Darkenedjib On GB Micro

The Micro launched in Australia yesterday, so I went and bought one, and thought I might write a hands on impression (for those who are considering). The photos below are taken by me, sorry about the blurr in some -_-.

Well, I bought the Micro, returned home, and went straight to my room to open it. You know that new hardware feeling you get when buying new gadgets? It was like that for me, sitting on the bed and staring at the console's box. The blurr in the images below could have been due to my hands shaking while holding the camera :P.





Yeah, I bought the red bundle. The only other choice from Big W was the silver console, which came with a black faceplate, it was a tough choice though. Anyway, I opened the box and slide out the contents. The Micro was visible behind a plastic wrapping... nice.



I took out the rest of the contents. There was an instruction booklet, user manuel, charger and extra faceplate. A pouch was included but I didn't notice. The charger was similar to the SP and DS ones, but a smaller socket to fit a Micro. The extra faceplate was purple.



The Micro itself was a lot heavier than I expected. It was made with a strong metallic casing, unlike the plastics of the GBA or metallic paint on the SP, and weighed a little more than an SP. The faceplate was covered with a clear plastic which looked neat, but left fingerprints when I held it.





Sweeet. I couldn't wait to try out some old GBA games, but first, here are some additional screens from different angles.





I took out two random games (first ones I could find). They happened to be Mario Kart Super Circuit and Pokemon Leaf Green. Here is a shot of Mario Kart.



The Micro fit nicely in my hands. The A and B buttons were easily reaschable, the D pad was very responsive, and the L R buttons gave a nice click when I pushed them. I first tried out the volume and screen brightness. The sound was decent, but not as loud as I hoped, maybe a tad louder than an SP. But the brightness was amazing, even at the lowest setting it was brighter than the SP's frontlight. And at 4 notches higher in brightness, I swear you could use it as a torch. The image was crystal clear (don't be discouraged by that shoddy image!), the Micro has as many pixels as the GBA SP, only on a smaller screen.



The image above is from Pokemon, again, crystal clear reception. The text was easy to read, and navigating items in the game was a cinche. It took almost no time for me to adjust to the micro's controls. You had to kinda cradle the console to reach all the buttons, which felt fairly compfortable. Notice the Start/Select buttons are emitting a red light. That meant the thing needed to recharge, the charged colour is blue.

I dug around for the Movie Player I bought a while ago (a Play-Yan alternative for watching movies on the SP or DS). The player stuck out of the system a bit (ok... a lot), but the picture was awesome. Hehe, I watched a bit of Family Guy on it.



For some reason, Family Guy didn't seem so interesting just then :P. I thought I might show you the other faceplate. The Micro came with a small bit of plastic, which I almost threw in the bin, used for changing the faceplates. I had to push the two points on the plastic into corresponding holes on the left side of the Micro, and the faceplate popped open. Changing faceplates was easy enough, though a pinkish/purple faceplate looked slightly out of place.



I guess there isn't much else to say about the console, though I was really anxious to recharge and start playing some GBA classics on the 2 inch screen :P. Afterwards, I managed to find an old Mario and Luigi Superstar Sage cartridge, and spent about 2 hours playing non stop. Lol, that was the reason I wasn't able to write a review yesterday.

So yeah, it's a nifty gadget, definitely worth the $138. I apoligise for the untidy review, I am really eager to return to MLSS right now :D. To finish off, here are two more images.