Games That Push The Limits of the Game Boy Color
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- Опубліковано 13 чер 2024
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• 5 graphically impressi...
The Nintendo Game Boy Color, it's a Game Boy and it's got colour. I can't decide how to spell the word colour here. Should I go with the British spelling with the 'u' or do I need to acknowledge that Nintendo didn't ever spell it that way. I don't suppose it matters.
Anyway, did any games really push it to the limit? Were there any that were as ambitious as games on other 8-bit systems, or was it all just by the numbers stuff we've seen before? Let's find out!
There's got to be more than Mario and Zelda.
00:00 Intro
01:52 Shantae
04:27 Alone in the Dark
06:55 The Fish Files
10:21 3D Pool
12:32 Toy Story Racer
14:10 Cannon Fodder
14:48 Championship Motocross 2001
15:05 F1 Championship 2000
15:46 Tyrannosaurus Tex
22:01 Ending and Patreon Thanks - Ігри
Dragon's lair GBC will always be one of my goto's to show it pushed limits
Was expecting it on this list. I only bought that game specifically because it was an amazing port. I didn't even like Dragon Lair.
How often do you get to do that?
The GBC Metal Gear Solid and Perfect Dark games are also pretty good and push the GBC to its limits.
Ah yes the original souls game lmfao. Dragons lair destroyed many hours of my childhood and it was well worth it
There's an episode of the Retronauts podcast where Jeremy Parish interviews Matt Bozon (the co-creator of Shantae), where he mentions that they went through quite a bit of effort to cram all of the sprites that comprise the Shantae character together and still have enough left over to avoid flicker.
Shantae is doing a whole lot of dynamic tile updating for the sprites. It's copying the sprites from the ROM into main memory, then using the GBC's DMA feature to get it into VRAM. That might not sound like much, but updating a large number of tiles per frame is still something significant.
Also, check out Wacky Races, it tries to pull off a Mario Kart experience on the GBC. The track has a Mode-7 looking texture rendered with perspective that animates fluidly, plus lots of gradients done by changing the palette every scanline. You can still see that it is a standard scanline scrolling racer game though.
The same pseudo troad texture trick was also used in the other VD Dev GBC racing games like Supercross Freestyle and Le Mans.
VD Dev were the masters of handheld 3D at the time and did great things on the GBA and DS as well.
There's several GBC games that use said technique, Cruis'n Exotica is very visually interesting example
V-Rally doesn’t get enough appreciation. These guys implemented full sprite scaling into the scenery. Not sure if it’s software made sprite scaling like Road Rash on the Mega Drive or they just sprite swapped 16 sprites into each asset, but it’s super smooth. They did for both regular and color game boys.
@@sloppynyuszi yeah it's a great port, the best pure racing game on the system. Unfortunately the cart is password save only I think whereas LeMans has a battery save.
@@sloppynyuszi reminds me how there's a fairly good Road Rash port on GBC, even the RR2 theme is beautifully translated.
I'm impressed by the Game Boy's lifespan most of all. Major titles saw release over 10 years after the Game Boy's launch. Amazing.
I had a blast with mine…especially since I had a genesis as a kid, which I didn’t mind. And I greatly appreciated killer instinct/DK/Zelda etc…
really sucked how we did not get a proper handheld upgrade till 01, but i did like the pokemon games so whatever i guess.
Makes me think the original GB successor that they planned (which was not GBA) was stopped not only because of the success of Game Boy Pocket but also the Pokemon games breathing more life into the system.
True, but most of the titles listed here (if not all) were GBC-exclusive, and they needed to be bc of the GBC's more powerful hardware.
I don't think the pool table is pre-rendered. Look at how the lower-left part of the table is jittering at 11:49. That looks like a non-floating point math error to me, and there's no reason for that if everything is pre-baked. I'd guess you could do this with simple vector draws and fills.
Fixed-point
@@HalianTheProtogen in time
Yeah it looks like simple vector fills to me to create a 3D table.
You're right, the Commodore 64 also had a 3D pool game, so I'm sure it's not something the Game boy colour would struggle too much with.
Are you sure that isn't screen tearing?
Wow, I really love how impressionistic-looking the backgrounds are in Alone in the Dark. I had no idea they did anything like that on this system.
All the combat was top down shooter style like Perfect Dark GBC.
