VALLEY WEEKEND : Game Boy Glitches Make Play a Challenge : On the new Defender, the screen blurs and images are jumbled. But the popular Toy Story is fun and nonviolent.

An open letter to Mario and the other kind folks at Nintendo:

I love Game Boy. I love being able to take my games on the road with me and being able to play even at 35,000 feet. But does no one in your fine organization understand its limitations?

As great as it is, Game Boy is an 8-bit rig with a liquid-crystal display that is primitive by today’s standards. So why do your designers insist on trying to make it do things it can’t? I’ve griped before about how games over-designed for Game Boy are impossible to see and play. But you keep doing it.

With the release of the fourth game in the Arcade Classics series, Defender/Joust, I question whether you ever played these on an actual Game Boy. Had you, you would have noticed that they suck.

On Defender, the screens blur to the point of being useless. Landscapes disappear. Aliens come out of nowhere. Even the player’s ship and lasers turn into a jumbled mess. Sure, it works great on Super Game Boy, but on regular old Game Boy--the machine this game is made for--Defender is junk.

Joust is at least playable on Game Boy, apparently quite a coup when you consider that most of the rest of the Arcade Classics just don’t work. These should have been great games, easily used on the relatively basic Game Boy. Instead, they work only on Super Game Boy.

I hope you will consider my plaint and not repeat the mistakes.

Toy Story: At the other end of the video game spectrum is Toy Story by Disney Interactive, a thoroughly enjoyable and beautiful spin-off of the holiday movie of the same name. Using many of the same techniques that were used in the computer-animated feature, game designers were able to make Toy Story look like an interactive cartoon.

Like the movie, the game follows the tense relationship between Woody and Buzz, two toys fighting for attention and devotion. Players assume the role of Woody and move through some environments that match anything on a 32-bit system.

One of the biggest pluses for this game, though, is that it is as nonviolent as a video game comes. And it is about as fun as a video game comes--which goes to show that broken bones and splattering brains aren’t always necessary.

Online Stuff: All the big video game companies now have sites on the Internet. If you’ve got access to the World Wide Web, check out some of these cool spots for tips, hints and previews of games on the way.

Nintendo’s site on the web is at https://www.nintendo.com. Sega’s at https://www.segoa.com. Sony is at https://www.sony.com. Atari’s site is really cool at https://www.atari.com. Keep in mind that some of these sites are pretty chubby with graphics, so make sure your modem can handle it.

Otherwise, you’ll spend more time tapping your fingers than anything else.

Staff writer Aaron Curtiss reviews video games regularly. To comment on a column or to suggest games for review, send letters to The Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth CA 91311. Or send e-mail to Aaron.Curtiss@latimes.com.