Recenzja ModRetro Chromatic: Game Boy handlarza bronią jest jednym z najlepszych, jakie kiedykolwiek wyprodukowano

If Lockheed Martin made a Game Boy, would you buy one?

In the 1990s, I was among the kids who thought military aircraft were devastatingly cool. By then, Tom Cruise and Top Gun had long established the F-14 Tomcat and a pair of aviator shades as a fantasy for young men; I personally preferred the Lockheed F-117A, the high-tech angular “Stealth Fighter” that could invisibly sneak past enemy radar, and was partial to the legendary Lockheed SR-71 that flew so fast it could outrun missiles.

At the time, I most likely would have snapped up a jet-black Lockheed Game Boy without a second thought. But I’m old adequate now to realize that cool aerodynamics are just the tip of a deadlier geopolitical iceberg. Lockheed makes weapons, and I don’t have a say in who gets to buy them or who they’re utilized against. I don’t have a say in whether that tech should be at all.

I’ve been reasoning about Lockheed Martin as I review a much simpler gadget: the ModRetro Chromatic. The Chromatic is simply a high-end remake of Nintendo’s Game Boy, and it might be the best version of a Game Boy always made. But it’s connected to a company much like Lockheed: Anduril, the defence contractor that makes weaponized drones, networked surveillance systems, and another military tech.

Both Anduril and ModRetro are founded by Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift VR headset. Luckey is now an almost unbelievable character, a devout anime and video game lover who reportedly stores his vast collection of games in a decommissioned US atomic rocket silo — 1 of several silos he says he owns.

He plays with a lavish collection of military hardware including helicopters and a Mark V peculiar Operations Craft utilized by Navy SEALs. He erstwhile made the cover of Time Magazine as a floating barefoot “visionary” with an Oculus headset atop his head, though these days he’s more likely to make headlines propagandizing for his version of the defence industry. He was the face of VR before Facebook kicked him out. (Luckey was an early Trump booster and took flak for backing a single Hillary Clinton-trolling billboard; Mark Zuckerberg denied he was fired for his political views at the time; any Meta execs have since apologized for his ouster.)

Many tech companies are active with military projects in any form or form. Google and Amazon have a contract with Israel for a “Project Nimbus” that Google knew could have enabled human rights violations against Palestinians, and Google has fired many workers for protesting that deal. Microsoft is presently working towards outfitting over 100,000 soldiers with a militarized version of its HoloLens headset. Meta is now letting defence contractors usage its Llama AI model. I think it’s fair to say fewer of us boycott these companies or even think about these things erstwhile we usage their products.

But where each of these companies can plausibly say “It’s just business” as they defend their cloud server contracts or when their CEOs kiss the ring, and it’s very hard to escape large Tech’s orbit, this is simply a fun but unnecessary product from a man with a circumstantial point of view on weapons, war, and politics. Luckey has twice hosted fundraisers for Donald Trump (in 2020 and 2024) at his own house. He publically expresses the fervent (and self-serving) belief that tech companies should get in bed with the military.

For Luckey, it’s not just business, it’s personal. And we’ve heard loud and clear that it’s individual for many of our readers, too. I’ve been investigating the ModRetro Chromatic for over a month, and it’s very good. I believe it’s the best, most luxurious way to play Game Boy and Game Boy colour games. But if the goal is to reconstruct and preserve our childhood nostalgia, the Luckey connection throws a wrench in the works. What you’re about to read is simply a real review of an excellent product, 1 I genuinely enjoyed utilizing — but 1 that left me feeling somewhat tortured in the process.

For Luckey, the Game Boy itself is personal. It’s how he got his start. Before Anduril, before Facebook, before Oculus, Palmer Luckey was a teen who modded Nintendo Game Boys. “ModRetro” was the name of the very first thing he founded: an online forum for gaming hardware modders like himself.

So as you’d expect, his company has any strong ideas about what a modern Game Boy should look like.

Where the $220 Analogue Pocket seeks to update the Game Boy experience for the present day — with support for another handheld cartridges, ROMs, save states, a tv dock, and so on — the Chromatic stays squarely rooted in the handheld’s past. There are fewer modern amenities here. It’s designed to feel like a vintage Game Boy, only now with the rough edges sanded off.

Nintendo’s easy-to-scratch casings, screen lenses, and buttons? They’re made of metal, sapphire, and PBT plastic now. Those hard-to-see screens? You now get a customized IPS display at the same size, resolution, and pixel structure as the first Game Boy and Game Boy Color, 1 so bright you can play in direct sunlight like we did back in the day. It does come, however, with a brand-new copy of Tetris that optionally adds T-Spins, instant drops, and the ability to hold pieces for later, modernizing the classical game that famously came bundled with the original.