I am getting these weird early Amiga vibes from it (and the sample-based sound). *buys on ebay*
I think it looked even better on real hardware, since the GBC screen was darker than the somewhat too bright emulator footage. Its small size also hides some of the imperfections. My vote would be on Alone in the Dark as the most graphically impressive GBC game. :)
Reminds me of N-Gage Splinter Cell
I would've loved to see Resident Evil on GBC show that much detail for its backgrounds. Well, if it hadn't been cancelled.
Literally watched the devs of Shantae watching a speedrun of the game and discussing how it was programmed the other day. This video was perfectly timed lol
Please share the link here. Would really appreciate it! Thanks!
@@choco_easty Here you go!
ua-cam.com/video/LiUHs5kjF_I/v-deo.html
@@hunterst.arnold6646 much appreciated! Thanks!
I think the GBC Dragon's Lair was pretty crazy.
There's also the GBC port of Street Fighter Alpha.
Street Foghter Alpha is more of an exercise of sticking to what the system can do rather than pushing anything. The characters were barely above stick figures, and the backgrounds were kinda basic. It’s a very good game and definitely the most playable 8bit fighting game, but I don’t think it’s pushing technical limits.
Dragon’s Lair though… I agree. Even if it’s just a lot of video, they did get a lot of footage into what I think was a 32mbit (4 mb) cartridge.
What was interesting abouth the GB color was that you had dedicated games, and hybrid backwards compatible games.
Limit Pushing GBC games I can think of not mentioned:
Wendy Every Witch Way
Star Ocean: Blue Sphere
Wario Land 3
Dragon's Lair
Donkey Kong Country
Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble
Perfect Dark
Mario Tennis
Lufia: The Legend Returns
The Harry Potter RPGs (Yes really)
Street Fighter Alpha
damn, i had no idea they put a star ocean game on this thing
The Harry Potter RPGs on game boy colour are probably the best harry potter games it actually feels like the devs actually cared Wario Land 3 did not seem that impressive but it does have a lot of content for a 8 bit game nintendo has always been good at putting a lot of content on 8 bit systems.
Perfect Dark, what? I gotta check this out.
Yes in fact both Blue Sphere and Tales of the World Nirikiri dungeon in Japan pushed the limits of the GBC that BOTH games HAD to be 100% TURNED based.
I was literally thinking of Star Ocean: Blue Sphere also, that was a very HUGE game too compared to others that thye had to order special cartridges for it to work.
"Takes a lot of inspiration from Resident Evil with characters wandering around in pre-rendered 3d-ish environments"
You do realize that already the first Alone in the Dark game from 1992 had 3D polygonal characters moving around pre-rendered 3D environments? :)
(I mean, those guys behind Resident Evil much have got the idea from somewhere, right?)
calling RE an originator of the genre is a stretch, popularizing it maybe but not an originator.
Incidentally, this made me think of the canceled GBC Resident Evil port which eventually leaked on the internet. It seemed pretty similar to that GBC AitD...
Resident evil was inspired by clock tower though, not alone in the dark. In fact, I’m pretty sure alone in the dark was made by some of the team members that made resident evil
@@wolfetteplays8894 there's an interview of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil's main Game Designer) in Le Monde (October 14 2014, the article is in french), where Mikami says "Without it (Alone In The Dark), Resident Evil would probably have become a FPS". Frédérick Raynal, creator of Alone In The Dark, told Gameblog (a french video games website) in 2015 that there was a deal between Infogrames and Capcom to not talk about Alone In The Dark influencing the design of Resident Evil.
@@grenadium It's so obvious that Resident Evil was heavily influenced by the first Alone in the Dark. Both are survival horror games with fixed camera angles. You could perhaps even call Resident Evil a ripoff, although the realistic graphics were a huge improvement.
(Similarly, there are still people, including the developer, who absurdly deny that Castlevania SotN was obviously heavily influenced by Super Metroid. Even the map screen looks like straight out of Metroid.)
To come back to the GBC though, the Alone in the Dark port looked much more impressive than the unreleased Resident Evil port. The latter didn't use the High Color mode apparently, which made it look much more conventionally GBC like. A bit cartoony like the Dragon's Lair port. Though this cartoony, hand-drawn (or hand-retouched) style has the advantage of making things in the background easier to distinguish and clearer to recognize. In Alone in the Dark you often saw just some sort of pixel goo.
