I've never seen my old handheld cartridges look as good as they do on the Analogue Pocket. Playing original software on original hardware is great, especially for retro-purists, but there are some definite trade offs when you slam your copy of Pokemon Red into an OG Game Boy: there's no backlight... Batteries require constant babysitting... Sound is less than stellar. The Analogue Pocket solves the limitations of Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and other handhelds of yore, and it does so with a familiar but distinct style you don't find with emulation-based solutions. In other words, the Analogue Pocket is the best possible way to enjoy your handheld gaming collection.
Analogue Pocket – Design and Features
The Pocket first distinguishes itself as a high-end gaming solution with its packaging. It's not quite the same caliber as a new iPhone, but the box in which it's packed is high-quality and makes a great first impression. It's par for the course for Analogue, so if you own any of the company's other gaming hardware, like the Super Nt or the Mega Sg, you already know what to expect. It's the kind of box you put on a storage shelf and convince yourself never to recycle or throw out. Inside is a USB-C cable, a few pieces of paperwork, some stickers, and the Pocket itself.
The Analogue Pocket measures 5.86" tall x 3.46" wide x 0.86" thick, which means it looks like a slightly-taller but slightly-thinner original Game Boy – but with extra buttons. Other retro-themed handhelds also mimic the style of Nintendo's famous handheld, but they usually come off looking cheap – or worse, bootleg. While the Analogue Pocket shares much of its industrial design DNA with the Game Boy, it doesn't look like a wannabe. Instead its mono-color aesthetic – it comes in all black or all white – gives it a sophisticated, modern look that feels worthy of its $219 price tag. That said, the matte finish suffers from the same issue as most other plastic gaming components, in that I can already see some smoothing around the edges of the D-pad and the most-used buttons, something I have to imagine will only become more pronounced with extended play.
Beyond the cartridge port, there's a USB-C port for charging, a slot for a microSD card, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a port for the Game Boy link cable. Analogue promises 6 to 10 hours of battery life. The 4300mAh battery is comparable in capacity to the iPhone 13 Pro Max, and there's an optional 18W "Fast Charging Power Supply" Analogue claims will charge up your battery 50% faster than other chargers.
The screen is the feature most deserving of glowing praise. The 3.5", 615ppi 1600x1440 display is absolutely overkill when compared to the 160x144 resolution screen of the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color. It's closer to the display on an iPhone than it is to a dedicated handheld like the Switch OLED, with its 293 ppi and 720p undocked resolution.
Colors are bright and gorgeous, and every pixel is rendered in a magnificent crispness no matter which system the cart you're playing was originally made for. Game Boy games render in four shades of black and white, green, or even purple if you want, and seeing them backlit on such a gorgeous display is really lovely. There's no blurring and no ghosting, just eye-pleasing pop. As far as input lag is concerned, I lack the equipment to precisely measure that sort of thing, but I didn’t notice any lag on a host of different games I tested from a practical use perspective.
The buttons on the Analogue Pocket are laid out nicely, with two shoulder buttons on the back, bookending the cartridge slot. I thought it would be an awkward placement, but even with my large hands I found them easy to reach and actuate. All the buttons have a solid feel – not exactly clicky, but not mushy or soft. There's no play in them, either, so they feel solid and responsive. In addition to the buttons for controlling the games, there's an "Analogue" logo button to return you to the menu screen.
The menus are pretty sparse and not particularly remarkable. A quick press of the Analogue button during gameplay brings up options to resume, quit, adjust settings, and access "Tools." The Tools menu has Nanoloop – which lets you make your own chiptunes similar to the somewhat famous LSDJ software for the original Game Boy – and GB Studio. GB Studio is a game creation tool, letting you play games you or others have made in a simplified game-creation engine. Unfortunately I was unable to test out any games for GB Studio, since there aren't any yet, but I did try out Nanoloop and my skills as a beat maker are as good as ever. That is to say, I don't have any knowledge of music theory at all and the symbols and menus may as well have been written with the Cyrillic alphabet. It’s still a neat feature, if one with something of a steep learning curve.