At its heart, the Chromatic is an effort to faithfully cross the first 1989 Game Boy with the 1998 Game Boy Color. There’s no SD card reader, no user-accessible operating system, no ability to add or play ROMs: erstwhile you slide the top-mounted power switch, it instantly boots your Game Boy or Game Boy colour cartridge utilizing a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip that emulates an actual Game Boy’s processors. Like with the Analogue Pocket, the upshot is more responsive, quirk-free gameplay than software emulators allow.

I’m a parent, and “I don’t have time for this shit” comes with the territory, so I immediately assumed I would miss “save states,” the feature that lets practically all video game emulator and retro handheld pause and resume your game at virtually any moment.

Then I fired up Pokémon Pinball on an Analogue Pocket, and found I was wrong. I was on a pokémon-catching rotation like never before. I caught Charmander, my daughter’s favourite pokémon, and for the first time in Pinball, I evolved it into a Charmeleon, then a Charizard, all without losing my ball. The stakes were high, so I reflexively tapped the Save State shortcut so I could retry if I failed.

Immediately, the force was off — but I felt a chunk of my excitement vanish along with it. I caught those Pokemon fair and square without loading the save, but I’d cheated myself of a pure victory, even if I didn’t wind up cheating the game. erstwhile I stuck that same game back into the Chromatic, a handheld without save states, the excitement came back. This is the way the game is meant to be played, and those stakes are there by design. That’s the experience ModRetro wants you to have, and the only 1 you’ll get. Ditching that modern amenity is simply a choice, and it isn’t for everyone.

It’s just 1 of many ways the Chromatic feels more authentic. Even though it’s a mash-up of 2 different Game Boy models, it instantly feels acquainted in ways the Analogue doesn’t, from the sliding power control and volume dial (the Analogue has you hold down closely spaced digital buttons and takes longer to start a game) to the button layout and feel.

The Chromatic is fundamentally the size of a Game Boy Color, with the same bulging battery compartment curve providing a rounded perch for your fingers to rest. But it’s clearly been designed for those who appreciate the first 1989 model too. It’s got the original’s iconic slanted, cake-sprinkle Start and choice buttons, its glossy domed A and B buttons, its larger D-pad, its more protected cartridge slot, and the rounded lower-right corners of its flat-faced chassis and cover glass. All of them bring me back to the handheld that made me a gamer.

I wonder if they bring Luckey back to his early days, too. due to the fact that while ModRetro appears to have made a remarkably repairable handheld and is presently open-sourcing its CAD files and firmware, this bespoke device is not precisely what ModRetro was originally created to make.

Luckey cut his teeth turning existing Game Boys and GameCubes into arguably better, more portable versions of themselves by reusing bits of old and fresh electronics. “It’s quite a few fun due to the fact that it’s about taking old technology and then cutting out the old parts, replacing them with fresh parts and making it into something that was never possible before,” he told Voices of VR in 2014. The ModRetro Chromatic is all custom, though, right down to its in-house screen.

Still, ModRetro’s first approach to improvement has been on display throughout Luckey’s professional history. Luckey’s key insight with the Oculus Rift was that low-cost smartphone components could yet make VR accessible, a belief he shared with researchers at the laboratory where he worked, too. Repurposed commercial supply chains are besides Anduril’s pitch to become the world’s most efficient weapons manufacturer, “so that the same processes utilized to build fiberglass bathtubs can just as easy be reconfigured to build rocket airframes,” as Tablet Magazine described it in August.

With that approach, Anduril has rapidly built out an arsenal in just 7 years, including multiple drones that can kill — 1 is simply a “loitering munition” that remotely dive-bombs a target, another effectively a recoverable ground-to-air missile.

When I look at the Chromatic and its prominent “MODRETRO” logo right above the screen, frequently I just see an excellent Game Boy. But sometimes I see the latest high-tech product from a man who makes high-tech missiles.

