Gadgetory

have you ever wanted to scratch that old-school edge for your favorite gameboy games from childhood but you don't want to actually scratch ground for an old actual Gameboy maybe just use it on your phone well that's the idea behind the smart boy from hyper kid a product that was originally teased a week ago as an April Fool's joke but was quickly revealed the following day on reddit to actually be a marketing ploy I need to see whether or not people are actually interested in buying the product now to be perfectly honest with you when this thing first popped up in my feed I didn't even give it a second glance but then shortly later Jon from TLD as well as my brother Josh brought it to my attention basically saying hey have you seen this thing called the smart boy it looks really cool and then I proceeded to tell them why at least me personally I wasn't very excited and mostly comes down to the fact that there's just a whole lot of problems that can keep this thing from succeeding the first which is Nintendo now the reason why Nintendo can be a problem for the smart boy isn't because of the tech because the Gameboy is old enough now to where you can actually remake the hardware and make devices that play gameboy games the issue though is trademarking the fact that it's called the smart boy which is clearly imitating the name game boy and that it looks just like an old-school Gameboy that's been cut in half it doesn't matter if it's a fully functional device or not that goes with your phone it still imitates the look of a gameboy and Nintendo is a company that isn't really a fan of people making knockoffs of their stuff so this is exactly the kind of thing that they can get riled up about and send lawyers after it's exactly for this reason that we lead to my second problem the fact that you have to actually use the old-school cartridges now if you've read into what the smart boy is this might sound like kind of a dumb argument because that's the entire idea behind it you can hook your phone up to it and then plug in a cartridge and play your old-school favorite games but I don't think a lot of people have that response when they first look at least the mock-ups for what the system is they see it where you can put your phone in this device and it acts like a game way which you know your phone is a hard drive it can play games directly from it so a lot of people I think have this misconception where it's going to come with prepackaged Nintendo games or have an in-app store we can download stuff which isn't the case because if they did do that that would definitely be infringing on Nintendo and would cause whole kinds of problems so instead you have to use old-school parches which is quite the extra step if all you were looking for was a simple device to use your phone to play old-school game and that leads us to another big problem the fact that well actual game boys still exist if you're going to take the time to hunt down old-school game boy cartridges why wouldn't you just go the extra mile and get an actual game boy I mean you can go on Amazon right now and look up a Gameboy Advance SP and get one in good condition for about 40 or 50 bucks now given if you wanted to go even more retro and get a Gameboy pocket or even the original brick that's gonna cost you quite a little bit more especially for good condition but if you just want to play your favorite old-school games 50 bucks is a pretty fair price and unless the smart boy something a lot cheaper than that I don't see how it offers itself as a good alternative which leads to my fourth problem the novelty of the thing the fact of the matter is that for me at least this thing just comes across way more as a novelty gift item rather than something that's actually functional you know it's the kind of thing that you buy to shop to your friends for two or three weeks but then you leave it in a drawer and forget about it you know compared to getting an actual Gameboy that's a piece of history that's something that you're gonna want to show off to people and take good care of and hold on to for a while because it's the real deal with this though you're just gonna buy it use it a few times but then the novelty is gonna wear thin and just gonna end up forgetting about it and that's what leads to really my final big issue that I really don't know who the target audience is for this thing if you're an old-school gamer you're more likely going to be down to get the actual real deal original Gameboy then buy some kind of product that's just gonna let you emulate the cartridges whereas if you just want to buy it as a cool little accessory for your phone to play some of your old favorites well it's going to ask you to do a little more than that because you're still going to have to hunt down old cartridges now if you have a couple still sitting in your attic awesome but otherwise that's going to end up costing you a lot more money than you thought you were going to pay at first which once again comes back down to price point now to be fair there are some upsides about the smart boy that I do recognize you know I really appreciate the fact that it's a legal way to play your favorite old cartridges but still get the benefits of emulation you know you can have save states and load states you can save and load any part of the game and it also gets around the fact that the save batteries have died in a lot of old-school cartridges and it has an online database to access different cheat codes almost like you have a game genie built in all the time but part of the problem is there's stuff a lot about this product we still don't know yet you know outside of a mock-up image the basic premise and a few really vague answers that the devs gave on reddit with some more information a lot of my points could end up getting addressed especially where the MSRP is concerned because if it's less than 50 bucks I could actually see some of the merit and grabbing it but if it's anything more than that and I really think it's going to be then I just don't see the point grabbing one over an actual Gameboy now you might think differently from me you know you might see this and think wow that's a kick-ass item and I can't wait to grab one ASAP and if that's the case let me know down in the comments while you're at it if you enjoyed the video let me know by thing that thumbs up button and subscribing if you haven't yet I've got more content planted on the way for you guys but until then I'm Kevin Kenton and I'll see you later