The popular Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) came to the United States at the beginning of 1999, a few months after the original Game Boy games and simultaneous with the anime show. One year later, on April 10, 2000, the first digital implementation of the game arrived in the form of a Game Boy Color game. Although it features only the first three sets–just over 200 cards–and a low-resolution interface, it is a complete and faithful reproduction of the card game. I've played Magic: The Gathering, the world's first (and best) TCG, since 1994 but only got into the Pokémon TCG a couple years ago thanks to the free digital version. As a teenager I dismissed Pokémon as too simple, but the game is a lot of fun. I no longer see the simplicity as a drawback. There is plenty of strategy, and tournament-quality decks can do crazy things thanks to powerful deck-searching cards. A skippable tutorial teaches you how to play the Pokémon TCG. Players use their card collection to build decks of...

A quarter century ago, Nintendo went back to the fountainhead with Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, which brought the original Super Mario Bros. to the recently released Game Boy Color. While playing SMB on a handheld device was a novelty, the game is unfortunately hampered by the Game Boy's small screen. The GBC was powerful enough to recreate the NES in a handheld form. However, in order to recreate the game perfectly without using shrunk-down sprites (as was done for Super Mario Land), only a portion of the screen can be displayed at once. A "block" in SMB is sixteen pixels a side. The Game Boy screen can show only ten such blocks horizontally at once, and the height is nine blocks, with the top half of the top row being covered by your score, coins, and time remaining. The NES outputted sixteen blocks wide by thirteen high. This means in SMB Deluxe you can see only 40% of what the NES showed! The other 60% is offscreen. As a result, the game looks zoomed in. Enemies, coins,...

I adored Wario Land as a kid but never played Wario Land II because by 1998 I had moved on from such childish activities as playing Nintendo games. Boy, did I miss out! Wario Land II is a rich puzzle platformer, featuring an astonishing 51  levels. Originally released on the Game Boy (except in Japan, weirdly), it was re-released for the Game Boy Color the following year. The first Wario Land game was technically part of the Super Mario Land series and played similarly to Super Mario Land 2 . Wario received Mario-style power-ups in the form of hats. Wario Land II is quite different: Wario is now, in his own words, "immortal." He can't be damaged by enemies, and there are no pits. When he gets his by a normal enemy, such as a goom, he is bounced backwards and loses several coins. There are no power-ups, but the attacks of certain enemies temporarily change Wario's bodily form. While these cartoonish transformations are depicted as negative, they let him go places and ...