Watching the Game & Watches

So the second volume of Pix n Love's History of Nintendo turns into a collector's manual around the middle.

It's definitely clear that it's not quite so straightforward a history as the first volume was once you see the rarity rankings for all of the Game & Watch (G&W) games, but still. This volume does what it does well, though it's also disappointing.

I mean, the first chapter of the book relates the history of the G&W series. It shares all sorts of trivial information about their creation, and various anecdotes that explain why certain things came out the way they did. But after that chapter it becomes a book full of entries about the various G&W games. There's still some trivia that gets offered up, but otherwise, it's a quiet sort of thing, tucked into the bottom of each entry and several times it's just a bit about how game modes differ.

Pix'n Love refer to themselves as the archaeologists of gaming, and what they've put together backs them up for sure. But volume two of The History of Nintendo is just too much of an artifact catalogue and not enough of a history. There are another 40+ pages, however, so more anecdotes could be found, and more connections could be made.