About The Handheld Gazette
Letter from the Editor
Summer 2026.
It started the way most good things do — sitting on the couch with the family, everyone staring at their own screen. Not together. Not really present. Just five people in the same room, each lost in their own rectangle of light.
My phone hadn't stopped buzzing all day. Work notifications, Slack messages, calendar reminders. The laptop was open on the table. The phone was in my hand. I looked up and realized: my kids were doing exactly what I was doing — scrolling, tapping, half-present. Tina too. We were all in the same room and nowhere near each other.
Something needed to change. Not a lecture. Not a rule. Something better.
So we went back to the Game Boy.
Not the original one gathering dust in a drawer — though that's a fine place to start. We picked up a few of the modern retro handhelds that do a convincing impression of the real thing. Clamshell design, clicky buttons, that satisfying snap when you close the lid. The kind of device that exists for exactly one purpose: playing games. No notifications. No work email. No Slack. Just a screen and some buttons and whatever you decide to put on it.
The phone is where all the work lives. The laptop is where all the work lives. The handheld is where the games live. That separation turned out to be the whole point.
And something happened when we started playing together. Aster got lost in Pokémon Emerald — breeding teams, trading, the whole obsession. Tina discovered Astro Boy: Omega Factor and wouldn't put it down. Max went deep into The Minish Cap and started explaining Zelda lore at the dinner table. I finally played through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow properly, the way I always meant to years ago. Leon, who's not quite old enough for any of it, was there for all of it — in laps, grabbing at buttons, part of the ritual.
We were in the same room again. Actually in it. Talking about what we were playing. Arguing about who got the next turn. Five people, five handhelds, one couch.
Here's what I noticed: there are new games for these things. Not just the classics — brand new commercial releases. Games people are making right now, in 2025 and 2026, for hardware that's decades old. New cartridges. New digital releases. New developers pouring their hearts into 160×144 pixels or whatever the GBA pushes. And they're good. Some of them are genuinely great.
But I couldn't find a good overview. There were forum threads and Discord servers and scattered itch.io pages. Pinned messages on Reddit. A YouTube video here and there. Nothing assembled. Nothing curated. Nothing that said: here's what exists, here's what's worth your time, here's where to buy it.
So we decided to make that ourselves.
The Handheld Gazette is that overview. It's a catalogue of new commercial games for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance — the ones people are actually selling right now. With reviews, hardware guides, and a growing archive of the scene. No nostalgia bait. No rehashing the same twenty games everyone already knows. Just the new stuff, the good stuff, the stuff worth playing with your family on a summer evening when the phone is in another room and the work can wait.
Because that's what this is really about. Not the games — though the games are wonderful. It's about being in the same room with the people you love, sharing something that doesn't ask anything of you except that you show up and play.
The phones will be there when we're done.
— Gert, Tina, Aster, Max & Leon
Lede, Belgium · Summer 2026
What We Cover
Commercial releases only. Games you can actually buy. We have enormous respect for the homebrew scene, but this is about games with a price tag — physical cartridges, digital ROMs, or both.
If a non-commercial project is exceptionally polished and feels like a real release, we might make an exception. But our focus is clear: commercial first.
We don't cover nostalgia. We don't rehash the same twenty titles everyone already knows. We're here for the games people are making right now — the commercial cartridges and digital releases being sold by their creators in 2020 and beyond.
Platforms
Game Boy (GB) — The original 1989 handheld and its games.
Game Boy Color (GBC) — The 1998 color upgrade.
Game Boy Advance (GBA) — The 2001 32-bit powerhouse.
PICO-8 and other platforms are on our radar but not currently featured.