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Kojote writes "The latest PDRoms Coding Competition has just finished. The idea was to write a homebrew Game & Watch-style freeware game for handhelds or consoles, and there were a total of 24 freely downloadable submissions. In detail, there were 10 Game Boy Advance entries, 8 GP32 entries, 3 Gameboy Color entries, 1 Genesis/Megadrive entry and 1 Neo Geo Pocket Color entry. The winning entries were headed by Beer Belly Bill (GBA) by Metalvotze. If you don't have real hardware to test the entries, you can use emulators such as VisualBoy Advance (GBA/GBC) and GeePee32 (GP32). Have fun!"

Thanks to Boomtown for the first part of their ongoing series, discussing the early history of handheld videogames. They start off with the Milton Bradley Microvision, which "actually arrived ten years prior to the release of the Game Boy", in 1979, and then discuss "Nintendo's famous line of simple portable LCD video games", the Game & Watch series, before covering the classic original Nintendo Game Boy, and "the world's first color handheld", the attractive but ultimately doomed Atari Lynx.

Courtesy of IGN, who extracted the pictures from Nintendo's official E3 press booklet, comes pictures and more details of the Game And Watch E-Cards, the collectible data cards which you can swipe through your E-Reader add-on in order to load in classic G+W games. Although there's already Game And Watch 4 for GBA and several prequels for Gameboy, these e-cards look to include classic, if basic titles never converted to Nintendo's new-school portable gaming platform. Neat stuff.

basscomm writes "Nintendojo has the first two parts of a two part editorial on the career of Gunpei Yokoi. Mr. Yokoi worked at Nintendo for many years and was responsible for such innovations as the D-pad, R.O.B., the Game and Watch, Kid Icarus, Metroid, the Game Boy, and the ill-fated Virtual Boy. This prolific inividual was killed in an automobile accident in 1997."