Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 213: Game Boy

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Ray Barnholt, and Jared Petty look back at 30 years of Game Boy. The memories! The classics! The music! The inevitable eyestrain from trying to play games in the dark in the backseat of a car!

This week in Retronauts, sorry, girls, this one's not for you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest scintillating episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we're going to be talking about a topic near and dear to my heart, or at least one that I've certainly invested way too much time into in the past few years. Yes, we're talking about the Game Boy, which turns 30 years old, like this week-ish, depending on when I publish this episode. It's about 30, yes, now April 21st.

1989 was when Game Boy launched in Japan, and it is now 30 years later, and we're going to look back at this plastic brick of happiness. And with me here to celebrate Nintendo's dentist and most pleasurable game system, we have. Hey, it's Bob Mackie. It's been 30 years, and now the Game Boy is a game man. Hi, it's Ray Barnholt. Did you say dentist? Yes, the dentist. I mean, no, wait, that was the Jaguar CD.

No, I said densest. Densist, yes. It is my density. Too bad, I've been working on a link's joke. It wasn't very dense, though. It was very full of air. It wasn't turned into anything. It was a much denser.

system than links. I thought the Dreamcast felt dense. Just a nice heavy, heavy console. It had heft. And who are you? I'm Jared Petty, and I'm very happy to be here. It's funny how anniversaries work. It seems like only yesterday it was the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy, and I was

feeling old. And now it's the 30th and I'm feeling 10 years older. Yeah, I think we probably, I think Ray and I probably wrote a lot about Game Boy's 20th anniversary and the one-up retro blogs. Yeah, something like that. I'm not mistaken. Actually, I think mostly you did. I think that was mostly Yeah, I did it to Ray.

I did it before it was cool, Jeremy. I know there was a podcast, too. There was a 20th anniversary podcast. Probably, but it's been 10 years, and so I don't remember that. All new opinions. My brain does not work that far back. Only about video games, not about video game opinions. But, yeah, I celebrated the 25th anniversary of Game Boy by launching a video series on YouTube that is still kind of ongoing.

I've kind of taken a break, because let me tell you, going chronologically through every single Game Boy game is. is exhausting. And so I decided to bring a little joy into my life by switching over to Virtual Boy for a while. But it's kind of the same thing. Virtual Boy, you take away the red, and it is basically a fancier game boy

with headaches. And fewer Pichinko games. That's only because it didn't live long enough. But give it time, and there would have been some 3D Pachinko Pachio Coon's eye-popping adventure or something like that. I don't know.

I'm sorry, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. You know? Anyway, Game Boy, what a great little system. Anyway, Game Boy, what a great little system. Guys, let's talk about it. Game Boy. Let's talk about our first encounters with Game Boy, because we've probably

discussed this before, but I don't remember. So it's all fresh to me, and it's probably fresh to our listeners, too. Ray, let's start with you, because you are, I think, the biggest Game Boy fan here. I'm a Johnny Come Lately, a pretender. I didn't really, you know, I didn't have one back in the day, so. Oh, I guess you are. So, yeah, I, I, I cover the Game Boy's history out of a sense of, I don't know. It's like, what is, what is, like, the past tense of FOMO? It was like, I missed out on it. And so now I'm trying to catch up, I guess.

I don't know. But you were there in the thick of things. You were the Game Boy. Yeah, I wasn't just trying to do it for YouTube cachet. Yeah, I mean, I'm so rich off the series with its hundreds of views. Look at that. You got all those derbies, all this Game Boy Scrilla. Yeah.

Well, I think like most people, it came to me in a vision. from God, and he spoke to me and said, they're making a new Nintendo. You can take anywhere you go. And how about that, dude? And I was like, okay, great, let's go for it. And then it showed up on my birthday one year. You were born on the same day as Game Boy? No, no, no.

Oh, I see. You don't mean it launched on your birthday. Yeah, but Game Boy was Immaculate Conception. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think you do raise a good point there that's saying a new Nintendo you can take where you go. here in the States in particular, with its physical resemblance to the NES, that was pretty much the idea they wanted us to get from day one. There's a Mario game on it. It looks like a Nintendo.

