How did the gameboy last through the 90s with so little graphical improvement?

Why couldn't anyone touch them when they stayed 8 bit for 12+ years?

Because it had good games.
No other handheld could compare in that department regardless of specs.

Like how any good system survives, games that sell.

Also helps that it was cheap to develop for.

The Nintendo® Difference, baby.

Simple:
GOOD library of games
Excellent battery life
Games weren't horribly overpriced
Games were easy to make

Pokeman was really just the finishing blow that all but cemented Nintendo as the king of handhelds for the longest.

Graffix don't make the game?

Good games, same reason every Nintendo handheld dominated.

For the first years, it was carried both by the fact it was a novelty and, the great games that came out on it.

The competition was also super bad, atari lynx was a piece of shit, game gear was good but, it took 6 AA batteries and they lasted 35-40 minutes.

Nintendo was clever in releasing the upgrades to the system when it felt it was losing a bit of momentum, look at the game boy pocket.

Then in the 1995/6 the first pokemon game came out and that definitely cemented it as the handheld system to have.

well you'd think people might want something besides 8 bit when they were getting fully 3d games on consoles by the time the gameboy color came out.

Being cheap but also cheap price
Tetris

Tech just progressed a lot slower back then

>how could a system last for that long! Why didn't they just make a new system ever 3 years like these days?

lol give me a break, fucking thing didnt even have color.

well ps4 pro is kind of compareable to gb vs gbc.

Nope. Back then technology was trucking on and speed and tech was doubling every year and moore's law looked like it had no limit.

Whereas today we're going to see the end of that law happen and realized very soon.

Why? People still love 2d games today. The only thing that really matters is how much fun you're having, and gameboy's were a lot of fun.

>How did the gameboy last through the 90s with so little graphical improvement?
>Why couldn't anyone touch them when they stayed less than quarter bit for 12+ years

it was a practical machine, something the lynx, game gear and nomad were not.

the neogeo pocket/color was a fairly decent gbc competitor, so it would be better to question why nintendo won out over that.

Haha I bet that's not yours, is it? Unless you're one of the three people worldwide that bought it, in which case I just feel sorry for you.

>gameboy

Meant TIGER HANDHELDS

The gameboy color was 9 years after the gameboy.

The ps4 was 2013 november.

When's the ps4 pro comin out?

f-fuck off at least it was backwards compatible

Good games
Good battery life
Cheap

which is why Nintendo has won every handheld generation

because processing power and display fidelity aren't the most, or even at all, important characteristics for a handheld gaming device
up until the 3ds, nintendo always understood this, following the philosophy laid out by gunpei yokoi starting with the original gameboy, which is why they've been so dominant in the market
(which is not to say the 3ds has a lot of processing power or a good display, it doesn't, it's just the first nintendo handheld which gets a lot of those things wrong that had made nintendo so dominant in the market for so long)

im sorry i cant hear you over my portable television

At first it was just brand power. Super Mario Land is a legit piece of crap but pushed systems.

The PS4 pro is coming out before the PS4 got games

>super mario land
>bad
fuck off

This bloodthirsty savage right here.

Sony made two PS4 consoles before making two games

Someone stop the madman!

10/10

wow........ i why do i even need my phone..........

really makes you think......

Useless. The batteries would have cut off while you were watching your chinese cartoons.

hm I suppose that was too wordy ...
I suppose you explained it better than me :)

It's short, ugly, and awkward. Some good music doesn't make up for it.

SML2 was a staggering improvement for a reason.

>chinese cartoons
I dont think they really had those back then
I mean they existed obviously but I dont think anyone here in the west watched them

>batteries
Not when I got this bad boy plugged in!

cheap shit for little kids

How else?

str8 fyre

>Remembering the days when you had to manually tune your TV with an analogue control
Fuck, I'm old...

>awkward
how so? it played perfectly fine imo, and that's the most important thing

I remember remote controls that you had to plug in.

when I was a kid we had exactly ONE guy in our class who owned a GG; he was the token rich kid in the class, and he also owned that fucking TV tuner thingy
he also had a gameboy, of course, like all the rest of us did

Well that weird bounce ball powerup immediately comes to mind. The can-can playing for invincibility was also very strange.

that post was meant to respond to this one

Because it's only competitor was a piece of shit

You're gonna have to be edgier than that if you wanna join our club. Here, try teleporting behind me.

We did, we just didn't realise what they were.

I feel slightly less old now, thanks.

That was fire flower actually - since the fireball in mario brothers bounced they just made it a ball.

too bad the effect never lasts
all I need to do is go out on the streets and look at some college girls to feel like I should be in a retirement home :(

uh well yeah they're some slight variations to the standard mario gameplay formula
if you call that awkward, what would you call SMB2?

Good games. Hell, look at Downwell and how well that was received despite being 8 bit, and that was only released recently. Same with Undertale.

You must not be remembering how it behaved in SML. You threw the projectile a foot ahead of you, and then it bounced diagonally upwards. Since most areas were not enclosed this made for a really shitty projectile that did not behave like the fire flower at all.

There's official art even that depicts it as a rubber ball.

this, plus batteries that lasted a decent amount of time

I was extremely young at the time and our tv was old as sin and didn't have it long but I do remember it.

First system was a nintendo.
I remember some friends up the street used to have an atari. I think I remember either the atari or the computer had the adventures of huck finn on it.

And I remember they had a different looking version of oregon trail, which I remember being odd because our school had macintosh apple IIGS's which looked different to me.

We took typing at a very young age because our school had the foresight to see computers and typing as a useful skill.

3d was a mistake

majority of areas (especially world 3 onward) were enclosed though which is what made it work

Sorry, been eating a ton of member berries and piss drunk on member wine.