Review: Super GoBoy
Score:
76%
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Some apps are made to solve problems you know you have, others solve problems you didn't know you had. SuperGoBoy does the second, my Gameboy had lived so long in a drawer collecting dust that it no longer occurred to me to use it, also that in use a guy in his mid 20s looks a bit daft with a Gameboy in hand. Alas WildPalm have jumped to that challenge with SuperGoBoy, play all your Gameboy and Gameboy Colour games on your 9x00 phone and look like a productive business professional while catching Pokemon, or leading Mario to the rescue of Princess Toadstool.
So what is it?
For the unenlightened, SuperGoBoy is an emulator, a piece of code that makes your phone act like a Gameboy for all intents and purposes. Unfortunately you can't just grab your old Gameboy cartridges and plug them into the phone, you need to download them as a ROM file to your computer, or straight to your 9x00 if you can afford the data transfer. There's a wealth of free games on the Internet to download, and SuperGoBoy comes with a copy of JetpacDX, a clone of the classic game from the 80s. As for getting hold of games you already own on cartridge, there are dubious legalities to this and it's a rule of the site not to go anywhere near dubious legalities (in other words don't ask where you can get Pokemon from here).
How good is it?
Surprisingly good. I dug out my old Gameboy to make some comparisons using Zelda Link's Awakening (one of the few cartridges I could locate after I tracked down 4 spare AA batteries). The game graphics are fluid and the system is perfectly responsive and feels slightly faster than the real Gameboy on the "Automatic (100%)" setting, you can also speed things up more manually if you so wish. Unfortunately you are limited to a screen the same pixel size as an original Gameboy, with such a large amount of wasted screen space a screen stretch or wide-screen play option would be nice. As for the controls, you can redefine the keys for A, B, up, down, left and right, but you only get start and select on the soft keys at the side of the screen. This is fine for most games, but RPG’s where you'll find yourself using those keys a fair amount get annoying. Sound lets this emulator down - for most games I've tried the sound is jerky and, though you can tell what it's trying to be, it is annoying and I end up turning it off, which is a pain as some Gameboy titles do actually have some good music.
Where some emulators let you make use of a game's in-built save function, SuperGoBoy requires you to use its own save state system. Not really a problem, although it does take a while to save, although loading is almost instant.
There are very few real gripes with this emulator. One is it doesn't respond to headphones properly, and playing games with sound leaves it playing through the main speaker as well as the headphones, leading to much annoyance to the people around me on the Eurostar. Secondly the options menu doesn't respond to pressing the centre of the d-pad (as 'ok') and you have to reach up to the soft keys by the screen to ok the option you select.
It's a great toy and lets me relive some of the classic games I loved on the Gameboy. Hell, I can effectively carry round in the pocket of my jeans a console and dozens of games that I remember from my days in the primary school playground filling most of my school bag. I can even sit at work gaming while looking busy. All that is really missing is Bluetooth/WiFi emulation of the link cable, being able to link up and play multiplayer games would make for much added enjoyment, especially with WildPalm having GoBoy versions already for Series 60 and UIQ devices. All in all, a great emulator and, though I meant to knock a review out pretty quickly, most of my time has been spent just going back for "another 5 minutes" with a game, safe in the knowledge that those 5 minutes won't see me needing to go to the shops to buy more batteries.
Reviewed by Heyden Smith at