You can take it anywhere. Nintendo's what you love at home, and now there are no boundaries to where you can irritate your parents. You know, I hadn't really thought about it, but Game Boy does look like the NES and not the Famicom. It bears very little resemblance to Famicom. I guess the kind of purplish buttons are vaguely reminiscent of the Red of the Famicom. That's not dweller. Yeah. Yeah.

So that is an interesting thought. Like, Nintendo took NES design cues versus Famicom. So I wonder, what does that mean? What is the significance there? Was it made for American kids? I don't think so because there were a whole lot more Japanese releases for Game Boy than American. Yeah, I don't know. I think if we take it from, you know, the obvious inspiration was the Walkman.

And, you know, those sorts of, like, grayish electronics of the time were sort of like the in vogue, industrial design. So I think maybe the cues were taken from that. Walkman was always, in my experience, Walkman were always like, you know, black. Black or gray. Like dark gray. I don't mean just Walkman.

I just mean like the general sort of like industrial design electronics from Japan in that time. Yeah. There was black as well, but also like grayish things. Yeah, I mean, it's got that kind of ribbed grayish look that you saw in a lot of Apple products at the time. So I guess that was maybe one of the first times Nintendo was like, Apple, they're neat.

We want to be like them. Oh, he's looking at that. And as you've pointed out before, Jeremy. And it launched with Tetris, a game that anybody could enjoy, but also in golf. It launched in America with Tetris, not in Japan. But it did have golf. It did have golf. And golf was a game for grownups.

And so you have this device that if it had gone with a Famicom theme, it would have looked more toy-like. Whereupon, in its gray kind of slayed NES form, it wasn't intimidating for children. It was something that was still friendly. But it also looked a little more grown-up, something that a salary man could maybe throw in their suitcase with a copy of golf in it. And yet, at the same time, they called it Game Boy. So, yeah, maybe they were a little confused about what they were trying to accomplish with that. But one of the very earliest Game Boy commercials does pitch the system very directly at adults. It's like a businessman going through all these situations.

It's kind of like a cutout or something. It's hard to describe, but it's like him being sort of green screened against these different situations like, you know, being in an airport and waiting in a dentist's office and that sort of thing. In media of the time, you would see adults playing Game Boy, and there's a famous picture of Hillary Clinton playing Game Boy on a plane. America was not ready for a gamer president. That's why she didn't win. Well, I mean, she cheated and got, she got Mew, so. You do get some confused marketing there, but I think their audience was probably internally, anyone who's bored.

I think that that might be what they were aiming for. Kids are perpetually bored constantly. Stick them in the back seat of a car with a Game Boy. they're happy, but they knew that anybody that had to idle away some time in the dentist's office or on a plane or anything else might be into this thing. And as such, many Game Boy experiences were built around the idea of pickup and play. I don't think it's a coincidence that the system launched with Tetris in America and was a huge, huge hit.

Because Tetris was the quintessence of a pick-up and play bite-sized experience. I mean, you get going with Tetris and you can play for quite a while. You get into that zone, but you don't have to do that. You can, you know, start a game of Tetris, you know, do the B mode and get your bricks up as high as possible at the maximum speed and last for like 30 seconds. So it was it was an adaptable, expandable kind of gaming experience just a while away a few minutes at a time. And that was a pretty novel concept. I mean, you know, at the same time you had little digital watch games. You had game and watch.

