[Guest Columnist - MobileMilitia]

When Nintendo took their first step into the multimedia world on the Game Boy Advance, introducing the Play-Yan, they did a mediocre job. It was a sweet device because it played MP3 files without any conversion or transcoding required and MPEG-4* formatted video files. What made it a little less than importable was the fact that the video files had to be ASF’s (.asf for the file extension), and those suck. Also, there were some bugs in the thing that hindered quality audio output.

Being host to a friendly interface, a standard flash memory format (Secure Digital, SD), and its own headphones jack, the Play-Yan was destined for improvement eventually. On Mario’s 20th birthday, September 13th, 2005, Nintendo released an improved version called the Play-Yan Micro to coincide with the release of the Game Boy Micro. This version brought some major improvements, but one feature of the old Play-Yan was missing: minigames. The old player had support for these ASF minigames that you could download from Nintendo and copy onto and SD card, and while they were mildly entertaining they didn’t really add any value to the device. On top of that, Nintendo only released a handful of these games, so like the e-Reader, it was more like a joke in the eyes of consumers. So in the end, the removal of this feature was definitely worth what we got in the upgrades.

What was upgraded? First off, the sound quality through the internal headphones jack was greatly improved. Now when you listen to music or watch videos, loud or soft, they sound great. Without having to go through any audio conversion, MP3’s sound just as good as they do on any other portable music player. On the downside, audio quality through the system’s speakers does not sound so great. It’s listenable, but I wouldn’t show it off to anyone like that. Plus, if you use the headphones jack on the system rather than the one on the Play-Yan Micro, you don’t get the greatest quality. How unfortunate this is as it would have been nice to use some good headphones with a ninety-degree-plug on the Micro and toss it in your pocket. The Micro itself, boasting a slim design, gains a lot of bulk when you add the Play-Yan and then a pair of headphones through the player’s internal jack. A smart redesign would have the jack coming out the side or possibly improved sound quality through the system it’s being used in.

MPEG-4 playback was added to the old and busted Play-Yan with a firmware update, but it’s only with the Play-Yan Micro that you get the aforementioned audio improvements. You might as well forget encoding videos in ASF from now on considering they could only playback in 32kbps mono, sampled at 8kHz; MPEG-4 videos support up to 320kbps stereo sound, sampled at up to 48kHz. The visual and audio boost seen in the new player is outstanding even when compared to video playback on Sony’s PSP…although obviously quite different still as the screen for the PSP is nearly five times larger than that of the Game Boy Micro. Tooting the Play-Yan Micro’s horn even more, video playback on the Game Boy Micro is gorgeous. Of course, playback on the GBA SP (especially the new backlit one) and the DS is great, but the Micro’s screen is by far the best yet and the dot pitch is like sex in space. As with any compressed video format, artifacts are present, but that mostly depends on the encoder you use…which I’ll go over shortly.

So what of features, controls, and interface? The way you navigate through music and videos is basically the same as the old Play-Yan, but the “Pictogram” design and character have gone through a few minor changes. Everything is a lot more polished now in every department, and Nintendo even released a sort of mod for the interface as well; by downloading a file from Nintendo’s Japanese site, you can change everything to a Mario theme. With the file on your SD card, the stick-man becomes Mario, the sounds are straight from the Mushroom Kingdom, and the little visual at the bottom of the music screen has Goombas and Koopa Troopas instead of stick-men, cars, and helicopters. In addition to the Mario theme, you can change different default settings within the file. For example, you can change the default playback mode, volume boost, and bass level.

With minimal buttons on the Game Boy Advance (GBA, GBA SP, GB Micro, and the GBA functionality on the DS) Nintendo had to come up with an intuitive way to work the controls for the Play-Yan Micro. They break down as follows:

General Controls:
D-Pad - menu navigation
L Button - hold at boot to select the Pictogram interface (if the Mario version is on the SD card), press with the R button to enable auto-sleep mode
Start - hold to enable sleep mode, press to bring system out of sleep mode
A Button - confirm selection
B Button - back out of current menu

MP3 Playback:
D-Pad Up - increase volume
D-Pad Down - decrease volume
D-Pad Left - previous track (hold to rewind within current track)
D-Pad Right - next track (hold to fast-forward within current track)
L Button - N/A
R Button - press Up and Down while holding to change reverb, press Select while holding to activate bass
A Button - play selection, move Pictogram character or Mario
B Button - stop playing
Select - scroll playback modes (repeat all, repeat one, repeat random, play all once)
Start - pause, hold to enable sleep mode, press A, B, and Select to perform a soft reset, resetting auto-sleep mode

Video Playback:
D-Pad Up - increase volume
D-Pad Down - decrease volume
D-Pad Left - hold to rewind within current video
D-Pad Right - hold to fast-forward within current video
L Button - decrease brightness
R Button - increase brightness
A Button - play selection
B Button - stop playing, return to video selection
Select - scroll playback modes (play one, repeat one, play all once, repeat all)
Start - pause, hold to enable sleep mode

It might seem confusing at first, but it becomes second nature when you’re using it as your main media player on the go. The sleep mode option also has a setting that you can’t change; auto-sleep will not put the system to sleep while playing music unless you have headphones plugged into the Play-Yan Micro (plugged into the system doesn’t count). This setting makes sense to an extent, but there has been at least one-half of a time when I wanted to just listen through the system’s speaker and have it go to sleep. Another feature that I haven’t quite figured out is the dancing Pictogram character. It seems that if you press the A button with the beat of the music (or at a consistent beat), the stick-man will begin dancing accompanied by more stick-men on the other stairs. Depending on how you press the A button, he’ll do some pretty entertaining moves like pulling his head off and doing the can-can. With the Mario theme active, Mario will jump jump like he’s Kris Kross, and eventually start hitting things like Fire Flowers and Power Stars. This little Easter Egg makes for a few minutes of amusement every now and again, but obviously isn’t a selling point.

Converting your videos for playback on the Play-Yan Micro is probably the hardest thing about the device. The player comes with Panasonic’s Media Stage program, but it’s all in Japanese…and who wants to bother with that? A quick Google search will yield a plethora of video conversion programs, but PSP Video 9 and 3GP Converter seem to be the most popular for our needs. What’s better is that they are both free. PSP Video 9 was originally used for encoding videos for the PSP, but people have begun using it for the Play-Yan Micro as well. The 3GP Converter program needs a certain file for encoding in the proper resolution and bitrate for the Play-Yan Micro, but once you have it, it’s a simple matter of drag and drop. The only thing you have to watch out for is stretching and squashing of your videos; most of the time, the little stretching it might do isn’t very noticeable, but the calculations required to add padding (black bars) can get a little tricky.

If you can’t figure out the video conversion aspect of the Play-Yan Micro, it still works almost perfectly as an MP3 player, justifying the cost. A few missing features like support for playlists and possibly more audio formats (OGG, SHN, FLAC, etc.) would have added more incentive to buy it, so it’s clearly not the definitive music player on the market. However, these could be added features with future firmware updates if enough people request it…or maybe they’ll be included if/when they release it in the US. That said, if you have a Game Boy Micro, an SD card or two sitting around (they are cheap otherwise), and no portable MP3 player, the Play-Yan Micro is a grand option to seriously consider.

*Note: ASF video files are, in fact, MPEG-4. However, the quality of ASF is far less than MPEG-4 videos of today. Thus, the update supports a much better (and up-to-date) form of MPEG-4, carrying the file extension of .mp4. So while the differences and similarities are known, this article will refer to the older video format as ASF and the new as MPEG-4.

Contributed by: MobileMilitia