Hello readers and gamers everywhere, I have a question for you.  Does anyone remember the Super Game Boy?  If not, here is a history lesson.  The Super Game Boy was a peripheral for the Super Nintendo that was shaped like an overgrown Super Nintendo cartridge with a Game Boy slot in the top.  It allowed you to play your Game Boy games on the big screen, while adding cool cosmetic changes like borders around the play-area and switching the Game Boy’s basic for shades of lime green to 4 colors of your choosing.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Super Game Boy however were the games designed with exclusive features.  You could play these games on a normal handheld Game Boy or Game Boy pocket with no problems, but if you put it into your Super Game Boy and booted it up on your TV, not only did you get special borders, but the color became much more in depth than the standard four color scheme.  The graphics got a major increase somewhere in between the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, and sometimes there would even be exclusive levels and features you could only unlock via the use of the Super Game Boy.

While the Super Game Boy was a short lived peripheral at best, it provided an important function in the evolution of video games.  The Super Game Boy was in fact the first example of cross console interaction.  The idea of cross console interaction is simple. Gamers who own both a home console and a portable console by the same or similar companies get expanded content by connecting the two together.  Technically, two home consoles, of different types could also be used in cross console interaction, however until companies become a bit more lax with their copyrights, i.e. never, this most likely will not happen.

Cross console interaction, has been a hotspot on the market ever since companies figured out it could be done reliably.  The Dreamcast sold tiny LCD games/memory cards which interfaced with games and allowed the player to advance their progress outside of the home console.  The Gamecube had several games which took advantage of cross console interaction including several of the Pokémon remakes, and even Metroid prime.  In fact, the Gamecube had games which were pretty much designed for cross console play, such as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures.  These games were but a mere fraction of their actual potential when played in a single player mode, and to have access to a multiplayer mode, each player had to have their own Gameboy Advance and link cable.

This is the fatal flaw of cross console interaction.  The absurd amount of requirements & the prohibitive cost of those requirements make it very hard to make the game easily playable by the general public.  For Crystal Chronicles, to have an immersive play experience you needed 3 friends, each with a Game Boy Advance, a link cable, a Gamecube, a Crystal Chronicles disk, and a memory card with their character on it.  At today’s used prices that is a six hundred dollar expense between the four of you, for one game, not to mention the batteries, take into account inflation and we might be talking close to $1000.  This was more than many people were willing to spend.  In the end, the weak point of this entire scheme was the link cable.  Many people had Gameboy Advances and Crystal Chronicles, but few saw the purpose in buying a fifteen dollar peripheral that worked for what at the time was essentially one game.  In addition, the one player mode in Crystal Chronicles was controlled with a Gamecube controller, NOT a Game Boy Advance.  So if you didn’t have a group of friends who readily wanted to play Crystal Chronicles with you, your link cable sat on your shelf collecting dust, and doing absolutely nothing.  Replace every instance of Crystal Chronicles in this description with Zelda Four Swords, and it continues to be accurate.  Thus, cross console gaming has always been more of a gimmick than a main stream idea.

Well, times are changing and the years of wires and memory cards are fading to make way for Bluetooth and hard drives.  As the face of gaming changes, so do attitudes toward past gaming ideas, and with it, the idea of cross console gaming is getting a fresh coat of paint.  The stumbling blocks that cross console gaming had specifically the large sets of game specific peripherals are now a thing of the past, and are being replaced by the built in capabilities of handheld consoles.  For example, the DS can connect wirelessly to the Wii and the internet easily.  This allows the DS to be used as a controller for Wii games on the big screen.  For now, this has only been implemented on a few games, such as Nintendo’s popular Pokémon series. However, the future for this control scheme looks bright.