It was not like Game Boy was the first handheld video game system by any means, but it was definitely the best to that point and the most accessible and had the strongest library of games, the greatest variety of games. As a kid, I remember being fascinated by the Atari Links, seeing it in display cases, and I love the color graphics, even like the kind of weird axe form factor. I thought it felt good in your hands. But there was very little on it that was fun. I wanted to like it. I wanted to think it was better, but I just kept going back to Game Boy. There was, I think a lot of it had to do for me with the sound engineering, sticking those stereo headphones in and hearing Super Mario Land

and that just wonderfully, wonderfully perky, melodic hook there. There seemed to be really, really focused attention on sound design, perhaps to make up for the fact that the graphics were a little more bland. I don't know any of the history behind that. But there was a delight in so many of the Game Boy games they chose to bring over here. It seemed that the library, particularly early on, was really well curated for that purpose. So as to the sound design, the Gameboy was kind of masterminded by Gumpi Yokoi, the head of

Nintendo R&D1. But the primary hardware designer was Satoru Okada, who would go on to work on, what else? Did he design the DS? He's designed a bunch of stuff. You don't know? No. Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, I should have looked that up.

Sorry, I'm not one of those guys who obsesses too much about the. designers at Nintendo as far as the hardware guys. Yeah, I know the big names. I mean, Okada's interesting because he was a hardware designer but also designed games. Like he was the lead designer on Solar Striker and a few other games. Yeah, well, that was the whole, that was kind of like Yoko's whole team, basically, yeah. They made like the first games. Right.

And to that point, the sound hardware in Game Boy was designed by Hirokazu Hip Tanaka. So he had, you know, made his name as, you know, a guy doing sound design for NES games, There's music for Metroid and that sort of thing, but he was the one who oversaw and designed, you know, like the specs for the Game Boy Sound hardware. And I interviewed him, I guess, last year, and I can't remember exactly what he said. It's in the most recent Game Boy Works book that I've published. But he said, you know, like, he knew there were limitations on what the sound hardware could do. So he tried to make up for it by making it stereo. And that was a big deal because the NES, the Famicom, they were mono only.

But Game Boy was stereo. And not only was it stereo, but it came with headphones packed in. Justified it. Yeah, like. Those were the first earbuds I've ever experienced in my life. Yeah, earbuds were a new idea back the night. I had seen people using earbuds, but to actually have them, you know, in a form that you could possess. And just as like a freebie thrown in.

And it was neat because they were red and blue, so you never had to question which ear to put which in. So there was a great little bit of color coding on that. But yeah, having that sound built in. I mean, that was both a way to show off the sound hardware and also a way to, I think, insulate parents from having to listen to video games. I think it made it a more compelling pickup for their kids because they knew that they could say put on the headphones and they wouldn't have to listen to tini sounds coming out at that little speaker on the corner.

So I think that worked on multiple levels. I was always shocked, even as a kid, by how good it sounded. I knew that, you know, I didn't know how many sound channels it had. I barely knew what stereo was. I just knew it sounded neat. And much like I know now from reading that, you know, it had kind of four and a half sound channels that had four that were utilized then, and then a fifth channel that it's utilized mostly by people that do composition now

that came through the cartridge. But that's not all that dissimilar in terms of what you've done. can do with the design for what the NES had, and yet it had its own very distinctive ring to it. Nothing quite sounded like the Game Boy. And to this day, I can be sitting in writing, and I'll keep a soundtrack that's pretty heavy with Game Boy music on it, just because when those pop in, they tend to have an almost jovial feel. Even the menacing stuff, you think about like the Castlevania II soundtrack on Game Boy. Even it's

Evening, it's, even It's, even its most like sinister sound. They're still kind of happy. And then you take something like Kirby's Dreamland. And that is pure ice cream on a chip, just flooding into your ears. It's absolutely wonderful. It's still my favorite composition on the system.

I think that's soundtrack. So let's talk about the origins of the Game Boy. Like I said before, it launched April 21, 1981, 1989 in Japan. And sometime in late summer, 1989 in America, I haven't been able to find a specific date or even month. I think it was August, but it's not as well documented as I would like. So whereas Japanese releases, like they can probably tell you the hour at which it first showed up in a store. Not so much here just due to the distribution model in the U.S. and so forth.

But in any case, it was a pretty quick turnaround. You know, there had been a, oh gosh, almost like two and a half years difference between the Famicom launch in Japan and the NES launch. in America, but here it was like, you know, three months. There are, I guess, four months. There was also no industry to rebuild at that point. Yeah. Yeah. That helped.

