Portable Gaming: The Ghost in the Machine

By ahoodedfigure June 16, 2010 7 Comments

While playing Aria of Sorrow and FFIV, I found that when the charge light goes on on my Gameboy Micro (the start and select buttons turn red, like two angry, angry eyes) I tend to incorporate it mentally into the game I'm playing.  Like with Aria, I found myself rushing to save because it felt as though the game had suddenly imposed a time limit on me, when what it actually was was the real world telling me the batteries were running low.
 
Portable gaming is pretty new to me, I guess.  I marveled at a very old version of Super Mario Bros. for the Gameboy, I wanted to get the Atari Lynx but never did (probably best I didn't, even though I think Xybots would have made me a happy kid), I actually missed the chance once to buy a Sega Game Gear at a yard sale which still bugs me, but it was only when I bought an adapter for my Gamecube that I actually played any portable games in earnest, and this Micro is my first actual portable game system 
 
( Tiger stuff, Game and Watch, and the like not included. There's a Tiger submarine game that I had that was actually pretty damned fun, a friend's Game-and-Watch that was about producing cement that was cool but too hard past a certain point, and an addictive Tetris knockoff that I gave to a former girlfriend, which was fun but not the best, since it seemed to start in one of four different ways or so).
 
Since I'm new to modern portable gaming, I still am amazed at being able to play a game while I'm hidden under the covers in bed, or in a different room than the TV. I don't make prayers to the battery gods or sacrifice chickens to the thing, but I still feel a bit like a cave dweller who just discovered fire sometimes.  I'm not willing to take the thing outside and actually make it truly portable, though, since I don't want to be thought of as anti-social (at least when I don't want to be), and I'm fricking petrified that the thing is going to slip out of my hands and break (which is a justifiable fear with the Micro, since it's shaped like a bar of soap and doesn't have much of a grip to speak of). 
 
Anyone still marvel at portable gaming at all, or have any similar stories of fears or cool moments with their portable systems?  I'm cool if you're all blasé about it, but I'm interested to know if anyone can sympathize with me, or talk about how it's allowed for unusual opportunities (you see promo pictures of people linked up on a bus, but I've never seen such a thing in real life).

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