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WonderSwan

A 16 MB, 256K S-Ram game based on Bandai's popular hand-held battle link-up game. This version allows you to breed up to 8 monsters at a time. It's black and white and only available in Japanese. What you bascially do is to breed and train monsters to fight against each other.

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What is a WonderSwan?

Latest in hand-helds from Bandai is the Wonder Swan which is 121(w)x74.3(d)x24.3(h) mm in size and weighs about 110g. The LCD screen of this game machine however is only in black and white with 8 shades of gray. But the colors of the unit will be in Pearl White, Silver Metallic, Blue Metallic, Skeleton Pink, Skeleton black, Skeleton Blue and Skeleton Green.

Like the Lynx from Atari, Bandai's Wonder Swan can be played both diagonally and vertically. Great for a vertical version of Tetris or a side scrolling game of Mario in horizontal fashion.

It seems that Bandai's Wonder Swan is capable of showing Full Motion Video (FMV), displaying kanji characters clearly and supporting cartridges of up to 128 megabits in size - something that the GameBoy cannot do. But before you think of this as a GameBoy copy, note however that this Bandai project was done with the blessings and assistance of Gunpei Yokoi (creator of the GameBoy) who passed on suddenly before he could see it being completed. There will however be a game called "Gun Pey", a Tetris like game, that is dedicated to him.

The best thing about the Wonder Swan, however, will be the link-up option to your PC. This enables software downloads as well as the transfer of games and high scores.