But I think, you know, it does speak to sort of the flexibility of the system. It was not a region-locked system. The hardware was universal in all regions, even, you know, when it came out in Europe, you still had the same design as in America and Japan. Cartridges were the same shape. There were no, like I said, no region lockouts. And, you know, because the game system operated on batteries, there wasn't even the issue between, you know, power systems.

Like, you know, the UK uses 240-volt power versus 120-volt in America and 110 in Japan. It didn't matter because everyone uses double-A batteries. So, you know, you could get the optional power brick, but they didn't have to worry about that. You didn't have to worry about the difference between NTSC and PAL visual standards because it had an integral screen. So it was a much more flexible game system and did a lot to strip away the regional barriers that existed at the time, which had been a factor, you know, from the days of the Atari 2,600, which took years to get over to Japan and had made almost no headway in the UK just because of the various barriers to entry on the technical side and also on distribution. Game Boy was just like they could manufacture it and stick it in a different box, put a different, you know, like consumer electronics label on the back, a serial code or whatever, and the same system could be released in Japan or the UK or the U.S. I do think that's funny on how that pretty much persisted throughout like all of handheld gaming for a long time.

Like with console gaming, yeah, there's lots of region locking, but like not until like the... DSI. Yeah, DSI 3DS. That was like when Nintendo was like, no. And that was, that was, yeah, the region locking there was tied to the digital storefront. So it's just another reason to hate digital distribution. But yeah, it was also an anti-piracy measure to a certain degree. But then they've gotten rid of that with Switch, which, again, is more or less a handheld system that also is a TV-based system.

So, yeah, the idea of region locking in handheld games is pretty uncommon. And, you know, I think it does just kind of get back to the flexibility of the hardware and the sort of universal nature of it. And, you know, if you look at the launch titles, three of the four Japanese launch titles for Game Boy showed up in America, Super Mario Land, Baseball, Alleyway. Like, those pretty much came over, I think, with no real changes. Baseball, they had to change the character names, you know, from Japanese names to America. American names, and they changed kilometers per hour to miles per hour. But that's about it.

Alliway was exactly the same game in both regions, and Super Mario Land was the same game in both regions. What we did not get was Yakuman, which was... Oh, darn it. Well, Yakoman's interesting because, you know, it's a, what do you call it, Mahjong game. Yeah, yeah.

But it's actually, it connects Game Boy back to its predecessor, the game and watches, because Nintendo had created a very deluxe edition game and watch called Yakuman, which was a, you know, it was the same thing. It was a, I keep blinking up Mahjong game, and it was like $200, and you could daisy chain four of them together. So if you wanted to spend $800, you could have a very, very elaborate game of digital mahjons. That's such bubble arable.

Yeah, it totally is. But I love it. And, you know, so then they took that, that incredibly overpriced creation of theirs, and they stuck it on Game Boy, and the cost of the Game Boy hardware and the cartridge was actually less than the cost of the standalone Yakuman game from five years before. Jeremy, did that take advantage of the four-player hardware? No, this was a, Yakoman was a launch game for Game Boy, and the four-player adapter did not come along until late

1990. I didn't realize it was that late. Shipped with F1 race. And also in Japan on day one

for the four-player adapter, they had Trump Boy 2. Yay! All right, here's some cool stuff that I know.

Sling some cards around. That's right. Yeah. So anyway, that was the one game we did not get from the Japanese launch. But, you know,

compare that to the early days of the Famicom where a lot of those games did not make it over. Like, we didn't get Gomoku, Rinju, Rhinju, what, Gomoku.

Naravani? Yes. The Go variation, yes. Yes. We didn't get the, so it's half-fi teaches English for some strange reason. And there is another Mahjong game,

like four-player mahjong. Yep. And there was a F-1 race kind of early on. There were lots of games that we did not get here. And then when it came to Game Boy, it was just like, you know,

let's create things for everyone. all around the world. What we did get in it instead of Yakuman was a day one release of Tetris, which was a few months later in Japan. That was the packing here. Packens did not exist in Japan. So that was a special treat for Americans who are stingy and demand more for their money. And also tennis. And a lot of these games, Super Mario Land and Alleyway were standalone games.

