The Nintendo Game Boy has turned 35 years old and in todays episode we take a look at some of the most technically advanced Game Boy games on the system that push the hardware to its limits Please enjoy!
Credits/Sources:
• Original Gameboy Varia...
www.gbstudio.dev/
github.com/gbdk-2020
bbbbbr.itch.io/canyon-racer/
Outro Music : Robocop - Jonathan Dunn
Time Stamps:
00:00 - 01:48 - Intro
01:49 - 11:17 - Technically Amazing GB Games (Graphics)
11:18 - 12:39 - Technically Amazing GB Games (Audio)
12:40 - 15:33 - Conclusion/Outro
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#GameBoy
12:19 "Listen... I can talk about the Game Boy for another two hours." Go on...
By all means!
Right? Don't threaten me with a good time, MVG!
"I could talk for another 2 hours about the gameboy" please do I'd love a 2 hour long mvg video about the gameboy
When the creators say this sort of thing.. I'm usually like.. is this a personal challenge?? Because if so, do it?!!
Who doesn't want MVG to take us directly in the heart of a z80 and show the finest games created for GB, with his smooth, cultured voice and spot on wisdom?
I'm up for a 2h anniversary retrospective of the og Gameboy 🙌
I’ll throw my hat into the ring stating that I’d love for MVG talk about the gameboy for two hours as well.
Yeah why not? I could handle eight hours of listening to the Gameboy.
RIP to probably hundreds of AA batteries in my childhood. I’m sure the overall cost of ownership of this thing was higher than most full consoles when batteries were accounted for
We were ruining the environment with all those wasted batteries 😂 I remember putting almost dead batteries in the freezer hoping it got a charge 😂 I was an idiot as a child
You'd be surprised how long those AA batteries would last, considering the original Gameboy doesn't make use of a backlight (for better or for worse) and how low power the Z80 is. Plus, later batteries got much better in terms of capacity. I remember playing a couple hours a day and swapping them every 15 days or so. I've heard that other consoles would drain through batteries much faster due to big bright LCD displays and powerful CPUs, overall the Gameboy was pretty cost effective imo! Edit: you were comparing it with the cost of *full* consoles, aka home consoles. Well in that case yes, the Gameboy was probably not the most cost effective, but that'd be the Gameboy punching a little above its own weight if that was the case 😅
I had Nintendo’s external battery, but it was NiCad instead of modern lithium-ion. Better than batteries but, not by much.
my parents brought me rechargeable batteries. though i dont think they lasted as long. i don't remember it being a problem.
At least it was efficient with them. I got a Virtual Boy in 1995 and it chewed through six AAs in under five hours. I don’t think I even had it a week and my dad took me back to the store to buy the AC adapter.
Whoever tackled drawing polygons with tiles must have been a borderline psychopath.
Yep, Dylan Cuthbert is his name. He has worked on some of the most impressive games in that generation. Star Fox was his brainchild.
If you think about it, it isn't that hard. You logically organize tiles as if those were a traditional framebuffer and write into those tiles. It's just not an efficient way to use what GB has. And to be frank - it shows. While it is interesting (ab)use, it doesn't look as good as games that actually use the hardware the way it was intended.
@@petrkubenaI think the tileset isn't big enough to cover even 70% of the screen
@@niko5008 that's probably why they are using only part of the screen for rendering vectors. rest are static tiles for the background. if you look at those bottom tiles on the right and you start filling them from top to bottom (11 tiles) and then columns from left to tight (16 tiles), you have the image in the viewport.
@@petrkubena okay psycho 😂
I loved developing for the Game Boy. I developed Lemmings 2 GB (and GG + MS) and thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of figuring out ways to overcome the limitations of the tile-based graphics system, display RAM size, and maximum number of sprites on a line. Race Drivin' at anything approaching a playable framerate was an incredible accomplishment by John Mullins.
Links Awakening is truly one of the most beautiful and charming Zelda's ever. Every part of that game oozes with love; it's truly something special when you can feel how much the developers loved making the game just by playing it.
