Nintendo Play Yan

The one area where the Gameboy line trailed behind was multimedia. Sure, it's got great games, but where are the movies and MP3's? The Play Yan is Nintendo's answer the Sony PSP. It's an officially sanctioned product from Nintendo Japan that plays videos (ASF, MP4) and music (MP3). That's all it does but it does it really well. You can't run backed up GBA games off of it yet. I say "yet," since someone is bound find a way to load them.

The PY has a SD memory slot that can handle upto 2GB of storage. It simply plugs into the cartridge slot of the GBA SP. There is a headphone jack in the front which should be used since the audio coming out of the GBA is crap. Having it outputted through the PY's own jack, yields a very high quality sound.

Since this device was made for the Japanese market, the interface is entirely in Japanese. The software to convert the movie is also in Japanese. There are rumoured plans to release it in Europe and North America but no official word from Nintendo.

You can use the included software to convert movies to PY compliant video. Like I mentioned before, it's in Japanese. Luckily, there are other options in the way of software. Ironically, PSP Video 9 can also be used to convert video that works with the PY. So can the 3GP Converter. Since the PY uses a industry standard codec, MP4, you can use pretty much any piece of software that can generate that format.

The video quality is suprisingly good. With decent compression settings, 30 minutes of video take up about 60MB. So it's about 2MB/min. A 2 hour movie will occupy 240MB, which isn't too shabby.

You're thinking, "Isn't this just another Supercard?" The Supercard is a device that tries to do everything. But it doesn't do somethings very well, namely video. It's a jack of all trades, and master of none. The SC lets you run GBA games but the video/music capabilities are crap compared to the PY. And vice versa with the PY. It does a great job with video and music, but has no capability to load games.

So why would you watch movies on a 2.9" screen when the Sony PSP has a much bigger and nicer screen? The PSP is huge compared to the Gameboy Advance SP. If I had a PSP in my pocket, it'd pull my pants down to my knees. The PSP isn't as portable as it appears. I don't watch a lot of movies and anime these days but with the PY, I find myself catching an episode of Corner Gas or Initial D during my lunch break at school. I also use it exclusively as my MP3 player.

If you have a GBA SP, you need to do yourself a favour and get the Supercard so you can run backed up GBA games, and you should get the Play Yan to make your GBA experience complete by having the ability to play high quality video and music. With both these devices, you can leave all your game carts, CD's, DVD's at home and have more room in your pocket for your cellphone.

The Play Yan sells for about $79US and can be imported from lik-sang.com and play-asia.com(where I got mine).

New Play Yan Micro for the Gameboy Micro