But the rest of the launch titles in both regions there were designed around the link cable, which was a big part of. of the Nintendo Game Boy Experience. And the link cable was also designed by Hipp Tanaka and was a very kind of simple serial cable that could plug two systems together. If they both started up with the same game in them, they could play head to head. You know, in baseball, you know, you took turns playing as, you know, or I guess you didn't take turns, but you like one team was home, one team was the visitors. But for tennis, I think it actually made a great selling proposition because, you know, on NES, tennis was a one-player game.

And they adapted it for VS tennis in the arcades where they had two separate screens. But because, you know, you were looking at the court from kind of like a behind the player view, it made it difficult for, you know, them to have, like, the other player as the opponent because they had a disadvantage because they had less space to maneuver in and the screen worked against them. But on Game Boy, if each player could, you know, have their own screen, they could each be in their own four court. So all of a sudden, you had something that didn't really work on an ES that did work on Game Boy. So, you know, it was a very simple and primitive. system, even by the standards of the time, but I think Nintendo did a really good job just

up front of selling the system and saying, like, here are, you know, the advantages, here are things that are unique and good about it. It's kind of fun of the link cable, which was such an early part of the marketing and such an early part of the game design experience and then sort of faded away in later years. It wasn't nearly as heavily emphasized after launch with a few exceptions. And then here you come around to the end of the Game Boy's Life span, and it's the link cable that thrusts it back into relevance

in a way that it never had before. With... Pokemon, right? Yeah. I think Pokemon was the... You're very in the lead. Oh, I'm sorry. Pokemon was the result of what,

like, them just realizing, like, oh, everyone has one of these, and no, we're not really using them anymore. From what I understand, Pokemon's development began around the time that Game Boy launched. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was in development for, like, seven years before it finally came around.

Yeah, I think it was like 1990 or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like GameFree. just, you know, picked away at this little labor of love. And that's why the code on Pokemon green and red in Japan is just an absolute mess. I think I was, it's practically homebrew. Pretty much, yeah. I think I was just projecting my, I think I was just projecting my own thought where it's like, oh, yeah, that thing.

I have one of those that I used for Tetris once. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, we talk about relevance, but the, you know, I don't, I personally did not have any experiences with the link cable, really, among friends. It was just like, oh, hey, here's this game. Yeah, doesn't the Simpsons game look cool? I also have, you know, Mr. Chew's Gourmet Paradise. Isn't that neat?

But, yeah, no actual multiplayer stuff for like a long time until I was too old for it. I've never talked to anyone who's actually experienced Mr. Chins' Gourmet Paradise. Mr. Chins, yes, that's right. Yeah. What do you think about that game? Oh, it's, I mean, God, what can, it's like the same blanket statement you can say about a lot of Game Boy games. It's very simple. It's very compact.

in that sense, and it's just like a nice little arcade-type experience. I like to just compact, not just for the brevity experience or sitting and playing for a small amount of time, but another way, we talked about designing around multiplayer or around the multiple screens and tennis. The Game Boy was a small screen. You had a 160 by 144 playfield, so you had about 20 by 18 tiles,

which is a little more than half of what you have on an NES. And that did require an era where you were going to do something on a side-scrolling platformer a more compact approach to design, because you really either had to make extremely tiny and therefore generally ugly sprites, or you made large characters that didn't have as much room to move around. And that took people a while to get their heads around. I mean, Ray, you did a series a while ago on Ninja Turtle games and the Game Boy in an episode of scroll or an issue of scroll, I remember, your magazine. Yeah, yeah, I did an issue all the turtle games.

And it seemed like the main problem was the ones that weren't fun was that you had a giant Ninja Turtle that couldn't move around a screen very well. Is that fair? Yeah, yeah, those first two were very odd. Yeah, the first game. These towering turtle sprites in them, and yeah, they couldn't really make their moved. They looked nice. Yeah. But when people learn to build around the compact stuff, that's where you got a lot of the great games.

