As recently mentioned, I’ve been keen on collecting Gameboy games as of late. They’re tiny and don’t seem to be quite as popular (ie: pricey) as some other older consoles and games.
For whatever reason the idea of getting a Gameboy Micro popped into my head last week. I can’t even recall why. When they first came out six years ago I was a bit intrigued but dismissed them as being too small. It didn’t help that in North America they were packaged with three kind of ugly faceplates.
I started looking on eBay for them. Ah! In the UK not only was the packaging different, but the colour schemes were as well. You had your choice of four metallic colours rather than having to go with whichever faceplate you found the most agreeable (or buying another one). There sure were a lot of pink ones on eBay. I wasn’t having that though. The blue, silver and green were all really nice looking so I loaded up my watch list.
After a few days of them going for what I thought was too much, I realised that I’m probably not going to get one cheaper than the standard going rate of £30. Not if I wanted one that wasn’t banged up and/or missing parts. I ended up getting a blue one, with the original packaging (velvety carry pouch ahoy!) for just under the going rate. Smashing!
It arrived yesterday and I must say it was love at first sight. The build quality is really quite nice. I much prefer the buttons and D-pad on the Micro over the Gameboy Advance SP. It’s also really comfortable to hold for long periods of time… confirmed by a couple of hours of Castlevania Aria of Sorrow last night. And the screen… well yes it is tiny but that doesn’t make it hard to play at all. If anything it makes the GBA games look better. Both the SP and micro have 240 x 160 px resolution but on the Micro those pixels are pushed closer together.
The speaker quality and volume isn’t that impressive, but I’m really not surprised. What is nice though is the built in headphone jack. No more having to use a goofy adapter with my SP to use headphones. (yes yes, I could use my DS Lite, but it’s just not the same as usually original hardware remember!).
Not sure how well it would work if you had overly large hands, but for me this lil’ guy is perfect. Only thing left to test is how good the battery life is. Only one way to do that… back to Castlevania 
