Qual è il design della tua cartuccia di gioco Nintendo preferita?

We love video games in whatever form they’re delivered. Dateci un disco, una chiavetta o un download digitale – if the game’s a good’un, we’ll be happy whatever the format.

Tuttavia, around these parts, we’re undeniably partial to the heft and clunk of a good old cartridge. Perhaps it’s because we’re gamers of, ahem, a certain vintage who grew up slotting lumps of plastic into larger lumps of plastic, but there’s just something about locking software into your console in this fashion that’s more satisfying than throwing a disc in a tray.

With Nintendo’s long history of distributing ROMs on carts and physical media’s continued relevance despite the inevitable slide to digital, we’ve been thinking recently about our favourite Nintendo cartridge designs and thought it would be worth posing the question: Which of Nintendo’s many different cartridges is your personal favourite?

If this were a disc-based brawl, Wii would be watching from the sidelines while GameCube’s cute little mini discs (non MiniDiscs, naturalmente, which are also lovely) and Wii U’s curvy-edged beauties would be duking it out.

But it’s not — this is cart combat. So before we turn it over to you for the deadliest of all deciders (a reader poll on’t internet), let’s take a look back at the many and various cart-y contenders, in roughly chronological order, looking to take the trophy. We’ve added some of our own thoughts as to their pros and cons. We’ve also excluded exotic variants and stuck to the standard-issue carts for each platform that supported them, including regional variants where they exist.

We begin in Japan with…

The Famicom Cart

The NES Cart

The Game Boy Cart

The Super Famicom Cart

The Super NES Cart

The Virtual Boy Cart

Il Nintendo 64 Carrello

The Game Boy Color Cart

The Pokémon Mini Cart

The Game Boy Advance Cart

The Nintendo DS Cart

The Nintendo 3DS Cart

The Nintendo Switch Cart

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Così, there we are. Take to the poll below to pick the best cartridge Nintendo ever made.

Was it a tough decision? Which ones did you struggle to pick between? Are you more of a disc lover? Sure, the way the Wii sucked in its media with that sultry blue light was neat, but better than a cart? Non, no, no.

Feel free to head down to the comments below and let us know how the 64DD (it’s a disc!) was robbed.