Street Fighter Alpha would’ve been a good choice- while it didn’t pull any 3D trickery or use the hi-color mode, it still packed smooth animations and responsive controls far above what any handheld(that wasn’t the Neo Geo Pocket Color) attempt at a fighting game had done to that point.
True but Neo Geo Pocket Color did it better and it was the same generation.
@@wizzgamerDude, he said it himself that NGPC was better at fighting games. It was the fighting games handheld after all, with dedicated hardware in its controls with the micro-switch joystick. Not even GBA had better fighting games than the NGPC, we would have to wait the PSP for another handheld with lots of great fighting games.
My vote for a GBC limit pusher is vertical shooter Project S-11. While the graphics are occasionally quite impressive, it's the music that really stands out: the composers, Jonne Valtonen (Purple Motion, one of the better known Amiga demoscene composers) and Aleksi Eeben use every little trick they've can to produce some genuinely stunning music with the hardware, which still sounds amazing even on a tinny little speaker. With a pair of headphones on it genuinely strikes you as ridiculous that the Gameboy Color of all things is producing this sound: there's even a decent effort to make everything sound good in stereo. The music is so good you end up playing through level after level just to hear more of it.
14:21 these guys apparently wrote a custom software encoder to stream pcm audio but the code is bugged, causing the distortion. i don't think anyone has managed to fix the bug but a while ago someone extracted the actual audio files from the rom and they're much clearer. still super impressive what they managed to squeeze into the cartridge, but disappointing that such a cool feature was incorrectly implemented
That guy would be me. Streaming PCM audio on the Gameboy is no big feat in itself. The issue in this case is the timing involved in both streaming all the video data, and audio. The audio data is streamed in chunks of 32 samples, and some of those chunks are shifted backward and forward in time to make time for the video updates. I tried briefly to fix the issue but didn't manage to. I'm sure it's possible with more work though. I might revisit it.
I heard that apparently it sounds normal on a real Game Boy Color, but if you try to emulate it or play it on a Game Boy Advance, than the distortion problem will kick in.
Edit: Did some quick research and no, real GBC won't fix the problem, what a shame.
The "Alone In The Dark" series came out before "Resident Evil". I remember playing "Alone In The Dark 2" for DOS when I was a teen.
It did your right, but this version of alone in the Dark definitely seems to have taken some inspiration from Resident Evil. This game in the Alone in the Dark series came out after the first Resident Evil games and seems to be influenced by that. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.
Donkeykong country did blew my mind back in the day because the small non-backloghted blurry screen helped to smooth up colors,thus making it look more realistic looking,on an emulator those colors do look overbrighted and somewhat correlated.
many emulators support interpolation filters to make the image look closer to the real thing, but since my first handheld was a ds lite i do find it hard to play anything with that gameboy frame blur
@@tsvtsvtsv The GBC is less blurry than a DS Lite, unless the timing pot is completely out of whack. It does look sort of washed out though, along with visible pixel borders which gives it a rather specific look.
Decent collection of limit-pushers here, cheers!
I remember Micro Machines V3 being impressive on my GBC - they retained the 3D perspective of some of the props, like coffee cups and salt shakers on the breakfast table. Probably just layers of sprites shifting around the place, but looked nice to me.
I think they are basic polygons, no? It sure looks it.
I think Street Fighter Alpha should be here, it's a shockingly good port of the CPS2 arcade game.
Side note: the first GBC exclusive game, is Top Gear Pocket.
18:40
In computer graphics you rarely need to pull the square root.
You just square the value you're expecting.
In that regard for calculating the distance to a wall,
you don't really use any trigonometric function.
If you want to know if you're 9 units away,
you do (dx)²+(dy)² and compare it to 81, not 9.
By doing this, you can avoid having to costly calculate the square root.
If 9 is not a constant, you will have to square it, but you can still square much faster with some clever math tricks, than calculating the square root.
Thanks for that. I've got to admit my understanding of 3D stuff is dim.
Harry potter and the chamber of secrets should also be on this list.
I'd also add Spawn to this list for the impressive amount of shockingly clear (for the system) digitized speech for the game's cutscenes.
1:12 reminded me of playing Link's Awakening on my Texas Instruments graphing calculator in high school. Now I'm 28 there's no need since I have an Android phone and a GBC emulator on it that I downloaded from Google Play.
doom on the TI was always fun
How'd you get Links Awakening on a TI calculator?