You think about something like kicks, which is just about the most simple arcade game you can imagine, but because it's built around lines and dots, it looks amazing. I'd say like Batman, or Batman is like, you know, the sides of your pinky nail. And it's like, yeah, it's still a fun platformer. Yeah, they did it. Same with Super Mario Land. I mean, that's kind of, you know, the kickoff right there. Not enough developers said, let's make a dinky, dopey little sprite

and really give players, you know, a lot of space to play in. And it's a shame because, you know, then you end up with stuff like, you know, Ninja Brothers, is that what it is? Ninja Boy? Ninja Boy, yes. There's only one of them, so it's just Ninja Boy. which basically takes the NES's sprites and sticks them on the Game Boy screen and takes a fairly difficult game on NES that's somewhat fun

and makes it extremely hard and not enjoyable at all on Game Boy. It was one of my least favorite experiences, especially because it costs so much to get a hold of that cartridge to photograph. God damn it. I like that you mention Batman because nearest I can tell it's the only Batman game where he's armed with a handgun. which also is another notable moment and Batman history

but I think that I was talking about the music from Kirby's adventure earlier I think Kirby is the perfect Game Boy game I think it was designed very purposefully around what can we do with this hardware by a team that obviously knew how to make games already and so it seems to be the Kirby ethos in general

and it's born out of this design requirement I feel like how are you going to make a small sprite look good on Gameboy making him a ball You know, how are we going to make the background, and how are we going to use this palette, screen real estate, what abilities work within that? We can't have too many enemies on screen at once. Pacing needs to be a little slower.

And that creates the series that's one of my favorite today, but I think it was built largely around the limitations of that hardware. Yeah, I mean, Kirby is interesting because he was a placeholder sprite. They were like, actually, this tinkle-pop-po guy is kind of cool. Let's just keep them. I think they realize, like, this little blob of very little detail works really well on the screen. and let's just go with it. Another thing as a kid, something that made me angry at Game Boy.

I loved Game Boy. But I had grown up playing a lot of home 8-bit PCs in addition to NES. And so I loved RPGs. I had grown to play in Ultima and wizardry and things like that and then moved on to Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. And I wondered why there weren't more RPGs on Game Boy

because even as a child, I was like when I played Final Fantasy Legend, I thought, oh, yeah, this works really well. Why aren't there more of these? and I tried to like the other stuff that came out that had that same kind of adventurey feel. What was it sort of, I forget, I don't know. Sort of Hope. Sort of Hope.

I tried to like Sort of Hope. I tried to like Sort of Hope is great, but it's not an RPG in the classic sense. Right. It's more of an adventure. And when I got it, I was kind of angry about that. It's an Icom MacVenture game that's had RPG elements added on to it because Kimco Seika, the developer on Sort of Hope, had converted those Icom games like Shadowgate over to NES. And then they were just like, this is. is a pretty good idea. Let's make it a little more, you know, like in line with the Dragon Quest stuff that's really popular here. But let's do it. I love that weird, innovative stuff like that showed up on Game Boy. I didn't mean to derail this, but I will go to Bat for sort of hope because I think it's really interesting and good. Oh, no, I think it's good now. I just think as a child I was angry because it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I think if I'm thinking about it correctly, it seems like the Game Boy had the same ratio of RPGs to non-RPes that other systems had just because there weren't a lot of RPGs. It feels like there were the same amount in comparison to what else existed.

At least in North America. Yeah. I'm thinking of North America. Yeah. Like, if you look at the Famicom market and Super Famicom, those systems were top-heavy with RPGs, most of which were bad Dragon Quest clones and starred, like, super-deformed gondoms. And Game Boy certainly had some of those. I've played one, and I hated it.

Oh, just one? Just one so far. There's more. But you think about the NES. I understand it was relatively light on RPGs in the States, but you still had, in addition to the ones we all remember, the four Dragon Warriors and Final Fantasy, you had things like Ultima 3, 4, and 5 on there. Don't forget about Ghost Lion.