Yep. Just replayed it again after like 25 years. Still an amazing game and made me tear up a bit... Again!
I remember spending so long playing that claw game to buy the bow super early lol
I've completed it 3 times, third time was on Japanese version. There were some difference, the snake boss had false head ehich exploded. The fisherman caught something other than fish. I lent the original version to friend he said it was chall and stuck on bird boss.
Amen. Can only agree.
My brother and I spent countless hours playing LA as kids. The Oracle of Ages and Seasons for GBC were pretty fun too
At 11:20, when that Robocop title music kicked in...wow. Nostalgia hit hard. I've always loved that tune and was surprised no one ever mentions how great it is.
I had never heard it but it sounds so good
Heh, do a search for the title music on YT, there's a lot of love for it 👍 The other tracks were also great.
Ended up being licensed out to a washing machine ad (Ariston) that's been living rent-free in my head for 30 years.
And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on and Ariston! Such a great advert
The C64 version is also very good and that's what I grew up with, but the GB version I remember most as that's what Ariston used and the advert was very creative and on all the time
When I saw the first screenshot of mario on the Gameboy in a magazine, the outline of the pyramid in the background looked like it was a path indicator of Mario's jump and I for some reason my young child brain assumed that the game would somehow show you how your jump would occur. So I guess that's why I became an engineer...
Some of my best childhood memories go back to that green screen brick: - Wario Land 1 - Mega Man V - Six Golden Coins (SML2) - Pokemon Blue - Link's Awakening - Tetris Attack So many great memories ❤
I love how the GB development scene has had a rebirth over the years. I recently bought the special edition of Deadeus and couldn't be happier with it. Super cool to have that scene alive and well.
Free GB Studio software can even allow people with no experience of making video games to develop their own Gameboy games. It's quite amazing really.
Wow, that Metal Masters theme SLAPS
Alberto Gonzalez made some fire tracks on the Game Boy 🤘
Big facts
The Link's Awakening theme and the Pallet Town theme from Pokemon are forever stuck in my head
@@AriesFireTigerCame here to say this. He's the GameBoy soundtrack master imo
Trust me, as someone who knows more or less how the gameboy chip works, it is even crazier than you think, especially because back then they didn’t have the tools we have now.
Thanks for showing GB Studio and GBDK! Happy to also see bbbbbr’s Canyon Racer. His work has bolstered many parts of the GB Homebrew community.
You're timing on this is amazing. After 48yrs the Z80 production is finally being stopped. Wild that the Gameboy and it's cpu heart were so legendary they persist into 2024.
The gameboy is 35, and I will be 30 this year. I never played OG Gameboy back in the day. I've mostly played OG Gameboy games with my Gameboy Advanced since my uncle gave me his old Gameboy games. But I still have a lot of fond memories of the OG games since I only had like 4 or 5 Gameboy Advanced games but like 25 Gameboy Gameboy games. PS: Nice video btw
30 as well here I had a Gameboy color for 1 year then got the GBA near it's release. Missed out on most of the OG Gameboy games. We prefer GBA games but I recommend gameboy color for you, and a cheap DS lite as well that was a bit after our time. GBC GBA and DS are the sweet spot
Iirc most of the good Gameboy games got colorized for the super Gameboy so u can enjoy them on Gameboy color
My first Gameboy was a dandelion yellow gbc, but I'm only a few months younger than the original
The Sharp SM83 CPU was _not_ purely a Z80-based CPU. It borrows aspects from both the Z80 _and_ 8086 architectures. This hybrid design aimed to bridge the gap between 8-bit and 16-bit architectures, offering familiarity for Z80 programmers while introducing capabilities for more demanding applications. As you said, the SM83 relies on an instruction set based on the Z80. This compatibility allowed existing Z80 software to run on the SM83 without modification, however, the SM83 also implements a register set similar to the 8086. This design choice enabled the SM83 to handle 16-bit data more efficiently compared to pure 8-bit architectures. It offers a blend of addressing modes drawn from both the Z80 and 8086 architectures. This provided programmers with more flexibility when writing code for the SM83.
