Game & Watch Gallery 3 is not a game I had back in the day. I did not really own a Game Boy Color, and by the time I had a Game Boy Advance, this was an afterthought. I actually had the very first game on the Nintendo Game Boy and liked it okay. But this third installment really rubbed me the wrong way. This one is included in the Nintendo Switch Online membership with the Game Boy collection, so that is how I played it.

For those unfamiliar, before Nintendo came out with the Game Boy, they were still in the handheld video game market, just on a much smaller scale. In America, these apparently ran anywhere from 20 to 50 dollars each, but most of them hit the market before the 1980s were over. Game & Watch Gallery 3 is a collection of different games they made for these little handheld devices. Almost all of them are very simple gaming devices with black and white graphics and flickering screens. In many ways, they were more basic than even the Atari 2600.

In this third collection, some of the games are kind of recognizable to me, even though we only had one Game & Watch growing up, which was the original Donkey Kong. By the time I got my hands on it, my brothers had already broken it. This one reminds me of Donkey Kong 3, the one that nobody ever played, but featured Mario’s lesser known alleged cousin as a bug exterminator.

I cannot remember if every game had it or not, but this one definitely has modern modes for every game included. They can drastically change how the games are even played. For example, the Yoshi screenshot shown is the exact same game as the bug exterminator one above, according to the collection. But this one especially feels much different.

Probably my favorite in this collection was Donkey Kong Jr. I was a fan of the original game, the NES version, because I never played the arcade original. To be honest, this Game & Watch version is not quite the same.

Neither is the modern version of the game that you can optionally play. But while I was playing it, I thought it was wild that they were still putting Donkey Kong Jr. in a game published in 1999. There is a fan theory that Donkey Kong Jr. grew up to become Donkey Kong, and the original Donkey Kong became Cranky Kong, but there is absolutely no making sense of that timeline. Especially since Donkey Kong and Bowser get invited to go-kart races and play tennis despite being the original antagonists of the Mario series.

As I was playing through all the games, I just felt incredibly bored and unmotivated to keep going. The original release got pretty decent critical feedback, which I am a little surprised by. I guess it worked better when we did not have so many distractions in the world, such as high speed internet, streaming, and much better video games. But it did not take me very long to wonder what the point of playing this game even really was. Even stranger is that Nintendo has not put out the first two Game & Watch collections on the Nintendo Switch Online menu, nor the fourth game that apparently came out on the Game Boy Advance.