At this point, you might be wondering: just how excellent is this hardware to justify all this soul-searching? Let’s start with build quality:

• It’s made of metal, not plastic, which can seem a small cold at first touch, but I can’t overstate how solid and premium this gadget feels. The build is incredible.
• I even intentionally dropped a Chromatic twice onto concrete, from 4.5 feet, without destroying it. More on that in a sec.
• The battery latch is simply a physical spring-loaded lever, which takes a small getting utilized to, but has specified a satisfying snap.
• Unlike all authoritative Game Boy, there’s no front talker grille. But unlike all my authoritative Game Boys, the bottom-facing talker is loud, crisp, and clear.
• The Start/Select buttons are no longer pliable mushy rubber, but alternatively PBT plastic with the same firm clicky presses as A and B.
• The volume dial is large and easy to find and usage by feel alone.
• The battery compartment is nearly the same thickness as the first Game Boy’s, giving it a beefier grip than any Game Boy since (though not rather adequate for my friends with large hands).
• The D-pad, a bit of a sore place for any Analogue Pocket enthusiasts due to the fact that it can sometimes let accidental inputs, feels tight and responsive – almost besides firm, mine wore in after many hours of play.
• When I tested it against an Analogue Pocket at the same brightness, utilizing rechargeable AAs, the Chromatic lasted 3 full hours longer. (You can watch a sped-up timelapse in

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  my present I’m Toying With video

  .)
• I simply plug the Chromatic into USB if I’m always moving low on charge — at under 3 watts of power draw, any old port will do! I powered it from my phone.
• I could even hotswap AA batteries that way. Plug it in, swap AAs, unplug, all without losing my game.

The Chromatic’s pixel-perfect screen isn’t strictly necessary: I mostly had just as good a time on the Analogue Pocket’s bigger, higher resolution display if I enabled the right filters and colour palettes, though I did appreciate that the Chromatic got the Game Boy colour feel just right out of the box. The Chromatic even lets you summon green-tinted first Game Boy palettes by holding down buttons at boot.

There are besides any ways it’s not completely faithful to the first Game Boys, just FYI:

• There’s no longer a visible gap between the screen crystal and the LCD, and the screen is no longer a blank green or grey erstwhile powered off. It’s a laminated black mirror like modern phones.
• While it’s mostly the size of a Game Boy Color, it’s nearly as dense as a full loaded first Game Boy at 10 ounces (285g). Compare to 7.5oz / 212g for the Game Boy Color.
• There’s an extra button below the volume dial that lets you change brightness, turn on frame blending and USB colour correction and… that’s about it for now.
• You get a Game Boy Color-sized Link Cable connector, but with the extra notch of the Game Boy Advance’s connector for possibly more compatibility with another Game Boy gadgets.
• You get 2 lanyard/charm holes, 1 on each side of the system, unlike the Color’s 1 on the left.
• The battery compartment takes 3 AAs, not 4 or two.
• There’s no longer a red power LED staring you in the face, but alternatively a multicolor LED on the bottom that only turns on for boot, low battery, and charging.
• The Game Boy colour infrared port’s been somewhat moved to accommodate the power switch.

And there were a fewer insignificant disappointments too. Mostly, I want it worked a small better in quiet bedrooms and loud airplanes. The buttons and even the D-pad click louder than any of my old Game Boys, yet the 3.5mm headphone jack volume is the quietest of the pack. I could barely hear its chiptunes over the din of the plane, and I couldn’t compensate with my noise-canceling Bose QC25 since the Chromatic doesn’t have a four-pole headset jack.

ModRetro besides advertises the Chromatic as “indestructible,” and if that sounds like marketing bluster, you’re at least half right. I dropped the Chromatic twice onto concrete, from 4.5 feet, and it came distant with only insignificant dents, and I was impressed. But ModRetro besides has a image of the thing getting run over by a car. erstwhile I ran it over with my car, the screen shattered. The frame is now badly bent.

I was besides a tad disappointed to find the Chromatic’s USB-C port isn’t as potent as promised. While the company advertised USB-C video output and even told me you could charge rechargeable AAs utilizing the do-it-all port, it turns out the Chromatic can only present itself as a webcam for desktop-style video recording, and NiMH AA charging didn’t make the cut. ModRetro CEO Torin Herndon, who was an engineer at Anduril from 2017 to 2021, tells me the company is beginning production on an optional rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack, but won’t talk price, capacity, or runtime just yet.

That said, I actually find I like AAs. At 50 percent brightness — far higher than I needed on the plane — I saw over 8 hours from a set of Ikea-branded Panasonic Eneloop rechargeables, or closer to 7 hours from Amazon Basics alkalines. That same brand of alkalines gave me over 12 hours at the second-lowest brightness setting, the dimmest I’d want to usage in the daytime, and just under 5 hours at max brightness and max volume. And again, you can simply plug the Chromatic into a USB port if you’re always moving low on charge, then drop in fresh AAs without losing your game.

There’s truly no question in my head that this handheld is the best retro Game Boy yet made, the 1 that best captures the physical feeling I had playing Game Boy as a kid. I love remasters due to the fact that they can let you recapture that childhood joy, playing with the Lego starship or Final Fantasy game you think you remember alternatively of the 1 that actually existed.

