Watched this the other day. Super cool stuff. makes me wish I could code.
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I had a semi-broken Game Boy Color. So did up a Funny Playing GBC Laminated IPS Kit, with the pre-sized shell in this nice red. And grabbed a matching case (3DS cases for $4 on playasia, nice) and made a sock for it too (all my handhelds are in a sock in a case).
The results are as good as the hype. I use the pixel grid display option and it looks pretty much perfect. Really easy mod and great value too.
The only downside is… really nice screen, but I’m finding after revisiting it that Game Boy Color kind of sucks.
There’s some gems I’m finding are still great, Crazy Bikers (Motocross Maniacs 2) is still superb. Because it is designed well around the hardware.
But as a hardware spec it’s just not great. I remember back in the day I thought it was early SNES-ish, probably due to the rich colours available. But now can see it’s clearly more NES/Master System-ish, just with SNES level colour depth.
But since it’s a post-SNES system, devs tried to do SNES kind of things with it. So it feels a lot like those 16-bit to 8-bit ports from the early 90s, eg FC Genjin.
Anyway the screen is great though, will definitely get a GBA one next.
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There are a few gems on it I really liked which make it feel solid. Here’s my list of games that are my favs, as well as ones I’ve heard are cool that I plan to check out someday:
all three Zeldas
Mario Golf
Pokemon mainline games
Pokemon Trading Card Game
Wario Land 2 & 3
Dragon Warrior 1, 2, 3,
Dragon Warrior Monsters 1 and 2
Toki Tori
Mr. Driller
the Game and Watch Gallery games
Pokemon Pinball
Metal Gear Solid
Legend of the River King
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The 16-bit demake feel is something I appreciate. Sometimes it’s literal demakes like with Dragon Warrior 3 for GBC.
Beyond that it’s not really comparable to anything else, really a cool anachronism to have an 8 bit console so late. The color depth is very high as you mentioned but also pixel artistry was so refined by that point, game cart sizes were huge (up to 64 mbit), a lot of different ideas for games and especially RPGs were being tried out on a very low risk platform. And it was gone in such a short time, the console was replaced within 2 years!
Yeah I just think the platform as a whole is kinda meh. Metal Gear smartly uses the limitations, but the limitations themselves are pretty… limiting. Almost not a single game would not work just as well in black and white really, and the low colour sprites (like 3 colours per sprite) look extremely outdated for the time. Eg Wario Land 3 doesn’t look much more advanced than Wario Land 2, despite the latter being a colourised port.
The entire platform is basically just colourised Game Boy. Nothing was designed from first principles to be a smart design that limited bottlenecks etc. Which makes sense given it was a rush job stopgap to capitalise on the Pokemon explosion.
The Zelda games are pretty ugly in many ways, great article here on why:
I still like LA DX (as it’s still a decent version of one of the best games ever made), but the Oracles… probably won’t play through those ever again unless there’s a remake.
It was replaced quickly but was supported quite a bit longer. ~500 exclusive games! (doesn’t even include the cross-gen black carts.) Far more than all N64 games total!
There’s some super weird stuff out there because of this. I just tried the Tony Hawk GBC games… Good effort I’d have to say, but not really worth time now. You can just imagine the poor interns who had to work on GBC versions!
Bigger cart size makes sense, huge issue with 80s games is cart size. I’m not seeing too much genius pixel work though, certainly worse overall than original GB or Famicom/NES. 3 colour sprites can only go so far. People go on about Shantae, but it very much looks like a Master System game just with bigger cart size so there can be more animations and variety etc.
Actually I think this is what it’s about - it seems to be a very western dominated platform. Which makes sense as Japan moved on more quickly to GBA.
Game Boy Color is the only system that I haven’t returned to - and I grew up with one! I instead ended up getting a Game Boy Pocket a few years ago and uncovered a bunch of GB gems that I didn’t have back in the late 90s, or on 3DS Virtual Console.
But even revisiting stuff like Link’s Awakening in its original form made me appreciate the original non-colour graphics more than what I was used to with the colourised version that I played on both GBC and 3DS. As @D.Lo pointed out, the colourised ports could look quite haphazard, and GBC-only titles tended to not be much of a step above it.
Maybe it has something to do with the limited pastel colour palettes, more often than not GBC and NGPC titles aren’t aesthetically pleasing compared with Game Boy (and even Virtual Boy) titles, they often look like they have less detail due to the super-sharp displays as well.
I also get the impression that priorities had shifted at major publishers, who were putting less talented teams on Game Boy Color titles relative to what the original Game Boy received. That might explain why many third party titles felt like SNES demakes rather than games built from the ground up for the system, since the Game Boy itself existed on the market for years after SNES had launched, too.
But there were some excellent games as @Peltz listed, though unlike Game Boy most of the games I remember fondly seem to be first and second party titles from Nintendo, Alphadream, HAL Laboratory, Camelot, Hudson Soft, and whoever developed Hamtaro. Intelligent Systems were barely involved with Game Boy, neither were Nintendo R&D1 outside of Wario Land 3 and the ports.
All the best and most relevant arcade ports had already come to Game Boy as well by the time Game Boy Color hit the market.
Lastly, couldn’t agree more about the Oracles games being ugly titles! While I played through Seasons when I was a kid, and it’s a perfectly serviceable game with fun dungeons, there are many elements to the game’s presentation and cringeworthy amount of bloat that really cheapen the feel of the adventure. The witless references to the N64 games in particular have not aged well.
At the time I was excited to see N64 era characters in the games. But yeah they’re just ‘there’ for little reason in most cases.
