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A while back a friend of mine sent me a link for an old issue of Pocket Games that he found on eBay. Of course I'm a huge fan of books and magazines with a heavy Game Boy focus, so I made a lowball offer and ended up with a copy. As it turns out Pocket Games was actually a semi-yearly release by the staff of EGM. This Summer/Fall 1999 issue is presumably the first one, and is focused completely on the Game Boy Color, though later issues would branch out and cover various handheld systems. The more I've flipped through it in the past few months, the more I've realized how great a magazine it was.

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Though their reviews aren't extremely in-depth, they seem to be more honest and insightful than other multi-console magazines of the same time. This of course makes sense as at the time most video game magazines were interested in the sort of powerful graphics that would come from disc-based mediums and generally seemed to consider the cartridge a dying breed. However Pocket Games rather fairly compared GBC releases to other GBC releases rather than their console big brothers. But what's nice is that they also didn't sugar coat anything as Game Boy fanboys either. This particular issue finds them ripping apart Midway's GBC ports of Mortal Kombat 4 and NFL Blitz, but also pointing out the fine work that both Konami and Capcom had done with similarly challenging ports ultimately showing Midway as a bit lazy in learning the GBC's new and improved hardware.

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This particular issue also features a fifteen-page strategy guide for Pokemon Yellow, which actually sort of led to me finally seeing what was so enjoyable about the series. Though I've never been a huge fan, I decided that I'd follow the walkthrough included here and see what all the hype was really about. Since then I've played other games in the series, but Yellow (so far) remains a favorite of mine, as it has a certain streamlined quality to it, especially when compared to Red and Blue. But I digress, the point is that in this day and age of in-game walkthroughs and FAQs for every game being only a Google-search away, it's refreshing to instead have a dozen or so pages of in-depth help and wonderful pictures to just get you started in a game. Rather than showing you every last secret, these sort of walkthroughs were more for helping the player get sucked into a vast game. It reminds me of the early days of Nintendo Power, which is nice.

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This issue also features list of Pocket Games' Top 50 Games, which features both Game Boy and Game Boy Color releases. The list is actually pretty interesting, as the first thirty titles have full paragraph blurbs explaining their inclusion on the list, and the magazine was even thoughtful enough to include import-only titles as well. Though reprinting the entire list here would be a bit much, but for the curious here's their top ten as of Summer 1999:

1. Pokemon Red/Pokemon Blue
2. The Legend Of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
3. Tetris/Tetris DX
4. Metroid II: The Return Of Samus
5. Wario Land II
6. Donkey Kong
7. Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
8. Final Fantasy Legend (series)/Final Fantasy Adventure
9. Super Mario Land (series)
10. Mega Man (series)


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The back cover features a great Capcom advertisement for their then upcoming releases. The ad shows cover art for 1942, Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams, Ghost'N Goblins and most interestingly the unreleased port of Resident Evil that GBC fans were so excited about. Though Capcom would eventually release the amazing original game Resident Evil Gaiden, this promised demake of the first Resident Evil never saw the light of day. How awesome is that cover though?

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Also of interest is this particular review of the Hyper Zoom by Interact. Though the accessory itself is hardly worth noting, the picture of it is. Notice that the Game Boy Color seems to be running a version of the Sega Genesis RTS game Herzog Zwei. This picture drove me nuts and sent me on a crazy Google mission to find any mention of a planned GBC port of the game, but alas not even a passing mention could be found. It's a fair guess that for whatever reason the editors just decided to use a random screen in the picture, though it still seems odd to me that they wouldn't use a random screen from a GBC game instead!

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This first issue is still the only one that I have, though I do plan to start keeping my eyes peeled for others. I'm not quite sure how many issues were actually published, but I can find proof of at least an Issue #17 being released in the Spring of 2005. Are there any avid readers of this magazine out there? Any favorite issues or features in particular?

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