I was expecting to see Warlocked and Dragon's Lair. Warlocked being an honest-to-God (only slightly streamlined) fantasy RTS in the vein of Warcraft or War Wind, so it's not got aesthetic "wow" but it is moving a lot of sprites onscreen and probably juggling a ton of AI routines and subroutines; as I recall, the pathfinding for everyone wasn't bad at all. Plus it was made by BITS studio, so being British, it had awesome music from some ex-Amiga demoscene talent, I'm sure. Very impressive stuff. And then Dragon's Lair,; I mean, if Tiertex's racing games (and Cannon Fodder) were on here for video compression, than Dragon's Lair GBC probably should be.
Those are the only suggestions I could think of off the top of my head. The choices here were fantastic though; T-Tex was obvious but no less impressive, Alone in the Dark is very ambitious, and Fish Files it probably the best use of the the GBC's high color mode (I was only familiar with games like Tomb Raider and Bionic Command Elite Forces using it for their static cutscenes). You may have had to look hard for these, but they were fun to dive into!
I was looking for a mention of Warlocked in the comments before I took the time to write a post about it myself, thanks for handling it first Barry. 😊 Also very fun to play, or at least my ~13 year old self thought so :)
Warlocked also has some amazing music. Still sounds great to this day.
I'm glad some one else remembered warlocked people don't believe me when I say the gbc had one of my favorite rts. Seen a copy at my local game store selling for 60 with no box made me smile.
The legend of Zelda Oracle of ages and Oracle of seasons had "Forwards" compatibility with the Gameboy advance.
a special shop was available in the main hub town in each game, where if the gameboy colour game was inserted into a gameboy advance, could unlock a shop that sold high value items. none of these items are needed to beat the game, but in each game there was an exclusive collectors ring you could get appraised. the rings themselves did absolutely nothing, and are just for 100% completionists who want to collect every ring in the game/s.
some people tried to claim that getting the GBA exclusive content on the 3ds version is cheating though. screw those people.
YES! Finally someone covers Alone in the Dark! Hugely overlooked title whenever it comes to limit pushing GBC games.
I think Toki Tori should have made the list, as it’s graphics are very advanced for the system, with some thinking it was a GBA game upon release. No 3D model type things, but good.
For sure it has exceptionally good graphics for GBC, but it's nowhere near looking like a GBA game. Anyone who thinks it looks THAT good needs to see an optometrist.
I worked with the guy that programmed The Fish Files (on a later game, on Nintendo DS), very talented programmer. He also made a 3D tech demo on the GBA with more than a thousand texture mapped triangles rendered at a solid 30 fps.
The mere fact that the Game Boy Color was capable of converting full-screen prerendered video to background tiles in real time is still impressive enough on its own. I don't recall any Genesis or Super Nintendo games that did that, for example, even with the possibility of enhancement chips.
Also, I knew that _Cannon Fodder_ cutscene was familiar; as I suspected, it was because Vinesauce played a bit of it a while back. What I hadn't expected to learn was that it had two sequels, the newer of which was recent enough to make an appearance on TotalBiscuit's channel.
Accele Brid seems to have some pre-rendered backgrounds, but it's not exactly impressive or especially good.
Not sure if the Sonic 3D Blast intro counts? ua-cam.com/video/IehwV2K60r8/v-deo.html
Kyle Pete's No Fear Racing on the snes comes to my mind along with Winter Gold FX (an Fx chip game).
Wacky Races does well, if I recall. Maybe not so technically impressive as, say, something for the SNES, but it does some convincing stuff.
Shantae, Pokemon Crystal(US and EU), Hamtaro Ham Hams Unite, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone and Chamber of Secrets are the examples of GBC games that occurred during the end of its lifespan, actually released when the GBA was released in NA.
I worked on a similar raycasting project and I can attest that the LUTs (lookup tables) are likely using a precomputed COS function. Our implementation had 10th of a degree precision but this likely wouldn't be needed for Gameboy. With a table for COS you can simply shift it for sine if needed.