They just seem like budget/B games. Which kind of sucks because what was magical about Link’s Awakening was it was an A-team game on the Game Boy. Actually better than Zelda 3 (IMO) working perfectly within the limitations.
Yeah, that’s the impression I got when playing through a chunk of the Game Boy games, Nintendo had their best internal talent putting out games for it, and so did many third parties. Even the arcade ports were often highly accomplished, be it BurgerTime, QIX, Snow Bros or Tetris Plus, the titles put out by Data East, Jaleco etc. etc. were rarely disappointing.
And sometimes Game Boy received its own specific version of these games, Avenging Spirit is fantastic in that regard.
I’ve been looking at picking up more quirky Game Boy games lately and stumbled across a rather cool looking platformer from jaleco: Banishing Racer.
Does anyone have any particular thoughts on this one, is it good?
Also tempted by the Game Boy version of Kid Dracula, which honestly looks better than the Famicom game. Snow Bros Jr also looks very impressive.
Just a shame a lot of games, like Lucle and Peetan, are prohibitively expensive now…
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Finally got round to playing Motorcross Maniacs 1, which I bought three years ago on cart. Really fun game with great use of physics and a wonderful feeling of momentum when you time your nitrous boosts well and land on some crazy bit of the course hanging in mid air.
@D.Lo Ordered the second game, cheers for the recommendation. How was Motorcross Maniacs Advance?
Yeah Motocross Maniacs is outstanding.
Back in the day it was seen as ‘2D Excitebike’ but it’s much more platformery. And a great fun challenge. The second really brings it to the next level, well done use of the GBC and has fantastic music. Probably my all round #1 GBC game honestly? Certainly the one I had the best fun with back then.
Advance is completely different and nowhere near as good unfortunately. The bikes are too big and the feel is all wrong.
Awesome, can’t wait to play the sequel now!
Shame about Advance, looking at MobyGames and it was done by a different (presumably new) team at Konami based in Hawaii. Wonder if team sizes getting bigger on PS2-era consoles was shifting some talent away from portable game development.
Re: GBC chat - there was one very important series which began life on GBC: Pawapoke (Powerful Pro Kun Pocket), the first two games got remakes on Switch late last year:
I was lucky enough to get a Group A Analogue Pocket, and it arrived today.
The screen is gorgeous and the unit feels great in the hands. But I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed with the implementation of the display filters.
Game Boy Pocket has a nice pixel grid. But it’s devoid of depth - the filled-in elements don’t hover above the canvas-like background, making games look sharper and more pixelated than they do on actual hardware. A waste of the Pocket’s 1600 x 1440 display, if you ask me. However the frame blending option does simulate motion blur quite well.
As for Game Boy Advance, initial impressions were good, perhaps because it’s been almost 18 years since I last used an actual AGB-001 or AGS-001 display. I was impressed by how good certain games like Tales of Phantasia looked using the AGB-001 display mode, a big improvement to what I remember on Game Boy Micro and DS Lite.
Here’s the game on Analogue Pocket’s AGB-001 mode compared to its AGS-101 mode:
Pretty good, right?
But it wasn’t until I started loading up older games, games I played to death on AGS-001 back in the day, where I started to notice things looking plain wrong.
Take Wario Land 4. It’s almost common knowledge among Game Boy display enthusiasts that Wario Land 4’s title screen shows an incorrect yellow hue on later handhelds, yet Pocket’s AGB-001 mode does exactly that:
It’s not just oranges going yellow either, the Pocket’s original AGB-001 mode incorrectly crushes all blue hues:
WarioWare Inc:
Konami Krazy Racers:
Golden Sun: Lost Age (notice how the oranges are yellow and the blues are navy)
Pawapoke - notice how the blues are so crushed that you can’t make out the tick marks on the status bars at the top of the screen
Once you notice the crushed blues and overly yellow oranges you can’t unnotice them…it affects some game’s more than others but it’s a blight on playing GBA games on the system. I think what the AGB-001 mode is doing is taking the AGS-101 colour profile and desaturating it (indeed it seems identical to using that AGS profile and turning desaturation to 5), which is why the oranges are still yellow, and the blues get crushed.
The AGS-101 mode is just comically oversaturated with reds, greens and blues that pop off the screen in an extremely unnatural way, so there’s not much choice between these two extremes.
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Great writeup. Really unfortunate to see yet not surprising. It’s really hard to achieve the same balance as the original screens. They were unique and, I assume, highly off-spec by today’s standards.
This is disappointing to learn, I didn’t come across anyone else mentioning the incorrect colour space, kind of surprised none of the retro reviewers mentioned it, I think only the GBA scrolling issue came up. Hopefully, it can be updated, and it would be nice if they add the drop shadow to help mimic the DMG/Pocket LCD too as the mister does.
Damn, good breakdown.
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Thanks folks!
I’ll look into Game Boy Color later this week. Only briefly tried it yesterday with two games and it looked good.
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Most people, even the great folks at digital foundry, may have just forgotten what the color space of GBA hardware was like, considering that the AGS-101 was official hardware that had that incorrect color space.
AGS-001 with its front lit screen was the most natural I’ve seen. But I actually never used the GB Micro.
I trust the impressions of @harborline_765 before any publication.
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Seeing how many people are modding IPS screens with no colour correction into GBAs I’m not surprised people don’t care about correct color space, doesn’t help how varied it is amongst GBA playing hardware too. I think the actual surprise is how Analogue mentions “Pro level accuracy” in its marketing and nobody bothered to check.
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