Game & Watch Gallery (kompilace, GB/GBC/GBA)

Want to get to know the legendary Game & Watch games but do not want to hunt for fragile collector's originals at high prices? Game & Watch Gallery is the answer. This series of compilations for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance gathered Nintendo's classic LCD titles and offered them on a single cartridge, moreover in two forms at once.

Each game in the collection comes in a Classic version, faithfully imitating the original black LCD segments, and in a Modern version, reworked in color, with animated characters from the Marioverse and often with clever extra details. The player can thus directly compare how the economical original from the turn of the seventies and eighties looked and how the same idea would look with a few decades of technological advantage. The mechanics of catching, juggling, and timing remain; only the coat changes.

Development-wise, the series was created by Nintendo in cooperation with the studio Jupiter, a Japanese developer known for work on a number of Nintendo handhelds. The first installment came out in the second half of the nineties and was followed by others, gradually aiming at the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance as well. Thanks to this, the collections cover an entire generation of handheld consoles.

The great advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the problem of reproducing the original LCD artwork. Classic Game & Watch devices had the image printed permanently into the display, so they are difficult to emulate faithfully. In Gallery, everything is solved directly by Nintendo on its own hardware, so you get an authorized, smoothly functioning version of the games.

For anyone who wants to soak up the atmosphere of the early days of pocket gaming, Gallery is the ideal starting point. Nostalgia and fresh variants together, playable on a device that is itself among the most important consoles in history. And as a bonus, it usually also offers rewards for collected points, which motivate you to return to the individual games for a higher score.

Why play: It is the most convenient and most faithful way to try out the classic Game & Watch games today, moreover in both the original and the color-modernized form at once.