You were right on the money with your guess
The Gameboy Color is still my favorite system graphics-wise. Love the animations
Some of the games have an... interesting style. Like MK4 or Bionic Commando that just said "screw outlines"
If you featured Tyrannosaurus Tex, it's a shame you didn't also mention the Resident Evil port that similarly didn't get released. It was similar to Alone in the Dark in a lot of ways, and though it wasn't as graphically impressive, it was still a massive undertaking to port a PlayStation game to an 8-bit handheld without completely redoing the gameplay.
Perfect Dark impressed me quite a bit, it used a mix of 2d and 3d gameplay and even some 8bit voice sounds that were surprisingly good. Add in the badass rumble feature with a separate AAA battery, I think it pushed the GBCs limits a good bit
I remember that game too. Big ol’ hulking cart … to this day though I’m not sure if my memory wasn’t just being flavoured by expectations of something more from such a unique game pak lol.
T. Tex was an interesting idea, and hugely impressive. But I can't imagine it being really fun to play for very long. I think somebody could have done an interesting slow/medium paced 3D exploration / adventure game that wouldn't have so much from the really poor controls of a gameboy. Likewise, that 3D pool gimmick could have been a really cool element/minigame in some bigger game with a bit more substance.
I played it, the controls are quite smooth.
You mentioned the so called millenium bug.
I think I was the only person at home who didn't fall for that silliness.
I altered the time and date on my PC, the vcr and tv and nothing happened lol
The abandoned port of resident evil looked interesting. There are a few videos floating about on UA-cam. But alone in the dark is a fantastic effort.
There's a unreleased/prototype San Francisco Rush game that got found a while ago.
It features a fully 3d racetrack you could freely move around in. In only 4 colors, but it still is very impressive.
I never thought of comparing the game gear and the gameboy colour - you've blown my mind! perhaps the game gear (and the lynx) deserve a bit more credit - or Nintendo less ;)
It all came down to batteries. The gameboy and hence gameboy color used 2 AA batteries and lasted hours. Game gear took 6 I think or atleast 4 AA batteries and lasted less per set of batteries. So many chose Nintendo purely due to cost. Both the cheaper machine and less to operate.
So overall people did not choose based on games or graphics but cost and battery life
@@philiplubduck6107 the original Gameboy used 4 double A's, but it lasted 30 hours vs the gamegear's 6ish (iirc). The gameboy color was able maintain the battery life while halving the battery count in the pocket and color primarily because of the introduction of alkaline batteries to the market. They offered a dramatically increased energy density.
@@JohnSmith-sk7cg thanks for the info, I think the hours of use really shows how much cheaper parents saw the gameboy as. 2 less batteries and 5 times the battery life would mean hundred of dollars saved over the life of the device.
The game gear and lynx where huge almost full size consoles that really matters.
@@belstar1128 - I've held both - No, they were nowhere near full sized consoles. they came out many years before that gameboy color - that really matters too.
I'd have included the impressive Donkey Kong Country port. It was a massive SNES limit pusher and they actually managed to cram it into a GBC cartridge.
Aardvark Software was Nick Pelling aka Orlando Q Pilchard, who did get his start writing games on the BBC Micro - including Frak!, Firetrack and 3D Pool. So this pool game is basically a conversion from that, which was calculating 3D in realtime on an 8-bit processor. Cannon Fodder's helicopter sequences are quite good though, with the chopper landing in a 3D view of the campsite.
“Day of the Tentacle vibe to it.” Some of those screens are clearly the Edison Mansion with a new paint job.
Tarzan GBC has some pretty neat animations, plus an awesome intro that - while not full motion video, it recreates the movie's clips entirely thru spritework.
7:00 this looks like an early PSone game. It's very impressive
There’s actually an RTS on the game boy colour - AND it’s actually decent. It’s called Warlocked: It’s very simple, but has all the basic features you’d expect from a classic RTS. I bought a copy on Ebay from the US and it’s completely charming. Even the music is good.
Stop Skeletons From Fighting did a video on it for anyone interested.
Hamtaro ham hams unite always felt pretty graphically advanced to me
"3D Pocket Pool. Yes the name in this case tells us exactly what this game is" Me: hehe pocket pool
So happy to see Championship Motocross 2001 on here and if it wasn’t I would’ve suggested it since it’s definitely the game I go back to to show off to my friends what the GBC could do.
Velez and Dubail made at least two racing games for the GBC and used a rather unique form of rendering the track surface.
Also, Tarantula Studios' conversions of GTA and GTA 2 were for the most part unabridged as the maps were tile-for-tile recreations of the original PC releases though the gameplay and population density does take a hit.
