Looks like I’ll have to go on another Game Boy kick later this year - Kirby’s Block Ball definitely wasn’t on my radar before!
Agreed on the sentiment that the Game Boy library is just chock-full of pick-up-and-play gems that play great.
And a lot of them defy our preconceived notions of genres some 30-35 years after the fact - games like Lucle, Aero Star, Banishing Racer and Cave Noire felt incredibly fresh to discover for the first time that I too wish I was around when the system was “current”.
My earliest handheld was a Game Boy Color in the late 90s, and as I’ve mentioned before, with the benefit of hindsight it feels like publishers were taking less risks on GBC:
My guess is part of this is Nintendo, or at least my perception that Nintendo shifted its focus to a younger audience with the Color, going off marketing and its branding.