Ghost Lion, swords, and serpents. They're actually more than you think when you start looking at the library. Just most of them weren't all that great. Whereupon, on Game Boy, you had Final Fantasy Legend, 1, 2, and 3, and what else? You had Ruland's Curse, which was an action RPG. You had, I mean, if we're talking about what was localized, sure, there weren't that many. There were a couple of Ultima games. Which, again, but they were action RPG style ultimate games.

They didn't follow the pure RPG form. And again, I loved them. It just, they were more Zelda-like, kind of like Final Fantasy Adventure. In Japan, you had wizardry, he had Last Bible, but none of that ever made it over here. I think more would come after Pokemon was popular for not even Game Boy Color. Like, Dragon Quest Monsters was a Game Boy game, right? The Dragon Quest Monsters Theory started. Yeah, the original was a highlight cart.

And things like the Dragon Warrior One and Two collection, that was a hybrid. That was a hybrid. Dragon Quest 3 was... Those were all like 98-99. Really laid on, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there were all actually, trust me on this, there were a lot of RPGs released on Game Boy in Japan, some really cool ones. There's one that I'm happy to have played a very tiny part in its history. Really? Ayakashi no Shiro, which was a first-person dungeon crawler set in ancient Japan.

I stumbled across this and did a, you know, history on it, and it was like, this is kind of cool. It's a shame there's never been a fan translation. And someone said, okay, let's do a fan translation. So now it's been translated as Domans' Revenge, and if you want to play a medieval Japanese dungeon crawler on Game Boy, you can play it in English. Jeremy, you've just made my day. Childhood and me is very happy. I don't know if it's going to really change your life that much. But, yeah, there was, I feel like the Game Boy Library was more or less what you would have seen on any other system in its given region.

Like in Japan, you had a lot of RPGs. You had a lot of Pachinko games. You had horse racing simulators. You had, you know, just like all kinds of anime license titles that were super terrible and made by Bon Presto or Tose or whatever. Just like you would expect on Famicom or Super Famicom. Rest here, you didn't get all of that. Yeah. But I think globally, what you had a lot of, every year was puzzle games.

Yeah. Love me some action puzzle game. Yeah. And only half of them were Sokobo. Going to bond some Socos. Yeah. Yeah, I have a weird habit of going through old, like, wishbook catalogs on the Internet that people slightly crazier than I am compile and then I read them. And there's a lot of these out there.

I was looking at a 1991 Sears catalog, their Game Boy layout, this one before I came in. And they had their games divided into four genres of Game Boy game. Adventure and Quest, that's one. Arcade and Action, that's another. Sports, the third, and then strategy, which was just a big, like, giant pile of block sliding games and well games, and those were all strategy games. Some of them are very good, and some of them are very, like, well, I didn't need to play this. Yeah. Like, I think Quirk by Atlas is great.

It's very fun and distinct. It's no amazing Tater. It's no amazing Tater. That would come later as part of the same series. Yeah, it's the same universe. It's in the SMT series? It's the Atlas Vegetable Universe. Oh, but no prints of tomato.

Oh, God. That needs to happen for Switch. Would play. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I think Game Boy had a little bit of what, you know, what any player would want. And I feel like it was kind of seen as a disposable system where you would play a little bit. You'd be like, okay, that was fun. Now I'm going to go back to my NES or my Super NES or my Genesis.

And that's, you know, that's, you know, where I really want to have my game experiences. But Game Boy was great for, you know, like I said, those little bursts of gameplay when you didn't have access to a television. And, you know, even Final Fantasy Legend, I think, reflected that because it was maybe the first console RPG I can think of that let you basically save anywhere. You can just save any time. You just bring up a menu, save, and stop playing. As long as you weren't in combat or, you know, in a dialogue. And as a kid, I really liked that, although I didn't understand why my fists could wear out.

