The best Game Boy games of all time

The handheld market wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the Game Boy. This brick of a system may have chewed through your batteries like crazy, but it was worth it to play games on the level of the best NES games anywhere you wanted. Sure, its library lacked color like the best Game Boy Color games, but that didn’t stop it from completely dazzling us at the time.

Even all these years since the Game Boy was made obsolete, there are some games that originated on this system that still hold a place as one of the best games of all time. Whether you’ve got the original hardware to play it on, or are taking a break from the best Switch games and diving into the digital versions on Switch Online, these are the best Game Boy games you should revisit.

Bionic Commando

71% Platforms Game Boy, Nintendo 3DS Genre Platform, Adventure Developer Minakuchi Engineering Publisher Capcom Release July 24, 1992 Like many of the games on this list, Game Boy’s version of Bionic Commando is a port of the NES original. There are a few minor differences: Instead of the contemporary military setting of the NES release, the Game Boy adaptation is futuristic, and — for some reason — your character is named Rad Spencer, not Ladd Spencer. Maybe Game Boy made him cooler? Those tweaks aside, the portable Bionic Commando features all the impressive platformer gameplay of the home-console predecessor. Instead of jumping, Ladd/Rad Spencer gets around using the grappling hook in his bionic arm. This might seem like a small adjustment from the usual script, but it gave the game unique mechanics and set it apart from other similar titles like Contra.

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge

70% Platforms Game Boy Genre Platform, Adventure Developer Konami Publisher Konami Release July 12, 1991 The first, and best Castlevania game for the Game Boy, 1989’s Castlevania: The Adventure, was an unoriginal and unimpressive misfire. For Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge, the developers returned a couple of years