Which is found in many TI graphing calculators.
I think the aspects that you say are "borrowed" from the 8086 were things the Z80 supported. The SM83 was more a middle ground between the 8080 and the more capable Z80 since it supported most of the 8080's instructions and some of the Z80's.
@@soli-ethd yep, and some homebrewers back in the days even felt for that. I remember the story of the dude who wrote a Yars Revenge homebrew port and he tested in against an emulator. He was devastated when his game didn't run on real hardware.
It's an enhanced 8080 but uses Z80 bit-twiddling instructions and Z80 assembly syntax probably because Intel assembly syntax is fairly ugly and unintuitive to people used to assembly language on other CPUs and the fact that the Z80 itself is also an enhanced 8080 and was widely used in early classic arcade boards. The SM83 lacks most of the Z80 extensions to the 8080 and some which it did borrow it put in different opcodes to the Z80. It even ditched some features both the 8080 and Z80 had since they were general computing devices where the SM83 was designed specifically for games. SM83 doesn't have the Z80 index registers or the alternate register set or the DD/ED/FD-prefixed instructions. For games programming, the bit-twiddling instructions are the most useful that the 8080 lacked and lots of the extra Z80 instructions were handy but too slow for use in games.
Graduated high school in ‘89. Started a full time job that summer. My first game system I purchased with my own money was Game Boy… then a Genesis, a TG-16, and a Lynx. A lot of great gaming came out pretty fast in 1989.
Nice ☺️ All important machines in the grand history. I've still yet to play a Lynx game!
I got a original DMG with Tetris on my birthday, also brought a mega drive for myself and brought a N64 with my own money back then, good times 😊
The Game Boy was my first buy too. I didn't have a job, but I sold candy at school.
Alberto Gonzalez was a f'ing wizard on the Game Boy. His tracks are sooooo good 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
11:56 Alberto Jose Gonzalez's OSTs are freaking beautiful.
11:20 aww man the sounds are amazing I grew up with the Gameboy so this is all nostalgic.
my childhood right here. OG GB did magic as devs learned the platform.
As a kid who grew up in a single mother household back in the 90s, I didn't have the luxury of owning a Game Boy sadly. I remember fondly dreaming of owning one and playing all those amazing games on the GB but my mom just couldn't afford it. Thankfully though my mom was a gamer and she taught me about emulation back in '97 when it was all very new, so I did eventually get to play those GB games I had always wanted to play via emulation. I'll never forget inviting my friends over who did own GBCs and were playing Pokemon and none of them believed me when I said I could play Pokemon on my PC. I fired up an emulator and loaded up Pokemon Yellow and their jaws hit the floor xD. Good times, thanks for the trip down memory lane MVG!
11:19 …and on, and on, and on, and Ariston.
Came here to say that 😂
One of my best memories is my grandma buying me a Gameboy for Christmas. Great detailed video! :)
I loved the game boy. I bought one from my own money directly at release and it was an awesome time. My favourite games on the DMG was the first Kirby Game, R-Type and Super Mario Land 2. Last year i tried to write a game boy emulator, as a demo for one of my C libraries - but i didn't got far with it, except for module parsing, decoding and running instructions.
dude i dont care bro please delete your comment
I have such a vivid memory of my dad taking me to Toys R Us to buy a Game Boy very soon after it became available. This sounds so remedial now I remember being AMAZED when I heard the stereo sound (da-ding!) the very first time I turned it on in the car. edit- the stereo sound was through the supplied earbuds, for the one guy who felt the need to correct me...
It's a mono speaker.
@@ebridgewaterthe Game Boy produced stereo sound from it's headphone jack. The original version came with ear buds, which is how I first heard it. So yes. I was hearing stereo sound.
@@ebridgewaterBurned!
