up worldwide.

And a good thing, too - the GBC is an absolutely gorgeous little machine, the first truly portable (ie the batteries last longer than an average bus journey) colour handheld games console ever, all wrapped up in a tiny package the size of a pack of playing cards.

And, of course, it's fully backwards compatible. Are you listening, Sony?

PAGE 3

The weird thing, though, is why. Because although the advent of the Color has seen software publishers suddenly ramp up their GB publishing efforts, the number of new games coming out is still pretty small.

Currently, only about half-a-dozen colour games are available over here, with not much over a couple of dozen more scheduled for release in the rest of this year.

Perhaps, then, the success is explained by the actual content of the games?

PAGE 4

The thing is, despite carrying names like Turok 2 and Abe's Oddysee, Game Boy games are a fundamentally different kind of sausage to the other video games around these days.

With limited graphics and a tiny amount of memory to play with, GB titles tend to be much more closely related to the simplistic platformers and puzzle games that pretty much disappeared when the 16-bit machines died out.

This isn't, however, necessarily a bad thing. Quite the reverse.

PAGE 5

Because now and again it's a little bit boring having nothing but epics to play all the time.

Sometimes you don't want to have to read page after page of storyline and instructions just to have a game of something. Sometimes you don't want to play something that takes six hours to get interesting.

Sometimes yyou just want to have a quick 10-minute blast on something to kill time before you go down to the discotheque, or probation office.

PAGE 6

One of the weird things about the games industry is that it tends to just set fire to its past. In the music world, for all the advances in technology and new kinds of dance music, guitar bands like Oasis still write ordinary, old-style Beatles-esque pop songs.

The old styles and the new styles co-exist happily. In films, even though you can now have huge special-effects whole-cities-exploding blockbusters, you can still choose to go and see a simple romantic comedy that could have been made in 1950 if you want to.

PAGE 7

In games, you don't have that choice. It's all big, it's all 3D, and it's largely all the same.

Now, with a Game Boy Color and a home console, you can have the best of both worlds once more. So it's no surprise that now they don't have to squint at a tiny grey screen to do it, large numbers of people are choosing to have access to simple old-fashioned fun arcade-style games again.

What IS surprising is how much they're having to pay for it.

PAGE 8

Because an average Game Boy game takes up just 1 or 2 Megabits of memory, while a normal Playstation title is roughly FOUR THOUSAND times as big.

The PS game is also vastly more complicated, and will take a team of maybe 20 people between 1-2 years to complete. A Game Boy game, on the other hand, can quite plausibly be knocked out by one person in the space of, say, a month. (Six weeks for a big one.)

You might quite reasonably expect, then, the GB game to be much cheaper.

PAGE 9

And yet the average new Game Boy game sells for nearly three-quarters of the price of the PS one. (£25 compared to £35). Something doesn't add up here.

The games business constantly tells us that the high price of games is due to the enormous development cost. Yet Game Boy games, with a far bigger potential audience than any console title (there are over 70 million GBs out there) and comparatively microscopic costs, still cost nearly as much as "normal" ones.