The Game Boy turning 30

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Image: Damien McFerran / Nintendo Life

On the subject of great portable machines, the granddaddy of them all turned 30 this year (April in Japan, July in North America) and we had a bit of a Game Boy blow-out.

Nintendo Life staff shared our favourite memories of the handheld, we spoke to a Game Boy retailer still keeping the dream alive three decades on, we interviewed veteran developer Jas Austin about porting R-Type to the portable system and spoke to other devs about their thoughts on the Game Boy. We also looked at the handheld rivals that took a beating at the hands of Nintendo's underpowered little wonder, as well as a Konami peripheral which turned the console into a 'mini arcade machine'.

And, of course, we turned to you lovely Nintendo Life readers to help compile the Top 50 Game Boy games. It was wonderful to look back and rediscover classic games that had passed us by on a machine that is very much a part of Switch's DNA. Happy Birthday Game Boy.

Hang on, Witcher 3 is really coming to Switch?!

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A candidate for biggest Switch surprise of 2019, if you'd asked us two years ago about the chances of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt coming to Nintendo's console, we'd have told you a game of Gwent would be the closest you'd come to getting Geralt on Switch. The rumour mill started at the beginning of the year, but even when trustworthy outlets began speculating it seemed like the most impossible of ports to dream for until the game was officially announced in June.

The game released in October and, well, it's excellent. By all accounts, getting Witcher 3 running acceptably on the mobile chipset of Nintendo's console was a huge task for Saber Interactive, but the studio did sterling work and brought the rich world of the huge RPG to Switch almost completely intact. We liked it a lot, but we're still not totally certain we haven't fallen into some parallel dimension or something. Whatever happens next?

Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 E3 2019 announcement

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Was it surprising? No - in fact, looking back at past timescales, we called that an announcement was potentially incoming. Was it exciting? Oh yes. Oh yessss.

For many of us (and we assume many of you) The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been one of Switch's most evergreen titles, and something of a wonderful oddity in the Zelda series. Usually our relationship with Zelda goes into hibernation after we've 100%-ed the latest epic, but Breath of the Wild's open world (not to mention its 900 Korok seeds) has kept us returning again and again to enjoy the scenery and burn around the landscape on our motorbike.

Still, the prospect of an entirely new adventure with the self-same Link and Zelda - whether set in the same Hyrule or not - is very exciting. We collected together everything we know about Breath of the Wild 2, but there hasn't been much information released since E3 and we're looking forward to more tantalising info coming out in 2020. We don't imagine we'll see it before 2021, so there's plenty of time to get hyped with more juicy details - and plenty of time to find those last hundred-or-so Korok seeds that elude us.

So, those are a selection of our favourite Nintendo moments from 2019, but what about yours? Feel free to let rip in the comments with your favourite recollections from the past 12 months of hearty Nintendo goodness.