Is ANYONE here a fan of portable gaming?

You can't imagine paying 80 bucks for a GBA SP? You buy liters of "Citrus Drop" and "Dr. Sparkle" instead of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper, don't you?

Well as I said I rarely have a time where I've got nothing better to do than play a handheld

That's where the difference between you and I comes in. I don't consider myself to ever be in a situation where I "don't have anything better to do than play a handheld." I find myself with free time, and decide to dedicate it to playing videogames. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a good console game, but sometimes I'm in the mood to play some Fire Emblem in the sun. I just go with whatever appeals to me at the moment. Handhelds, for you it seems, would feel almost like a last resort, right? To each his own, I guess.

I had a Game Gear way bak when. Actaullt, I still have one, it's just that I don't play it anymore. The battery pack stopped working, the adapter stopped working, and I've just never put batteries into it.

I never really used it to it's full potentioal, Instead of going outside, or walking around with it, I'd always hook it up to an outlet somewhere in the house. Kinda funny, I have a portable, yet I don't play it unless an outlet is around. It has a rechargeable battery pack, but I think I left the batteries in too long.

Anyways, I had games like Virtua Figheter, Sonic Spinball, columns, and some racing game. Out of those, Sonic Spinball was my favorite, but it got fried up a long time ago. Virtua fighter was kinda neat, it was the only fighting game I've seen with a story mode, but it lasts all of two minutes or less.

I haven't played any of the Nintendo handhelds much. I played a little bit of one of the Poke'mon games, and I played LOZ: The Minish Cap at the store for a little bit.

Game gears were so huge I don't see how they could be considered portable.

Although they were a revolutionary. Nintendo didn't come out w/ its color handheld until after the colored cases, and after the lol virtualboy.

That's not revolutionary, it's evolutionary. It was only natural to assume that one day handheld game systems would no longer be displayed in green monochrome, just as television sets evolved from black & white to full color.

On top of that, the GameGear's display was too far ahead of its time. The backlight washed out all of the definition and blurred the entire display when the game was in motion.

Handheld technology must move at a slower pace than console technology because of the issue of cost and the overall effectiveness of the hardware. It's a lot harder to design and manufacture a cutting-edge handheld than it is to design a cutting edge console. A console can be the size of a truck and nobody complains about it. A handheld as big as you head, however, isn't going to really draw you in for the purchase, now is it? Nintendo released the GBA close to a decade after the GameGear, yes. However, the screen is damn-near perfect, the processor is substantially more potent, the unit itself is a fraction of the size and the price is a drop in the bucket. Nintendo kept us waiting for a longer period of time, but by doing so, they gave us a near-perfect product at an extremely reasonable price. As opposed to the GameGear, which strived to be too advanced too soon, and what we got was a shoddy, oversized handheld with pathetic battery life and a pricetag nasty enough to kill a boar.

The fact that it took Nintendo so long to release a color-display handheld was a good thing. They got it right, while Sega jumped the gun and screwed it up.

I thought the Gamegear was pretty sweet, I actually played it more than my gameboy, it was just too fucking huge to carry around.

I do believe that the Gameboy Color had...color before the GBA.

No shit.

On top of that, the GameGear's display was too far ahead of its time. The backlight washed out all of the definition and blurred the entire display when the game was in motion.

I never noticed that. I did notice that the if you looked at the screen from a side angle, the visibilty and the colors would get screwed up though.