Apathy Sketchpad

At home we have a Game Boy cartridge boasting fifty-two games or so. This is all well and good, but a few of the games are listed more than once. Exactly how something like this could be allowed to happen is at first unclear, but the cartridge in question was bought in Singapore. In Singapore, where, you understand, you can be arrested for chewing gum, it is commonplace for a shop to openly sell pirated software, simply because the profits are so much greater than the fines.

Also, in Singapore, there appears to exist a strange charity, whose aim is to provide people with terminal stupidity with Game Boy developer kits so that they can live out their final days churning out imbecilic hand-held games before they accidentally fry themselves in one of their funny two-pin mains sockets. At least, I can think of no more sensible explanation for some of these games, which mostly involve a logo, then a title screen, a brief menu of game modes, all of which take you to the exact same level, where you can variously push blocks around, kill someone, fall in holes, but never get past the second screen.

A game, to my mind, should be a fun experience which you can quickly pick up without reading the instructions, or failing that, a fun experience you can get the hang of after a while and maybe a couple of flicks through the manual. It should not be a baffling and frequently painful effort to guide a sprite that resembles nothing very much excruciatingly slowly around a screen of equally unidentifiable blobs, some of which kill you. It should not present you with the same two screens of level again and again until you are either killed, bored, or forced by the nice men in the long white coats to put the Game Boy down. There should be no game on a four bit machine that can competely baffle a second-year physics student before the end of the first screen.

The question is, if there is no such charity, where do these people get the Game Boy developer kits? I want one. I want to put Fourtris on Game Boy. I think that would be cool. Oh, well…