Ryan Davis Associate Producer	Now Playing: Ape Escape 2 (PS2), Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (GBA) Looking Forward To: Tony Hawk's Underground (PS2), Champions of Norrath (PS2), F-Zero GX (GC), Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (GBA), Karaoke Revolution (PS2), Half-Life 2 (PC)

1 Dimension 2 Many

Over the years, Nintendo has been almost as bad about releasing funky console peripherals that verge on being absurdly useless as the king-daddy of poor hardware decisions, Sega. ROB the Robot is an obvious example, and for good reason, but don't forget other winners like the Nintendo Power Pad, or the ill-fated 64DD. With this legacy in mind, I picked up the new Game Boy Player a few weeks ago, along with a copy of Advance Wars 2. I expected my use of the Player would be occasional at most, and really I bought the damn thing mostly for the novelty value. Honestly, this is the same reason I also own a Dreamcast keyboard, mouse, and broadband adapter.

Ryan's Idiot Nostalgia: Exhibit A

But, unlike my foolish Dreamcast hardware purchases, the Game Boy Player is actually getting some real use. I played Advance Wars 2 virtually nonstop all weekend, and the experience had me brimming with nostalgia. Not any real specific kind of nostalgia, like "Hey, remember when you used to get Wacky Wall Walkers in boxes of Rice Krispies?" but more of just a vague yearning for days past. I was reminded of countless weekends and summer days spent on daylong 16-bit benders. I'm an easy mark for nostalgia, and I'm pretty sure that those days weren't as great as I remember them, but that doesn't mean the nostalgia's useless. It reminded me that, until about eight years ago, all my gaming experiences had been strictly two-dimensional, and I loved it, dammit. It was some of the purest, most unadulterated, and most enjoyable gaming I've had in this life. Now, in 2003, playing Advance Wars 2 on my 36-inch Wega actually made me feel ashamed that I had been cooping up all these fantastic 2D games on the GBA's teensy 240x160 screen. It's a wonderful luxury to basically have a portable SNES in my shoulder bag with me, but this shouldn't be the only outlet for classic gaming.

Exhibit B: Sit 'n' Spin: Break Dancing for Dumb Kids.

But despite these divine outlets for electronic entertainment of yore, I have worries for the future of sprite-based video game visuals, and this concern is manifested in the form of Sony's forthcoming PSP. This isn't to say that I consider this high-octane handheld my archnemesis--in fact, I have high hopes for the PSP, and I think that if anyone can make a disc-based portable console work, it's Sony. But if the PSP has a portion of the processing power that Sony currently claims it will, I don't see publishers continuing to bankroll 2D games when the hardware can handle 3D graphics. The bottom line is that 2D doesn't sell like 3D, and the only reason publishers have tolerated releasing 2D games on the Game Boy platforms for all these years has been technological necessity. 2D graphics have been the black and white to 3D's Technicolor for a while now, and though there are compositional advantages to sprite-based graphics, they just don't dazzle. I know that's a pretty harsh assessment of the situation, but folks who grew up playing 2D games are quickly being outnumbered by newer generations of gamers who know only polygons. But hey. We still have our memories.