@@InfectiousGroovePodcast Ah, you did not mention the earphones in your original comment.
@@French_Canadian_Pea_Soup Not really. He did not mention the earphones in his original comment; only that he bought the console, turned it on in the car and 'heard the stereo sound'.
The GameBoy sound chip is one of the best 8-Bit synthesizers after the mighty SID of course😊
This video made me go out and buy a DMG after playing only on emulators for the past 30 years. The nostalgia is wild! Even down to the little audio crackles on boot up. Thanks for reigniting the spark 🔥
Burai Fighter Deluxe and Gargoyle's Quest -- loved them and their soundtracks!
broooo after reading this gargoyles quest soundtrack just popped in my head...! haha i miss that
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Pokémon games when it comes to audio. What Junichi Masuda was able to do with the Pokémon games (especially Gold/Silver) was insane. Loved the video though. Keep up the good work!
Junichi Masuda composed the soundtrack for Gen I, but Go Ichinose composed the soundtrack for Gen II minus the Gen I tracks he rearranged. Nevertheless, both did a great job composing for the Game Boy.
@@reillywalker195 Really? I did not know that. Thanks!
I still have my original Gameboy, I keep it in my safe. Over time the old girl has begun to break down bit by bit, but I'll hold on to it forever. This was a good reminder of how much gaming has changed as well. This was the time period where you had to get things right to succeed. Insane optimizations were the norm and it holds up, unlike today. Now you need Several GB of storage and insane specs to run certain games, rather than being optimized. It's a shame, but this makes the old gen of hardware and games that much more special. Thanks for the video MVG, much love from the USA brother!
Yeah, it's rather unfortunate that although technology has improved and it's generally advanced gaming in many ways, it's also allowed for good development practices like polishing and optimizing to fall by the wayside. Most devs today would be completely unable to produce 'impossible' games like the ones shown in this video because in their world, they don't have to worry about hardware limitations.
Faceball 2000 was based off of Midi Maze on the Atari ST, which was released even earlier than Wolfenstein 3D, in 1987. And unsurprisingly it has been released by the same publisher as Faceball 2000 :-)
Gotta shout out Metroid 2. I never got an NES as we were an Amiga household but luckily I got a Game Boy and was hooked on the Metroid franchise from that point on. Good video as always, thanks for your service!
I had a Sega Master and a Game Boy! Traded 2 games for it, I had Metroid 2 included in the deal. It was the perfect portable system since it was unbreakable!
Game Boy was my childhood. My parents never owned a home console but had a couple of Game Boys which me and my brother constantly be playing. Thinking back we got lots of entertainment from relatively few games. We had 2 copies of Tetris, Dr Mario and Wave Race which ment we could link cable multiplayer those 3 games and 1 copy of Super Mario Land 1 and 2. We eventually got a PS1 as a home console and the pokemon games on Game Boy but we had been playing the same 5 gameboy games for several years at that point.
Man, all I had back then was just a gameboy and I'm so glad to have had it with games like pokémon and zelda coming on it
The GameBoy will always have a special place for me. I remember as a 12-year-old. I got the game boy with Tetris and Super Mario land at the time the system was was around about two years old. They remember that they very very well, it was a major part of my childhood. I had pretty much all of the big hitters when it came to Mario. I will always have one regret when it comes to the game boy getting rid of Dr Mario for double Dragon., the game was a fantastic system that really showed anything was possible if you had talent and know how.
Thanks for the great video! I also love how relevant Game Boy and GBC are even today. I see more and more people find these old consoles and all the cool games for it. Modding is now super easy and convenient and with modern display tech you can now actually enjoy GB/C games in any place regardless of lighting condition. I can't wait to see how the GB/C modding scene evolves and what new games the indie scene comes up with!
I still remember the ending theme from V-Rally. Amazing stuff.
34 seconds ago, just in time for lunch, your timing sir, is perfect!