It is really cool to see GBC games again theses days. They were so colorful. But back then you could not really see them until the GBA SP arrived with a lit screen.
I remember watching a play through of a super impressive "3D" shmup called Katakis 3D on twitch a long time ago, although it looks like that video no longer exists.
The first game on my mind was Network Adventure Bugsite.
I remember it using a lot of colours, possibly rather big maps, and running weirdly slowly for unclear reasons that must have had to do with it trying too hard to be impressive, but I'm not sure what was actually going on there
obsessed with the comparison “like if squarepusher released a musical birthday card”
I think Perfect Dark on GBC was a worthy contender for this, maybe I'm wrong and im thinking with nostalgia but I loved it as a kid and it was still fun to replay as an adult
I replayed it recently, definitely an impressive gbc game, I was expecting to see it in this video
@@lucdubois3927 Its very good, was quite ahead of its time I think, the fact it had actual voice acting, rumble pack and the variety in missions defintely made it stand out over all the games I had on GBC as a kid. I could never complete it though, it was punishingly difficult, 10yo me couldn't hack it haha
Tomb raider and perfect dark both had incredibly fluid animation. I can't recall if they were good to play though 🤣
Tomb Raider had fuid animations partly because it was grid-based like Prince of Persia, not pixel-based like Mario or most other side scrollers. So if you walk left, Lara Croft walks left at least 1 grid (several pixels) and she finishes every grid she entered. This takes a fixed amount of time and allows for predefined animation cycles, e.g. for starting and stopping to walk. Pixel based games like Mario or Shantae can't do that, since they have to react instantly for every pixel of movement. For similar reasons, for grid-based games, there is only a small number of possible jumping arcs, which again allows for predefined animations.
Lara also featured a subtle boob jiggle animation on the GBC, though that had nothing to do with grids. 😄
What about R-Type DX? Yes parallax effects have been done before on the Game Boy family, but one stage in this game has large ships that move in any direction (not just line scrolling) on top of a detailed background. You can tell by the shimmering around the ships' edges that it's using the background, so it's shifting part of the background in arbitrary directions while the rest of it scrolls to the left. Would like to know how that was done.
Nice video! I hope you will do a sequel some day. Here are my suggestions for the sequel:
1. Knockout Kings: interesting 3D boxing games with kind of fake 3D (and voice samples) that wasn't possible on original Game Boy or Game Gear.
2. Mickey's Racing Adventure and/or Mickey's Speedway USA - impressive and quite colorful racing games by Rare for the system.
3. Dragon's Lair - see the previous comments!
4. The New Adams Family - same developer and same sort of (point & click) game as The Fish Files. Maybe not as colorful but still impressive.
5. Street Fighter Alpha - great animations & see previous comments!
6. Blade - based of the movie and developed by HAL Laboratory this game has some great graphics and smooth animations (and is actually fun) but I'm not sure if you'd consider it special enough :)
"Blade - based of the movie and developed by HAL Laboratory"
This has to be the most out of character project for HAL, LMAO!
I think it's always cool to see a game push its console limits! Sometimes the results are really good, like with Shantae, The Fish Files and some other games not mentioned here like the Scooby Doo and Ottifants games, but there are some games that I feel needed to be on other systems instead. I get that Tiertex wanted to do something really special with Toy Story Racer, but if all they could do was repeat certain track sections over and over, it should've been a Game Boy Advance game instead. Can you believe there exist versions of Street Fighter 2 for 8 bit micro computers?
> Alone in the Dark
ZX Spectrum people usually call this effect "multicolor" or "rainbow colors", and C64 people call it (if i'm not mistaken) "FLI"
7:42 Blurriness of the screen? I thought the Game Boy Colour's screen was very sharp, like the original Game Boy's.
It is sharp, also the gbc didn‘t have motion blur like the original GameBoy. Generally the GBCs screen, while not being backlit, was great overall
I have some suggestions for games that pushed the GBC to its limit
Magical Chase (The Airship level is the most impressive thing about it)
Perfect Dark (the most impressive thing about it is the digitized speech)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Mega Man Xtreme 2 (Detailed backgrounds for GBC standards)
Toki Tori (Parallax scrolling, nice waterfall effect. and well animated)
Rhino Rumble
Wacky Racers
Ganbare Goemon: Seikūshi Dynamites Arawaru!! (the production value is quite high for being a Japan only GBC game)
Project S-11
Rayman GBC
Dragon's Lair (game needed a 4 megabytes cartridge)
Stip: unreleased (even though there's no playable build available to the public and only official screenshots remain on the internet, the graphics looked quite detailed, and reminiscent of the SNES and Amiga)
Stip looks nice, a bit like Rayman, probably even better.
