"Game Boy Porting"
As a life-long Nintendo fan (well, until recently anyway) it's always bugged me that the Game Boy line (and later, the Nintendo DS line) just couldn't get decent ports of older Nintendo games.
The 1989 Game Boy, with its "cabbage-green" screen, was exempt and at one time a totally different beast than the NES or the Super NES. It excelled in original games, whether puzzle games being a perfect fit (launch title Tetris), some made-for-Game-Boy sequels (sequels to Kid Icarus and Metroid, Super Mario Land, the excellent The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening), other original titles that required the linking cable (Pokémon Red and Blue), or Game Boy adaptations of popular SNES games (Donkey Kong Land).
The problem really started with Game Boy Color, released in 1998. NES games were starting to have a small come-back, with still many used NES games on the shelves on second-hand game retailers. It would be the perfect system to port many classic NES games!
Or not. The Game Boy Color had a distinctly different resolution, much less than the NES. As a result, every game got some alteration that made it harder or more annoying. The famed Super Mario Bros. DX couldn't let you see past a certain point that you could in the original Super Mario Bros., making some jumps a leap of faith (though you could pause and look around). Shadowgate and Déjà Vu divided the "action" commands and the graphics (and this was even more a resolution-squisher, the games were built as Macintosh games in the first place). Crystalis was butchered in more than the resolution. Dragon Warrior I & II also got a release. Worst, those were some of the only NES ports ever. By and large, the idea of a portable NES faded away with the release of Game Boy Advance in 2001, though the Game Boy Color enjoyed the massive success of Pokémon and its sequels, plus The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX. There was even a port of a Super Nintendo game, Donkey Kong Country, which dramatically downscaled the graphics and music, but was still rather enjoyable.
When the GBA was released, it seemed to blow the Game Boy Color out of the water. A new widescreen screen! L and R buttons! 32 bits!! But as anyone knows, bits don't mean anything: the GBA was certainly wasn't a portable PlayStation, and barely more powerful than the Super Nintendo.
The GBA had three major problems that most people agree upon:
1) An inferior sound chip to the SNES
2) No X & Y buttons
3) No backlight
It also didn't have 3D, putting PlayStation ports out of the question.
So, where did the GBA fail?
Well, it had really odd choices for ports, and some arrived too late.
Rather than re-releasing the Super Mario Bros. games, they created the Super Mario Advance line, which had the non-SMB1 games in their graphically updated forms (from Super Mario All-Stars) plus a graphically-updated port of Mario Bros..
To compensate for the lack of a backlight, colors were brightened. This was obvious when the front-lit (and later true back-lit) Game Boy Advance SP models were released, making everything seem washed out. The GBA-SP was the truly the pinnacle of the line, but integrated the headphone slot with the power adaptor, requiring an adaptor. The washed-out colors, coupled with the bad sound, ruined the ports of the Donkey Kong Country series. Even the classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was messed up because they felt like they had to dub in "Link's voice" from Ocarina of Time. Mother 1+2, the port of EarthBound and its Japanese-only prequel, was unreleased in America, but it also was messed up by the sound and graphics.
Meanwhile, in late 2004, Nintendo released Classic NES Series, which had more accurate NES ports of some of the more popular games, like Metroid, or Ice Climber. Unfortunately, the resolution was too small again, and $20 was too high a price for many of the games.
Around that time, Nintendo released the Nintendo DS, which at the time wasn't supposed to replace the Game Boy line (but it did).
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Another one was a Currently Playing I was to put up (for the first one) but never got around to it.
Currently Playing: Now Every Wednesday
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
A Link to the Past is going well. So far, I've
Pokémon Yellow
Since I was never able to attend a Nintendo Event where I could get Mew "officially", nor do I want to invoke the "Mew glitch", I just decided to use a GameShark to capture a Level 17 Mew north of Lavender Town. I dropped it off at the Pokémon Daycare Center at Route 5. Hopefully, it will grow into a strong Psychic 'mon (in the meantime, my Butterfree is going to suffice). I think I've got a pretty strong team at this point: Butterfree (evolved from a Caterpie), Pikachu (starter), Ivysaur, Wartortle, Graveler, and Charmeleon. Butterfree's a bit on the weak side, but that's okay: TM29 Psychic will help it greatly. Meanwhile, I'm...
a) in "Silph Co.", which means I'm about halfway done with the story
b) still in Pokémon Tower
From The Archives:
May 31, 2005
Final Fantasy III (Super NES)
Super Back to the Future II (Super Famicom)
Yoot Tower (PC. Mac, actually.)
Riven: The Sequel to Myst (Mac)
SimCity 2000 (Mac)
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (GBA)
Pokemon Gold (GB)
Maniac Mansion (NES)
The Lost Vikings II (SNES)
(the "So far, I've" is original)
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