Why do kids feel the need to announce when they watch a yt video 😂
One of my all-time favourite soundtracks is for a Gameboy Color game called Project S-11. The game is an all-around technical marvel but the OST is the absolute highlight: it's by Purple Motion, an absolute legend of the demoscene, and it's incredible stuff you can't believe a GBC is capable of making.
Awesome tribute to our childhood! I immediately went and downloaded all the soundtracks to the songs you played for the GB. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
MVG I'm so glad you're talking about my favourite console, like millions of others. I hope you've seen my 2021 video interview with the developer of ZAS as you mention it. I also did a live with him recently. I also interviewed the composer of Batman the Animated Series, who did great things on the game boy. And there are more interviews to come in Japan and Spain (you mentioned bit managers' games, for example). The game boy catalogue is so incredible! I'd also recommend my video on Vattle Giuce, which is also technically incredible. The subtitles are in English 😊👍 Thanks again for your work, you're an inspiration to me 🙂🙏
20 years later. The switch games that made the impossible !
The Witcher 3
Doom eternal, Hellblade
From the day I was home with the chicken pox back in '89 and my Dad surprised me with the Game Boy, to today where I still have that very same Game Boy with an ips display I dropped in it and still play often. The Game Boy will always have a special place in my heart. To this day I have a raging addiction to handhelds because of it 😂. Anyways, really enjoyed this video, MVG! Cheers!
Cool! The best Gameboy review I have ever watched. Really interesting, entertaining, the best showing the capabilities of that incredible console. In depth technology explanation.
Oh god I'm getting old why did you have to make a video on the gameboy turning 35 lol...
On the other hand, I can scarcely believe that the Game Boy is actually older than me (only by a few months, although it didn't launch in Europe until I was a year old), when it was such a big part of my childhood. I guess part of that is how long it stuck around for, nearly 12 years (if we include the GBC), which would be unthinkable for a console "generation" these days.
The fact that they also made games like Street Fighter II and Bomber man compatible with multiplayer on the SNES using the Super Game Boy is also just mind blowing.
mate as soon as you mentioned "sound" Robocop soundtrack was already buzzing in my head. Keep up the good work, I really enjoy your content!👍 Greetings from Australia
The original Game Boy was my introduction to Kirby and even the Legend of Zelda, Link’s Awakening is very first Zelda game I ever played!
Loved my gameboy until I got grape juice in it in 4th grade 😢
In my hometown, so few people in my class owned one! I only met two people in 2 groups of 30 students. I dunno, probably parents didn't want to pay for extra games ("we have a nintendo at home!") or maybe, related to my comment, no one had consoles back in the day until the release of the SNES (only a few people had a Megadrive and that's it, other than that, it was 8-bit European micros all the way). And the lucky ones already had a 286 PC or similar. Lynx might as well have been a pink unicorn. And Game Gear, I only know in person 2 people who had one back then and they regretted it because it was terrible as a portable. I can't stress enough how much of its own thing, how different, the EU gaming scene was back in the day compared to the US and JP.
When this video started I had a flashback to Christmas morning as a kid & my mum telling me a gift will be under my bed in the morning (so I didn’t wake her up at 4am) and that gift was Crash Test Dummies. I couldn’t believe it when you showed the intro, I loved that game. Thanks for the video!
another great video of yours. You reminded me again of how beautiful the GB graphics look.
Tetris is the reason that I got a Gameboy it is one of the greatest game of all time Who agrees with me
I was born in 95 and grew up with a super nintendo, game boy color, and 64, and tons of classic games. I never understood tetris. I mean I understand how to play. But I don't get why people think it's so fun. To me, it's one of the most boring games of all time. Maybe because I grew up playing things like ocarina of time, but I do like puzzle games like Mario's picross picross. I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy tetris, but I can't ever play that game for more than two or three minutes
Some GameBoy consoles in AU never had tetris with it. I still have my console but my title was Super Mario Land as an additional charge. Would have like to get tetris with it like everyone seems to claim.