I think Ben Jelter's The Machine is worth mentioning here.
It's a recently released indie game for the Gameboy Color that really pushes the envelope in storytelling and world-building department. Glad that I happened to find such a hidden gem!
pocket pool means something totally different lmao 🤣
When you were showing the alone in the dark footage I thought you were showing another version and was going to switch over to the gbc to compare. Didn't realize that was the gbc right away. Super impressive.
I also enjoy being the age (42) that I can say that those graphics are impressive, knowing the evolution that graphics went through in my life.
Wario Land 2 is my most fav. GBC game ever! Good times.
Was really impressed with some of the visuals. Thanks.
Love watching these thank you for your hard work putting these videos together
Most have pointed out some good examples in the comments already and the examples in the video and those like T Tex I completely forgot about. Not sure if Pocket GT counts (the game before the GT Advance series on GBA but on the GBC). There is likely other racing games on the GBC that may be much better than it gameplay or impressive but I haven't checked them out yet.
Shiren The Wanderer GB2 was a full scale roguelike with fantastic graphics on the GBC, it’s impressive and super fun and a shame it never came to the west.
there was a video from modern vintage gamer recently that showed off a quake like game running fairly performant-ly well on the GBA.
I still think skipping mention of V-Rally 99/V-Rally Championship is a miss.
I remember when I got my game boy color in atomic purple. Loved that handheld
For added effect, watch in the UA-cam Miniplayer!
Great video, especially the Tex breakdown. I'm really curious though, was Warlocked and Dragon's Lair ever considered? The first is I think the only RTS for the system, pushes constant audio samples for voice, solid AI for every unit, and quite a lot of sprites on screen as it's effectively an odd modified port of Warcraft 1. The other, it's the laserdisc game dumbed down into a 2bit color style graphics, runs smooth, has all the areas of the original arcade while snipping sequences in life/death a bit short, less audio, and 8 moves removed from the complex Smithy sequence. That pair of games commonly come up in discussions of GBC games batting above their pay grade.
For me, there’s a reason the GB/GBC/GBA remain amazing handhelds to this day:
A number of GB/GBC/GBA games were just watered down (and typically awful) versions of really good console games.
It was rare but nice when they made a decent port… But greatness can’t really be watered down.
They do, however, have an area in which they excel. When a game is developed specifically for a small screen, two buttoned, low power, portable console.
Pokémon is a classic example of this, but there are many games like Zelda, Mario, Tetris, Wario, Metroid etc that were built from the ground up as GB/C or GBA games rather than ports of SNES, NES, PS1 etc games, and these games often stand the test of time and many of them to this day are considered classics.
Newer handheld devices (PSP, Vita, 3DS) are so good at rendering 3D environments, running intense games, utilising a slick control interface etc that many more of their catalogue are ports of console games, and in most cases, their ports work and rarely feel overly watered down (if at all), meaning that it’s much less common to find unique titles built for that hardware (3DS/og DS aside, that seems to strike a perfect balance of both).
I love playing games on the PSP but most of those games had a better version available on the PS2 or PS3. ThT doesn’t detract from the fun, but I do find the contrast interesting.
For most games if you want to emulate them, rarely would you think “I know, I’ll emulate the psp / vita version of that!” But you’ll need a GBC/GBA emulator for many classic and amazing games because no better console version exists or realistically should have existed, Pokémon would never have been as awesome on the SNES and while there were good N64 and GameCube ones, they were the watered down Pokémon games ironically…
It’s also interesting how the GB Metroid game smashed the NES one, though there’s no beating Super Metroid 😛 many games had counterparts but weren’t watered down ports, but fully fledged unique games built for the handheld, which is different to having just made an acceptable handheld version of a full game for cash (as may developers were 100% guilty of doing).
I’m so thankful for being able to experience a lot of these on original hw and the ones that I can’t, on emulators, and I’ll always appreciate the incredible work done to create so many unique classics for GB(C) and GBA!
