Just the feel of the GBC A, B, and DPad buttons far exceed any experience I’ve had on any of the newer Nintendo GB Advance and 3DS series. Some of the Pokémon designs that I’ve seen from the new Pokémon OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire releases look a lot like 5 year olds playing with polygons. Sure, graphics are better in the later generations, and there’s always the nostalgia behind the original Pokémon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow releases, but Pokémon Crystal – being a combination of Pokémon Silver, Gold, and a continuation of the Generation I release – has the best story line, Pokémon design, and number of overall Pokémon at 251. I chose to start with Pokémon Crystal simply because it’s undeniably the best of any Pokémon game TO DATE. A day or two later, I’M LIFTED: Donphan bout to get this bidness. I was able to wrangle a GBC for just over $30 and a used Pokémon Crystal cartridge with a working save-battery for about $40. Needless to say, I hurried back to eBay quickfast, lest my dreams wilt and die right before my eyes. Not only are these joints $250 to $300, but the GAMES are about $200 to $250 each!”…and as soon as I click that ‘new condition’ filter I instantly regretted it.” Apparently it’s a rare commodity to find certain games in working condition so the price of buying them brand new has skyrocketed. So because I want that shit all freshnasty, I immediately hop on Amazon and start searching ‘Game Boy Color’ (GBC) and as soon as I click that ‘new condition’ filter I instantly regretted it. I’m about to fulfill my childhood dream (yo, some of us aspire to less than others). They were good to me and they entertained me, but here I am years later as an adult and this deep sadness emerges from the depths as I feast my eyes on this bad boy that’s got 2 hours left on the auction block: In my mind, shit was glowing, Pikachu was giving me a backrub and all that jazz. It was a visceral lesson in patience that this experience instilled in me day after day as I bit down hard, trying to offer advice to my friends while they battled without as much as a credential to show for it in my hands. Even so, I’d spend the entirety of my school days envying my friends at school who brought their Game Boys and would huddle at the back of the class to link up and challenge and/or trade with each other. ”This is the age where I discovered emulators and rushed home from school every day…”This is the age where I discovered emulators and rushed home from school every day to hop on my Game Boy emulator and loaded up the latest save point from the Pokémon Blue rom I’d downloaded from the interwebs on my 14.4k (I wasn’t even on that 56k level yet) modem. This is all it takes to send me back down the rabbit hole into a time where my parents were too poor to afford to buy me a Game Boy and I was too determined to not miss out on the new hotness that was Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue when they dropped in the United States. Just a week ago I’m surfing eBay in the most random pattern, enough so to puzzle future civilizations as much as we’re puzzled today by the Voynich Manuscript, and I come across a suggestion to take a look at a used Game Boy.