@@danielburleson563it was the best when there weren’t as much choices as a poor kid. We played Tetris on our electronic dictionary devices, and that was the best thing ever. For now though, Tetris is really just a mini game.
@@user-yk1cw8im4h yeah true, that's why I think the bigger games and stuff kinda spoiled me. I can imagine that never having a handheld game would make Tetris seem really cool at the time
I remember playing on the Gameboy as a child. I remember going to stores that sold music and videos and they had the gameboy games in big clear cases on shelves. I can see it in front of my eyes. A very specific memory. I don't have my gameboy anymore, but a couple of games survived the past 30 years. This thing got me into gaming and I haven't stopped since (though I am not entirely sure if we had the snes or gameboy first).
Great video, I love learning about the tech side of the Game Boy. Also, the soundtrack for F-1 RACE was so good. Maybe.... maybe TOO good, lol. Definitely an OST to check out!
V-Rally was my very first videogame, I played it so much that Alberto Gonzalez's soundtrack has been permanently playing in my head for the past 26 year or so
man this channel never ceases to amaze me. banger content after banger content. top-notch writting and editing. cheers!
There was a brilliant feature in Retro Gamer recently about the making of Game Boy R-Type. That's another impressive effort. And it highlights the fact that being related to the Z80 means there were a lot of European coders who transferred from 8-bit Z80 machines to the Game Boy, bringing years of experience and technical tricks.
i love the way you weave the tech analysis into all your videos.
Kinda wild that the idea for the Game Boy originated from Gunpei Yokoi noticing a businessman passing time playing with a calculator.
This is pretty interesting. Well done MVG for another amazing video
I LOVE your Game Boy videos! There is just something very special about this handheld.
I really love how the Gameboy sounds in general, it brings so much joy to me just by hearing to any game's music on it
Awesome video, as usual. Some of my fav games ever are Super Mario 2 and 3. I regularly replay them on various GB emulators.
Good to see the Killer Instinct GB port get some love. I was always blown away by the concept that i could play my favorite SNES fighting game on the go and it still somehow felt great to play. It even has a stage and track that's unused (or at least you couldn't select the stage) in the SNES version. That game got me through so many road trips as a kid, and I could have never imagined there would have been a KI3, let alone having the ability to play that on the go with nothing compromised thanks to the Steam Deck.
Great video! The Samurai Shodown Port has some very amazing GB music and extras (original themes made for the quiet stages). Fatal Fury Real Special also has some nice 3d floor effects and sprites.
Been absolutely loving your latest videos ❤ exactly what i needed, thank you
Dr. Mario was one of the games played a lot! The gameplay was very addictive. Great video, I watched it with my 14 year old son to explain him how gaming in the 90s looked like. Thank you preserving this knowledge and help sharing the knowledge!
35 Years it has been and it is still producing a large fanbase and it is still worth coming back to. I remember my days playing Gameboy over at carers houses and having a fantastic time. Eventually I got into it thanks to Pokemon. Now I want to do my own Gameboy Advance Build and have the ultimate Gameboy with me.
This is great. I love learning about how unique and impressive the system actually was!
My neighbor had about 30 GameBoy games and he would let me borrow a few at a time. I only had 3 or 4 of my own. My favorites that I had were Tetris (of course), Metroid 2, Batman the Animated Series, and later on Pokémon Blue. I was gifted rechargeable batteries that lasted about 5 or 6 hours on a full charge. Not the greatest but better than spending all my money on AAs. Thanks for the video.
Donkey Kong Land 1 has one of the best Game Boy soundtracks, IMO.
The Game Boy was my first 'console'..so many great games and memories..Great video!
Great video. I'm working on my 3rd GBDK release. Will be my first physical release! I love the GBDK shoutout great toolkit and you're right it is very fulfilling developing for the Game Boy even though the player base is somewhat niche. You're also right the GB has so much going for it right now. I remember 6 or so years ago we were all hyped over backlight screen mods that weren't even the right size. Now we got every mod under the sun and stuff like the Analogue Pocket, the FP FPGA GB and the mister. It's a great time to be into Game Boy. Also on the homebrew side there's a lot of developers who are making really good games that would have went toe-to-toe with the best of them if they were released back in the day. Also I just wanted to say your exposure/lighting setup to get the on-device video capture was very good. I know that can be challenging lol.
