1554: Hyperlynx

The Game Boy apparently turned 25 recently, but I didn’t own an original Game Boy when they first came out. (I did later pick up a Game Boy Pocket, a Game Boy Color and indeed every Nintendo handheld since, but no original Game Boy.) As such, I don’t have quite as many fond memories of the little yellow-and-black wünderkind, because our household instead elected to indulge in the Atari Lynx for their handheld gaming needs. (More specifically, the Lynx 2, which was considerably smaller than the monstrous original Lynx but still far too big to even think about putting in your pocket.)

The Lynx was a surprisingly impressive machine for the time, boasting a full-colour backlit screen, a 16-bit processor (compared to the Game Boy’s 8-bit) and hardware scaling for smooth “zooming” of sprites and images a la the SNES’ Mode 7 facility without the “rotation” part. All this technological advancedness (spellcheck tells me that’s not a word, but I’m going to use it anyway) came at a price, though; the system gobbled batteries like they were rapidly becoming extinct. (In fact, the rate the Lynx consumed AAs, it’s a wonder batteries didn’t become extinct.)

So bad was the battery life that it was literally impossible to make it through the entirety of a game such as Gauntlet III without having to plug the AC adapter in partway through the play session. And with the Lynx’s “game card” cartridges lacking any sort of battery backup functionality (and, consequently, the ability to save games) this meant that every time you started playing a game you had to begin from the beginning again, unless the developer had thoughtfully included some sort of “password” function. (Oh, remember passwords? What a hellish time we used to live in.) This meant that games either had to be very short or friendly to replaying. Certain games handled this well. Others, like the otherwise excellent quasi-point-and-click adventure based on Dracula, did not.

There were some really solid games, though. Unofficial Pole Position sequel Checkered Flag was a particular highlight due to its impressive use of the Lynx’s sprite scaling facility (albeit on a distinctly “retro” style of racer, and Warbirds proved that it was indeed possible to have a good crack at a flight sim on a handheld device. The aforementioned Dracula had some impressively stylish visuals and was a good adaptation of Bram Stoker’s story, lack of save function aside, and Gauntlet III was arguably the best version of Gauntlet the world has ever seen thanks to its wide variety of characters and sprawling, interesting levels.

One of my favourites was Electrocop, a game whose technological achievements were really quite impressive for the time. Effectively a 3D third-person shooter before anyone knew what those were, Electrocop cast you in the title role as you wandered around a 3D base from a side-on perspective blasting robots and hacking terminals to open locked doors. It was far more than a straight blastathon, and the side-on 3D effect, in which you could run left and right as well as “into” and “out of” the screen in smooth motion, was utterly gobsmacking for the time. I also vaguely remember it having cool music. Let’s see if I can’t find some.

Also of particular note was the Lynx version of Klax. Klax remains one of my favourite puzzle games of all time — there was just something so satisfying about it — and the Lynx version was pretty much arcade-perfect, right down to having a vertically-oriented screen.

Yes, the Lynx was not at all afraid to demand that the player hold the already unwieldy device on its side with the joypad at the top and the buttons at the bottom (or the other way around if you preferred — there’s a feature that modern handhelds don’t offer!) and indeed boasted a number of vertically-oriented games, of which Klax was one and the aforementioned Gauntlet III was another. After you got your arms used to the initial awkwardness of the arrangement — a problem mitigated marginally on the slightly smaller Lynx 2 — it was actually quite a good way to play, and an eminently sensible solution to the problem of how to accurately represent ports of arcade games that originally played on vertically-oriented monitors.

Anyway. I sold off my Lynx a good few years back now, along with the hefty collection of games I had for it. There are occasional days when I regret doing that, but unlike a lot of the old Game Boy games, many of the Lynx titles don’t hold up particularly well these days, sadly. Although there were a few standout titles — most of which I’ve mentioned in this post — the majority of the library was fairly mediocre in retrospect, and would probably come as an unpleasant shock to people used to the incredible depth and breadth available in handheld games today. Like many systems that failed to endure as well as others, the Lynx was an impressive gizmo in its day, but today, I feel, owning one would be little more than a curiosity rather than something to take particularly seriously.

Or perhaps just a Klax machine. Which, frankly, is actually probably reason enough to own one.