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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Jason England

I replaced my Steam Deck with a modern Game Boy, and it's the perfect love letter to my inner '90s kid

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Back in the ‘90s, I was a Game Boy kid — I even loved those late night drives back from vacation where you had to wait for passing street lights to see what was on the (non-backlit) screen! But the real beauty of it was the games were purposely built for on-the-go play to instantly hook you.

That’s something I believe has gone missing in 2025. We’re surrounded by vastly more powerful systems like the Steam Deck OLED and ROG Xbox Ally, which do allow for incredible-looking games that tell infinitely better stories with vast amounts of gameplay depth. But with all that complexity, they can take a while to get to the good part, whereas Game Boy games ditched all of that unnecessary guff and just got to the point.

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