For the last week or so, I have been buried. I have spent hours playing Dragon Warrior III and Pokémon Yellow, and I have rediscovered my team of monsters. I have been reminded of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on the Game Boy Advance because my friends have been talking about halo Infinite.
Going back to play games like this can be difficult. I have popped in an old game only to realize that it doesn't look the way I remember it. They have looked better than ever, and that hasn't been the case this time. This is the promise of the Analogue Pocket.
Analogue has made a name for itself by releasing a stream of high-end hardware designed to play old games. It started with the NES and has since expanded to include the other games. Analogue is trying to preserve older games by making them usable on modern TVs. Analogue consoles use field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, which means they function just like the original hardware.
The $220 Pocket is the company's most ambitious product to date and takes the same philosophy and applies it to handheld games. It is also the best.
Analogue has a price of $219.99.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
The Pocket looks like production on the Game Boy never stopped and Nintendo kept revising it over the past three decades. The form factor is the same as the original Game Boy. The Pocket is a plastic brick with a square screen up top, a D-pad and face buttons below, and a cartridge slot in the back. There are some changes.
There are four main face buttons instead of two, along with a pair of shoulder buttons on the back of the device. There is a home button between the tiny start and select buttons, as well as a headphone jack and a link cable port on the bottom of the device. You can get between six to 10 hours of game time with the battery powered by a rechargeable Li-ion battery.
Analogue has made a number of accessories for the Pocket. A lot of different cables are included, as well as useful things such as a dock and an accessory for other game platforms. I have been able to test a few to give you an idea of what you might want to do.
The Analogue Dock is a nice idea, it serves both as a charging station for the Pocket and a way to play handheld games on your television. It connects to your TV via a standard HDMI cable, and you can connect a few controllers via a variety of methods. I tested it on a PS4 controller and it worked. These games were never designed to be played on a big display, and in some cases they made me a little nauseous when I played them, so they are more of a novelty than a necessity. I wish I was just playing on the Pocket itself.
Analogue is extending the functions of the handheld with a series of adapters for other portable machines. I was able to try out the Game Gear accessory and it worked as advertised. I spent a lot of time playing through the terrible version of Virtua Fighter and the great version of Streets of Rage 2. The physical aspect of plugging in an accessory and then sticking in a large game is a little cumbersome. It looks like something that would have been made by sega during the Genesis glory years and makes the Pocket less portable than a regular Game Boy game.
The screen is the biggest change. The display in the Pocket is made of Gorilla Glass and has 1600 1440 resolution. That is 10 times the resolution of the original Game Boy. It looks amazing in practice. It is hard to overstate how good the games look rendered at such a high resolution, with such a bright color, when you consider that the Pocket supports the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. The original Game Boy has a crisp and clear look, but it shines when you play color games where you can really see the graphics.
The Pocket shows old games at their very best, which breathes new life into them. There are many ways to modify the visuals. There are various options in the main menu. You can do that if you want to make all of your Game Boy Color games look the same. The default option is where everything looks nice and clean. For Game Boy games, you can either stick with the classic green hue or see things in a more modern-looking gray. You can adjust the sharpness and desaturation of the image. I kept the brightness jacked to 85 percent and had no issues with it. It looked great. Since the Pocket has a square screen and the Advance had a more widescreen display, the GBA games are slightly smaller.
These games are not fundamentally changed by the Pocket. You still play the same thing, but they look better and are more convenient to play. One of my favorite features is the sleep option, where you can put the Pocket in a battery-saving mode without losing progress. It is great for old-school games that have a lot of time in between save locations. Analogue says the handheld supports almost 2,800 original hardware cartridges. I tested more than a dozen games on all three Game Boy platforms, including games like WarioWare Twisted and the original Game Boy Camera. Everything worked well.
The Pocket was very comfortable to use. There are lines engraved across the back of the plastic to make it grippier. It gets a little warm but not to the point that I felt uncomfortable. The D-pad on this thing is responsive and clicky. The placement of the shoulder buttons is a real quibble. I found my fingers up after playing a game that uses them a lot. It is similar to playing on the old GBA. I definitely felt the strain, but it was not a deal-breaker. I wasn't able to test Remappable buttons for this review because they are coming in a future update.
The Pocket also has a built-in music tool called Nanoloop, and support for a game creation tool called GB Studio. I have no musical or game design abilities, so I have to admit that these features have mostly been lost on me so far.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
The Analogue Pocket is a device that is designed to honor the classics, and for all of its features. Every aspect of it, from the brilliant display to the fine-grain customization options to the welcome sleep button, works in service of making the cartridges you already own look and play their best. The Pocket does that.
Considering its premium price tag, it might be a niche product. Many of the games you can get for the Nintendo Switch lite are available on modern consoles and even on phones. It has never been easier to play the classics. There is still something special about playing the original versions of these games, even though digital media is fleeting. I don't want to buy new versions of Final Fantasy V because I don't know what changes Square Enix has made.
I own the perfect port. It was released in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance and I now have the perfect place to play it.
The Analogue Pocket begins shipping on December 13th for those who pre-ordered.
