Nintendo Game Boy Notebook Takes Us Back To Analog Era Of Video Game “Walk-Throughs”

If this Nintendo Game Boy Notepad lands one genuinely super-effective blow to your nostalgic feels, you no doubt know the pre-hard drive struggle. Don’t lie. You cherished that notebook of passwords, maps and cheat codes the way your mature self guards a social security card or birth certificate.

Forget save states and memory cards. If your computer or console glitched during your game and you didn’t previously jot down that absurdly long random password at the end of the last completed level, you were good and properly screwed. Those weekend hours sunk into your latest Blockbuster rental? Gone. Less than dust.

For want of the modern cop-out luxury of scouring Google for a walk-through, a cheap blue Bic ballpoint and scrap of loose-leaf paper could have spared the salty tears that stained your vomit-green screen when your batteries tapped out.

You know something? Call us Luddites, but we wholeheartedly champion that analog era of chronicling the secrets of your conquest the hard way. When you wistfully gaze upon this pad’s holographic “screen” recreating a scene from “Super Mario Land,” reflect on a time when every drop of ink bled onto a page to make notes on your progress represented the incalculable sweat poured from your fingers in the name of catching every Pokemon, rescuing Hyrule once more from Ganon or making sure Samus crammed every power bomb she could straight up Ridley’s ass.

Trust salty, grizzled “Dark Souls” veterans: with no control over preserving your progress, every little secret’s preserved knowledge might as well draw the boundary between crushing defeat and hard-earned victory. From the first of these 100 college-ruled lined pages to the last, this is your codex of survival. Guard it ferociously.