Wow, this is cool! It has never made sense to me that a platform with thousands of times more compute and capabilities than Gameboys from two decades ago is worse in every regard for gaming. Hopefully resources like these can be used to both find and promote good works!
Younger generations really have it bad with how the market treats them as customers. I highly doubt they experience same level of joy as previous generations using gameboys and similar devices did.
I honestly feel majority of the games at that time were made by people genuinely in love with games and stories, whereas now, it's mostly opportunistic cash grabbing incentive. Not saying nice and well done games don't exist, but it is hard for casual young player to come in touch with them
The rewards system for many games has been horribly screwed up. Constant small rewards are common on most mobile games, rather than the segmented rewards of old games where often the more effort was required the bigger the reward. The kids have little to no concept of payoff and expect a constant flow of action to reward. Suika Game, which was recently popular, is a prime example. Nearly every time you drop a fruit a reaction happens and you get a small reward. This also seems to be creating a general impatience I'm seeing in children where if there's downtime or slow segment they start looking for other forms of stimulation. It honestly makes me very worried because that behaviour might be extending to their everyday life rather than just with videogames.
The Gameboy didn't have access to the internet which meant you couldn't do most of the modern business models on it. The only way to make money off of a Gameboy game was to sell it in a store. It was impossible to patch it after it was released so you had to make sure all of the bugs were fixed instead of just shipping it unfinished and patching it later. There was no way to play a game off of a server and no way to track "hours of gameplay" or "player count" to optimize for addictiveness. Without an internet connected platform, these things were impossible.
I yearn for an app permission of the form "can never access the network, period", and I don't just mean that it can't initiate or receive network requests, but also that it can't receive updates. In other words, once you install it, both you and (more importantly) the developer understand that the game is done. It's apparently unimaginable to people today, but this is how games worked for decades (and yes, every game that was worth its salt Just Worked, without major bugs).
Manually blocking connections for computer apps or disallowing automatic updates on phones often leads to "you must update the software to continue using this" block. It happened constantly when I had an Android and didn't allow updates because I was effing tired of developers messing up something that worked perfectly as-is.
The huge intrinsic problem with phone games is that your only real I/O device is a tiny touchscreen. This is a massive, often underrated limitation. You can't just port over games which are designed for a controller, and you can't make entire categories of games, at least not well.
It's not an easily solvable problem, and it's why platforms like the Steam Deck and the Switch will continue to be extremely popular.