But I don’t remember my childhood nostalgia coming with a side of possible guilt and fear about putting money into the pocket of a weapons contractor. Feels weird!

Even practically, I wonder who, outside of a fistful of 1989 handheld lovers like me, would want a handheld that just plays Game Boy and Game Boy colour carts. Many of the best games are costly and hard to find in physical form — Metal Gear Solid and the best Pokémon titles can easy command $100 each — and it’d be a more compelling gadget if it could play the arguably better library of Game Boy Advance titles as well. The Analogue Pocket does.

Luckey has said he wants to grow that first Game Boy library. Game developers never rather stopped making homebrew games for the Game Boy, and ModRetro is 1 of the fewer now publishing them on actual carts. all Chromatic comes with a fresh copy of Tetris, and you can already order 10 more titles, including a fresh version of Toki Tori and Tales of Monsterland, sequels to Traumatarium and In the Dark, and my individual favorite, the grindy JRPG Dragonyhm with any excellent tunes and pixel art.

This chiptune in particular, Dragonhym’s “Gonrad Forest,” captivated me at once:

If you feel weird about ModRetro, you should know these games aren’t exclusive to the Chromatic, either — they played perfectly well plugged into an Analogue Pocket or a Game Boy Color, and any even worked on my 1989 original. any may be available to purchase as ROMs. If you just want to effort them, many have playable demos you can effort in an emulator, or even a web browser, like this:

On a desktop, tap to focus; press Enter to start; usage Z, B, and arrow keys to play.

It’s not clear to me how serious Luckey is about backing a fresh era of Game Boy. For 1 thing, the Chromatic is already sold out at his website, and he says he isn’t making any more, but will focus on releasing fresh games while it builds “something more sustainable” in terms of hardware instead. (A grey Chromatic is inactive available at GameStop, for now.)

Second, as far as I can tell, all of ModRetro’s games beyond Tetris were already in development; some, like Dragonyhm, were already headed to cartridge elsewhere. Developing fresh games isn’t presently a company goal: “We are typically looking for games deep in improvement at this time, and effort to push them across the finish line into being a full-on physical good,” Herndon tells me. He says ModRetro mostly pays to make cartridges, boxes, and manuals, and gives developers a “pretty awesome” percent of sales.

The pre-release carts that ModRetro sent me besides had a couple issues that are hopefully getting ironed out: I mysteriously lost my full save in In The Dark 2, and Traumatarium Penitent was missing a key bugfix the developer made almost a year ago. Toki Tori besides booted into a full screen glitch the first fewer times I started it up, but it seems to be working now.

Even erstwhile people love the thought of revisiting the Game Boy and supporting retro game development, I fishy most will see a $200 handheld that makes you individually swap pricy cartridges as a luxury they can’t afford — not erstwhile all iPhone and a mountain of Chinese emulator handhelds can play the same games, ones they can (illicitly) download for free.

And if you find the Analogue Pocket isn’t vintage adequate for your tastes, you could always do what I just did and add a modern backlit screen to your genuine Nintendo Game Boy. It won’t be pixel-perfect, but it might be good adequate for me:

This is 1 of the more hard reviews I’ve always had to write, due to the fact that I have no qualms recommending the ModRetro Chromatic on the strength of its hardware, which justifies its $200 price. It feels more like the Game Boy I remember than many of Nintendo’s actual handhelds erstwhile I choice them up today.

But like the Tesla Cybertruck, it’s besides very much the product of 1 individual in particular, a individual who stands for other things that might clash with your ideals, and it could wind up being a symbol that you don’t terribly head any of that, even if you actually do.

Luckey recently told a Pepperdine University audience that it’s not a bad thing to celebrate the power of weapons, saying that “societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting force on others in pursuit of good aims,” and that “you request people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.” He explained that his company is named Anduril after Aragorn’s sword in The Lord of the Rings partially due to the fact that that sword was “inherently good,” and “wielded only by the kingdom of man against the hordes of Mordor.”

Real life contains no inherently good drones or inherently good missiles. And 2 major throughlines of Tolkien’s work are that war is hideous and that power inevitably corrupts. The joy I find playing with fake swords in the ModRetro Chromatic is now weirdly intertwined with a general fear: that Anduril’s real weapons might be misused. I won’t propose that niche $200 Game Boys are actually funding those weapons in any meaningful way, but these inactive aren’t emotions I associate with my childhood Nintendo experience.

That means the Chromatic isn’t the eventual Game Boy, even if it has the best build quality and the best screen. There’s inactive area for a better pair of rose-tinted glasses than the ones Luckey has paid to create.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge