Wow, Gaff, not sure what to say... wouldn't have taken you for the die hard Pokemon trainer.

Actually, as a huge supporter of the old pre-color GameBoy, which I still think is one of the most amazing things ever made, I have to admit that Pokemon is most certainly on my "must have" GB games list. Don't get me wrong, I have zero fondness, nostalgic or otherwise, for the annoyingly cutesy Pokemon that has been marketed to kids over the last ten years. But back in the early days, before the marketing hype hit the states, back when it was simply the red and blue cartridges, it was one of those games that gave you the most bang for your buck as far as GB carts are concerned. It was a very good simple RPG that you could pick up and put down in a second, making it an ideal GB game. Even if you literally only had five minutes to play, you could progress in that period of time, yet the overall game experience was very long lived. Hands down, the best bit was fighting with other players via the link cable. What other RPGs let you do that? The game had a bunch of really lame looking monsters in it (which is the sort of thing we have all come to expect from Japan, eh?), but it also had some that were cool enough. But, unfortunately the whole over marketing to the ten and under crowd made it very hard for anyone else to take it seriously (okay, not very hard, impossible).

Still, at the end of the day, the original GameBoy game is very much worth the $5 or so a used copy will cost you these days. It, along with Link's Awakening, Tetris, Metroid II, Mario Land 2, and the GameBoy Camera (and probably a few others in there I should be including), should be in every monochrome GameBoy enthusiasts collection.