My one complaint with the button layout is the volume and wake/sleep buttons are too close together. On more than one occasion I went to turn the volume down and accidentally put the Analogue Pocket to sleep. A quick press wakes or puts the unit to sleep, while a long press shuts it down entirely. I managed to shut it off trying to turn the volume down once, which led me to exercise extreme caution with any future volume changes, stopping the game and turning the Pocket sideways to ensure I was pressing the correct button. A simple raised bump on the wake/sleep button would give a tactile clue, but for now the only solution is to look. It's a small annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
Analogue Pocket – Game Play
Great news: the Analogue Pocket does exactly what you want it to do, which is play pretty much any Game Boy, Game Boy Color or Game Boy Advance game you can think of. Kat Bailey and Rebekah Valentine were kind enough to dig through the IGN collection of handheld games to send me a really comprehensive and varied selection of GB/GBC/GBA options, and with one exception, the Nintendo e-Reader, I was able to play them all right out of the box.
Analogue's products use system-on-a-chip architecture rather than emulation. In other words, all the parts and pieces that made up the electronics of your Game Boy and GBA are just smooshed down into easy-to-swallow field-programmable gate arrays. An FPGA is a type of hardware chip that take all the electronic components of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance and replicates them perfectly "at the transistor level." It's all very technical and interesting but also probably not that interesting if you're not me, specifically. It means you're playing on actual hardware, rather than emulation software that tricks a computer into thinking it's hardware. Because of this FPGA implementation, programs work as originally intended because the system for which they're designed is right there, not virtually pretending to be there, as is the case with emulators.
This means a lot of the weird functionality that was built into some game carts themselves still works great. Want to play Kirby Tilt n' Tumble with its original motion controls? Tumble on, my friends. How about the Game Boy Color version of Perfect Dark with a AAA-battery powered rumble pak built into the cartridge? Your pak will be RUMBLED. Analogue made sure to test out all sorts of the weird and wonderful experimentations in cart types. I even watched an episode of The Fairly Oddparents on a GBA Video cart. I'm sad to say the Nintendo e-Reader doesn't immediately work for no other reason than its form factor is just incompatible with the way the Analogue Pocket is designed. You can still use it, though, via the Analogue Pocket Link Cable, which can be bought separately from Analogue for an additional $16.
Speaking of accessories, there's an available Game Gear adapter you can pop into your Analogue Pocket right now to get even more use from it. There are also Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket and TurboGrafx-16 adapters in the works, which is exciting since not enough people have familiarity with those great little systems.
There's also the aforementioned HDMI dock, which is sold separately for $99.99 and could probably have a review of its own. It does what you'd expect: lets you play your handheld games on the big screen – or better yet, capture or stream gameplay from original carts. That's pretty awesome, although you miss out on the rumble features or the ability to tilt and/or tumble. But it also has Bluetooth and 2.4GHz support built-in, so if you have a supported wireless controller you can pair it without any extra hardware. It's kind of cool to use my Switch Pro Controller to play these old handheld games on a big screen. It also supports wired USB controllers, although not all of them are supported, but the list of both wired and wireless controller support is marked for future expansion by Analogue.
Save states are supported with the launch firmware, something I personally couldn't live without. It's buried in the menus, but holding the Analog button and Up on the D-pad snaps a save. A lot of old games are hard, but not in skill-based or satisfying ways. They're unfair or bafflingly hard probably for no reason other than to make children sad. Apart from being able to cheese your way through some of the harder games with save states, something I will never judge a person for doing, they are also great news for anyone who dug up an old favorite only to find the internal battery is flat. Your old save might be gone, but you can start fresh and not ever have to worry about it again. I definitely appreciate this addition to the Pocket, but keep in mind that a MicroSD card is needed in order to save anything.
Analogue Pocket – Firmware Updates
Firmware updates for the Analogue Pocket are not fun. Hopefully the launch firmware is stable enough to require little updating in the future, because the process is arduous. I wish I could just plug the USB-C cable into my PC and do it that way, but that's just not the case. It requires downloading the firmware to a microSD card, which in my case means digging out my USB card reader since neither my laptop nor my gaming PC have card readers built in. It also requires a FAT32-formatted card, which wasn't a stock option in Windows for formatting my particular card (it only offered the choice to format exFAT or NTFS). Thankfully I have a Linux computer because of how insufferable and awful I am about technology, but there has to be a better way. Once the firmware update is loaded on the card, you pop it back into the Analogue Pocket and power it up. It HAS to be turned off beforehand, you can't put it into sleep mode or the universe will explode. Okay, a few steps less dire than that, but it feels like it.
There's that minor twinge of panic that comes with turning on a device for a firmware update, wondering if the minor delays are part of the process or an early sign you've just bricked your hardware. Thankfully the update went through fine, and the launch firmware looks full featured – but it's not a 1.0 version, which tells me I'm going to have to update it again sometime in the future. Oh, and the HDMI dock also requires a firmware update, this one requiring you to format a USB thumb drive.