That RoboCop music is brilliant! I had almost forgotten about it. I listened to the music more than I ever actually played the game.
I'm still continually amazed at how developers in the past made games for systems with hardware so insanely limited. And how many games actually run at 60FPS. Meanwhile modern games are barely 30FPS on consoles while also taking up tens of gigs of space, and need absurd hardware requirements. Not being able to grow up with computers running BASIC and getting into programming is one of my biggest regrets.. a regret I didn't even have a choice to make since I wasn't even alive. It's crazy.
Nice video as always! Thank you! Fortress of Fear was the game I've spent most hours... Others are Castelvania adventure, Probotector, Tiny Toons 2 - Montana's Madness,, RoboCop 2, Terminator 2, Mickey's Magical chase, NBA Jam and Tetris... That's pretty much all the games I've played as a child. I've only owned Terris and growing up in a very secluded and remote area meant that if I was lucky, I would meet a kid during the summer holidays who happened to have some Game Boy games and would be willing to share for some time with me... I miss those wonderful days!
Its my time to shine! My favorite GameBoy game of all time is so underrated, because it is two games in one! Its called - Radar Mission! First game is the one i love - just a strategy of sinking ships! Second game is an action based game as a submarine, and you have to sink all ships or the enemy submarine. And now for one of the best sound and music on a GB game, and you almost got it right, but just almost! It is RoboCop 2 by Ocean. Damn, those beats still kick ass!
Thanks for the explanation. Pretty interesting as always.
The first Game Boy game that made me go “wow!” as a kid was Gargoyle’s Quest. Sure, it had a ton of slowdown, but the amount of large sprites, great music and excellent level design that game throws at the player was impressive! It’s still one of my favourite GB games next to Link’s Awakening, Super Mario Land 2 and numerous others…
I think Factor 5 deserve their own video! They always seem to push a system from the Amiga right up to the GameCube. It's a damn shame they had to close down after Sony forcing them to put motion controls into Lair and projects that Nintendo and others didn't want them to complete. I'd love to see their Wii verision of the Rogue Squadran trilogy get leaked seeing it was finished and what they could do on that platform. They did get resurrected in 2017 but the main guy did then join Epic so I don't know what they're doing.
Awesome video! I did a little programming on GBA in college with DevKitArm, it was definitely a highlight of my time there! Technically impressive, you hit it on the head for me with DK Land. I have the first one and was super impressed with it. For music, my favorite is Kommisar's mix of Bad Apple!!! on LSDJ. Also for a great watch, Michael Steil does an awesome presentation called The Ultimate Gameboy Talk, from 33c3.
I picked up the Gameboy hobby a few years ago including dabbling in assembly and doing hardware mods. I’m so glad to see that the community has only gotten stronger.
Thanks for this. Definitely going to have to go back and play some of these GB games.
The opening 10 seconds with that Batman game unlocked a core memory. I was 5 and my folks got me a Gameboy and that game was the one game I had for the longest time, it was hard but I loved it. I think a few months later my mom bought me Super Marioland and I needed her to beat so many levels for me lol.
The Game Boy port of Contra 3 was actually how I was introduced to the game. I was a Contra fan, sure, and had an SNES and was aware of the game, but just hadn't gotten around to renting/buying it. My cousin had this port so I was able to play it through him. It was my first Super Game Boy-enhanced game and I had had the SGB for a little while at that point so this port in particular is special to me.
great video! since you asked: my favourite games are Mortal Kombat 3 (even if i revisited it a while ago and it was terrible, but when i was a kid it felt like a miracle to be able to play my favourite snes game on the go...) and "Navy Seals"... i played it so much that the music theme is stuck in my mind forever... sometimes i still use the jingle (whispered) of the introduction as a lullaby for my little son...
