GAME BOY EXCHANGER FEATURE - September 1999
Elsewhere in this months games section we praise the
Nintendo Game Boys library of 1000-odd different games, but if you think about it,
whats so great about that? Youre probably saying "Even if I had the money
to spend 20 grand on Game Boy games, I could hardly carry hundreds of them around with me
at a time unless I had a giant wheelbarrow, and quite apart from being a pain in the arse
that doesnt fit in very well with the machines go-anywhere ethos,
now does it? You idiots." Except, of course, youd be looking pretty stupid by now if youd said that (and lets face it, youd never have said "ethos" anyway), because now theres a device that lets you do exactly that. The Game Boy Xchanger is a diddy little blue gadget that plugs into your PC and enables you to cram up to 250-odd of your existing GB games onto a single cartridge the same size as an ordinary one. It works with old mono games and the fancy new colour ones alike (you can mix and match the two types, although the colour ones are a lot bigger and you wont get nearly as many of them on a cartridge at once), you can change the games over as many times as you want (writing a new cartridge is as easy as falling off a log and takes about a minute), and you get to select your games from an easy-to-use menu once theyre on there. The Xchanger even supports games which save your progress into the carts memory as you go along, like Zelda, and you can also use it to run free home-made games created by bedroom GB programmers, including brilliant versions of old Spectrum classics like Jet Set Willy and Jetpac. The device is perfectly legal (although one of the reasons for its popularity is that it also lets you put commercial GB games downloaded from the Internet onto the cart, which entirely isnt legal), and its even cheap, at just £25. (Blank cartridges come in various sizes, from £20 up to £60 for the biggest.) The GB Xchanger is a modern miracle of miniaturisation, and itll give your Game Boy or Game Boy Color a whole new lease of life. |