I'm a Nintendophile
Inge dropped a message for me about a site called Nintendophiles which has some really great content if you're into your Gameboy as much as I am (and obviously for their other platforms as well).
The link Inge gave me was to an editorial about the state of Gameboy games. It's very, very interesting from a business perspective, talking about publishers who've gone under and why there's no competition to Nintendo in the handheld gaming market. It has this really great link to a CNN article about a company called Red Jade which was funded by Ericsson and supposed to come up with a kick-ass Gameboy killer and included downloadable games, a 3D engine and Bluetooth! But when their funders pulled out in 2001, the company died. Very, very interesting.
Okay - from my perspective, we're going to see the mobile phone game market mature into something similar as the GBA market, except that there will be a lot more independant publishers and the distribution system isn't bottlenecked by cartidges. Actually, Nokia's Symbian based game phone, the N-Gage isn't open at all. They are working with only a select number of publishers and the cards that have the games will be proprietary. I personally think this is dumb as dirt, but we'll see.
There's a lot to be learned from Nintendo's monopoly in handheld games. Would you believe me that my latest fascination with the GBA is 80% research? ;-)
The article also points out a couple cool GBA-specific sites, GBA Central and the Euro-Asian Gameboy Advance page, the latter having lots of links to hardware add ons as well. (Looks like that GBA Linker may be on my list again now that I can find ROMs super-easily on KaZaA).
Roaming around the site some more I found a link to the Advance Wars Network which is a site dedicated to my new favorite game (after Yoshi, of course). And there's more.
Cool ass stuff. Thanks Inge!
-Russ