I look forward to trying these games, I previously only knew about Alone In The Dark, which looks incredible for GBC! I haven’t done a play through yet though.
Surprised not to see Dragon's Lair, that one really blew me away at the time.
A FREACKING TOKIMEKI MEMORIAL ADD A LIL BIT OF VOICE ACTING!!!
Nice man, that Lucasarts style adventure sure looks worthwhile...going to get hold of that rom and play on modded new 2dsXL
In fact most of this list is worthwhile just to check out how crazy they went on this system
The difference is a lot more subtle - Zelda runs with minimal slowdown compared to the GB original and has large scrolling areas like a 16bit game.
Star Ocean has big well-animated sprites for its battle scenes, same with Wario.
I wonder what a GBC metroid would have looked like post-Super Metroid?
Katakis 3D prototype is a limit pusher for gbc as well,shame it was never released.
Tyrannosaurus Tex makes me wonder how well a Wolfenstein port would run
I have a F1 Championship 2000 cartridge, and I appreciate how the tracks feel more real than those "top gear"-like racers, although still not as convincing as a real 3d racer. Kind of a nice middle ground.
Alone in the dark is just a point and click picture with a scaling animation on the character
I don’t think it counts because it was never released in an official capacity, but Capcom had a port of the first Resident Evil in the works for Gameboy Color. It was 90% finished before they canceled it, but eventually someone leaked it online. From the gameplay I’ve seen it was shaping up to be a pretty faithful port of the console version just in 2D. The environments where detailed, the character models didn’t look too bad, it even had fixed camera perspective. It was quite impressive considering the hardware it was on. I think the only problem is that it looped the same song over and over, but otherwise it’s completely playable and I’m pretty sure you can play the game start to end.
Perfect Dark and Metal Gear will always be on my mind for pushing the sheer console like amount of content.
And GTA 1 and 2 for the flawless framerate combining extremely fast driving with absolutely massive open worlds for GBC standards
Not related to this video, but more to the theme - will we see a "games that push psx to its limit"?
Sat and played Q2 the other day and wondered why it hasnt been a video on it yet. It was smooth, decent fps for a PS and even had great multiplayer.
Other suggestions would be Tekken, Soul Reaver, MGS, Wipeout 3, Driver 2, Gran Turismo 2, Ape Escape and Spyro/Crash plattformers. Just of top off my head but im sure there are plenty more.
The next video you will see from me is on this very subject, I'm just editing it now. Good choices on the games! I'll be mentioning most of them. Great minds think alike obviously.
@@Sharopolis Oh man; Im so looking forward to it!!
switch to 144p and Alone in the Dark looks amazing
Gosh what's that song in the very beginning that's great background music it's not in the description
On the topic of _Tyrannosaurus Tex_ , I’ll mention that there’s a homebrew version of _Wolfenstein 3D_ for the GameBoy Colo[u]r: ua-cam.com/video/3j6W-UF_7X0/v-deo.html However, it most-likely can’t be considered a legitimate “limit-pusher”, as it uses a co-processor
I agree, Shantae is one of the best scotformers on the system.
me: watching this video:
come on homebrew homebrew homebrew PLEASE
I only have a few mins left, praying the last segment is on homebrew games that really make the most of the consoles hardware.
2:50 what did she do to make that frog pass out?
I feel like if I had known about this Alone in the Dark GBC game when I was a kid I would have absolutely adored it.
Damn. Look at Shantae getting ahead of the curve with those jiggle physics. No 3d needed, just 10 pixels or so.
Not really on the same subject but I think Shantae can recognize gba to utilize specs from it
0:38 - Only Crystal was necessary that you play it on the GB Color. Gold and Silver could be played and beaten on original 1989 hardware.
Magical Chase really belongs in this list, a very impressive game, lots of parallax and cool effects and things happening at once
Sight-unseen, Game Boy Color Dragon's Lair is my immediate answer.
There was also a BMX game of some sort that was pretty graphically impressive. Wish I could remember what it was called. The two Zelda Oracle games were gorgeous as well.
Great video as always!
There is a Wolfenstein port on the gbc (with additional hardware inside cartridge)
It would be great if you’d review it too)
UA-cam channel Dosgamert may well feature it. He seems to like to record gameplay from ports of Wolfenstein on many different systems. As well as interesting mods of it!