So, who’s got their £150 imported Game Boy Advance, then? Because I’ve got a lump of three-month-old cheese I’d like to sell you. Fifty quid?

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To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the GB Advance sold like hot sushi at its launch in Japan last week, and of course also to the usual loonies who pay triple the price to importers so they can some play old NES and SNES games a few weeks before the official UK release in June.

The thing is, though, if you take a step back, it’s a bit difficult to see any actual reason why. (Apart from the fact that the Japanese would buy dog poo in a box, as long as it was newer and smaller than the old dog poo.)

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Because let’s take a look at the apparent reasons for the success of the Game Boy and its newest offspring.

1. POKEMON

Pokemon games account for around 99% of all sales of original Game Boy games, and 20% of GB Color sales (even though there aren’t even any "proper" Pokemon games on GBC at all).

Yet there won’t be any Pokemon games on GBA for at least a year and a half. So it can’t be the Pokemon fans who are buying them.

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REASONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE GAME BOY

NO. 2 - BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY

Supposedly one of the prime reasons for the success of each new Game Boy was the ability to play all your old GB games on it. However, (and it’s a bit embarrassing, chums, that I’ve only just noticed this) the GBA’s backwards compatibility is actually horrible.

GBA carts are much smaller than GB ones, so GB games stick out a mile from the top of the GBA while you’re playing them. Also, the screen displays of the two machines are different sizes.

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What these facts mean is that if you try to play your GB games on your GBA on the train or the bus, the sticky-out GB carts will probably get constantly caught on other commuters’ clothes and briefcases and stuff as they walk past, wrenching the console out of your hands and smashing it to bits on the floor.

And even if they don’t, you’ll have to play your old games either horribly stretched and distorted to fit the screen, or with big ugly black borders around them, like a UK PS2 game. Ugh.

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REASONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE GAME BOY NO. 3 – INVENTIVE GAMEPLAY

Part of the reason people feel so fondly towards the GB is that it offered gameplay of a type that, increasingly, you just couldn’t get anywhere else – ie old-fashioned, 2D and simple.

However, with at least half the GBA’s planned launches seemingly being cheap rehashes of 10-year-old SNES games (or even older NES games), it doesn’t look like that’s going to be true for long.

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I may be wildly overestimating the intelligence of the game-buying public here (it certainly wouldn’t be the first time), but I’m having trouble seeing that large numbers of people are going to be happy to fork out £35-£40 a time for the privilege of playing more or less direct ports of SNES games that they could pick up for three quid at their local second-hand shop. (With the SNES itself going for another fiver.)

Yeah, it’d be nice to play Super Mario World on the bus. But not THAT nice.

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But, y’know, I’m probably wrong on this one. Game Boy Advance will probably be a massive success, purely because everyone loves the Game Boy so much.