Love these breakdowns of the limitations of old hardware and seeing how creative dev's got in squeezing out effects/features previously unseen or even not thought possible at all. The old saying of 'neccesity is the mother of invention' really hits home. R-type had no business being as good as it was!
I always loved the low quality plastic add-ons that everbody had for their Gameboy back in the day. I had this crazy magnifying glass/speaker thing that snapped onto my Gameboy and provided a light as well making it just absolutely cumbersome. Those companies made a killing with that crap. The only one I really liked was a rechargeable battery unit that replaced the original battery door and added a bit of thiccness to its bottom. Way better than going through 20 AAs every few days playing Link’s Awakening.
I will never forget how this wonderful piece of engineering blew my seven-years-old mind back in 1989, when I first saw it and played Tetris on it in a mall.
My favorite thing is the modding community. Ive met so many great people and learned so much about electronics and micro soldering. Building and modding these gameboys is an excellent entry to these things because the circuit is realtive simple to understand. Ive build a ton of gameboys and carts by now and nothing makes you feel better than building something!
My fondest memory of the Gameboy was a summer 1991 vacation with the family driving to Miami in a full size custom fan. My step-brother and both agreed to buy Nintendo World Cup, but not play it until the trip. We did that and it made the trip so fun! Tons of link cable vs. games. It was a race to who got to be Germany and then the other person would have to play as somebody else. Anyway, we both got incredibly good. The final match is game code I still remember is 01613. The next best thing to do was to play Cameroon (the worst team in the game) and try to score 100 points or more. If you do so you get a glitched score similar to getting a lot of extra guys in SMB1 on the NES. I will never forget this game. It’s hands down my favorite on the console.
V-Rally was an awesome experiance back in the day. With the track going up and down and cars feeling real, being able to bump up and roll over, it was miles ahead of any other racing game I had played on the GB. Looking back today, it's equally awesome to see how they managed to actually pull it off with the limited capabilities available. As far as sound on the DMG goes, I can't not mention DuckTales. And Link's Awakening is probably (with a slight nostalgia boost) still my favourite Zelda game. Along with the likes of Mystic Quest and Pokémon, it really blew up the scale and scope of games that could fit onto that tiny handheld.
Please continue this series, would love to see more games from other retro platforms that really pushed the boundaries of their hardware
Alberto Gonzalez, the legend! Made that little machine sing!
Being from Poland, where Nintendo might as well have not existed back in the day, I still had a chance to experience a bit this console. I played Street Fighter 2 on it, and it was probably my first time playing a fighting game ever. I also remember playing a Looney Tunes game, though there's no way I'd be able to tell which one. There could've been something more, probably Super Mario Land? Truly a marvel of engineering. I'm nearly a decade younger than this wonderful little device and yet I'm still amazed.
amazing content mate, as always. My first Game Boy game was Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and by oh boy is that an underrated gem and series that Nintendo hasn't touched since. by all means though, please do a 4 hour video about the Game Boy.
I'm am so hyped you mentioned Killer Instinct for GB! I loved that game and played it to death. It was an amazing port and doesn't get enough credit. If you haven't tried it you are missing out!
I could listen to this kind of stuff for two more hours. This system was a large part of my childhood. I played Final Fantasy Legend 2 when I was 4 or 5 years old, got about... halfway?... through the game, before I knew what words like "elixer", "ether", "antidote" meant. It scared me, those sprites and enemy names... BackgroundGaming has a full 11 hour playthrough I recently watched over the course of a week. That's some hard nostalgia.
i had that one too but not til i was 10 or so. i remember getting it at gamestop from the display case (cartridge only) in about 1998 thinking it was an actual final fantasy title. a very good first jrpg for a kid to play.
I am impressed by how developers would circunvent hardware limitations, mostly until 16 bit era. Today even with all the resources and praticaly unlimited storage sizes, games come under-optimized...