Pushing the Gameboy Color to its Absolute Limit

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I've covered loads of Nintendo consoles so far. NES, SNES, N64, GBA. Where's Gameboy, you ask? I have no good answer for you. It's simply an oversight, but one I plan to correct right now.

The Gameboy Color was a strange beast. Released mostly as a stopgap to fend off the Neo Geo Pocket Color, it was still an 8 bit machine but souped up substantially beyond the original gameboy in much the same way that the Gameboy Advance wasn't simply a handheld SNES.

Besides the improved hardware, it also benefited from decades of developer experience. There's little time during the 5-8 year run of a console or handheld to fully learn all the tricks for getting the most out of it.

But 30 years on, all that stuff has been uncovered, making possible technical marvels like "It Came from Planet Zilog" by Phantasy, named for the Gameboy line's Zilog 80 main processor:

Similar raster effects on display below, in "Cenotaph", a joint project of Dual Crew and Shining:

Actual real time 3d vector objects are featured in "Wired" by R-Lab. Impressive until you remember that Star Wars Arcade did this with worse hardware in 1983:

Back to the comfort of raster graphics with "Space Waste" by Octarine. It's neat to push such old machines to do 3D, but in terms of visual appeal, high color pixel art achieved by palette swapping trickery wins every time:

Now for the games. Everybody and their dog knows about the Resident Evil prototype for GBC. I won't be covering that because there's a much more impressive game in the same genre that actually came out, Alone in the Dark. It used palette swapping to achieve high color depth backdrops and used software based sprite scaling for the protagonist:

Toy Story Racer utilized the same pre-rendered vector animation (similar to Flash) as the intro to Out of This World, and the ski courses in Winter Gold for SNES. This gave the impression of moving through 3D tracks:

Tyrannosaurus Tex is another overly ambitious 3D-ish GBC game, but which never came out. Maybe for the best? This sort of game was better off on the GBA. It's still a marvel that they managed this much on what amounts to a suped up NES:

Cannon Fodder was an alright game that got ported to seemingly every machine in existence upon release. Naturally it eventually got to GBC as well, with (somehow) a fully voiced FMV intro:

Shantae is a series that still continues to this day, but was made famous by the excellent pixel art animation of the first game in the series which came out for GBC:

Toki Tori was a decent puzzle platformer for GBC, remarkable only because it managed parallax scrolling backgrounds, something few GBC games attempted:

If I told you Dragon's Lair came to GBC, you'd assume they made it into a side scrolling platformer or something. But nope, it's still an fmv reflex game with every scene from the original intact, using the same vector animation technique as Toy Story Racer:

Rayman is another game that should have waited for GBA. It did eventually get a fully true to the original GBA port, but the GBC port deserves high marks for coming astonishingly close to the same visual quality on drastically worse hardware:

There's plenty more in the GBC lineup to marvel at. GBC was after all Nintendo's answer to the 16-bit threat of the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Devs did as much as humanly possible to polish and spit shine those 8 bit graphics in hopes of staying relevant.

For the most part they succeeded, and the GBC successfully bridged the gap between the original Gameboy and the Gameboy Advance, denying SNK a foothold in the handheld market. That's all for this time, keep your eyes peeled for the next installment!

^{Stay cozy!}