That was very difficult to get my head around. Keeps happening in that series. Yeah, you just, you broke your hand, you used it too much, too many punches. I was talking about that catalog earlier. In 1989, it comes out by 91. There's a double dragon game, a contra game, a Mega Man game, a Castlevania game, Ninja Turtles, Mario, Final Fantasy. There's Robocop and Paperboy. It is reflective, you're right, of the marketing game.

Robocop and Paperboy is an amazing sounding crossover that I really want to see. Yeah, I love that Dark Horse comic. Frank Miller, man. He was great. So, yeah, you know, Jared, you said earlier that at the end of, of Game Boy's life, we got Pokemon, but I would like to push back against that claim because Pokemon launched in Japan in 1996.

The final Game Boy release that was compatible with Monochrome Game Boy was one of Bob's favorite. One Piece Grand Line Bokenkie, a hybrid Game Boy, Game Boy Color Cart, that launched in June 2002, more than 13 years after the system debut. I like one piece.

I don't know if this game is any goes. Probably isn't. Probably not. But only that series could release a game on Game Boy in 2002. Well, there were a few other games released that had backward compatibility with monochrome. Yep, in 2002 and 2001. The final Game Boy color release, I think, was just the following year. So those hybrid carts stayed alive for quite a while.

So much of it was the fact the thing was ubiquitous by that point. It was $90 at launch. I mean, how often did something like that ever happen in our industry where you had a fully capable self-contained system at such a low price point at the very beginning that just kept dropping by 96 and 90 bucks it came with Tetris it came with Tetris it wasn't just a system it was a system in a game and headphones and batteries yeah good god by by 96 you could buy one for 60 bucks and so they were everywhere why not keep making games for it's a z80 it's easy to develop for so just they're cheap to make for why not yeah I mean well I don't know that it was easy to develop

for I've heard some horror stories from people who have programmed for Gameboy but it was at least well-documented, very well-known. It was like a very common off-the-shelf processor family. So, yeah, the thing about Game Boy is that it was garbage. It sucked. It was a piece of trash when it launched. It ran on like a 10-year-old processor.

The screen was murky and passive matrix LCD with four shades of grayish, greenish. Yeah, it was a terrible system. And that's exactly why it was so successful, because Nintendo found that perfect delta, you know, just the perfect balance,

between crappy tech and the ability to just give people a good enough experience to make it worthwhile and a really great price. If Game Boy had been a great system, it would have cost a lot more and it wouldn't have been nearly successful. I mean, you look at links and there were a lot of factors working against links, but it launched almost exactly the same time as Game Boy in America, but it was way more expensive and way more powerful. But because it was way more powerful, it was way more expensive, way more battery hungry. And, you know, it didn't have the library that Game Boy did. It didn't have Nintendo's monopolistic control of every developer except Atari. Are you, sir, not a fan of G-Lock? I don't know that I've played G-Lock, but I do think Blue Lightning is extremely impressive to look at

and not actually any fun to play. Yeah, neither is G-Lock. Well, there you go. But, I mean, Lynx was amazing to behold, but, you know, it just costs so much and it costs so much to maintain and to keep playing because of the battery drain. I do think it's very interesting, though, that it was basically contemporary. Like, it wasn't just made after the Game Boy was least,

sort of like the Game Gear was. It's like, it was like, it's very much the alpha and omega of like, how do we approach? It's like, I'm sure the designers of both were like, okay, we're at a point now in history where we can make this sort of technology. We can make a contained handheld system that's not just LCD-based in like the old things were.

And it's like two different approaches. One was the high-powered, colored one, and they really struggled, and it was lo-fi sort of... Game Boy. Well, Lynx had a lot going against it. It had actually been in development before Game Boy. It started out in 85, 86, and the designers of the Amiga were like, let's do this, but in a handheld form. And that's a damn ambitious choice. They put together some crazy hardware, but because of Atari's shenanigans with epics, it got delayed and pushed back until it finally.

finally launched after Game Boy, which was, you know, very unfortunate for Lynx. It could have been a lot bigger, I think, if it had beaten Game Boy market by, you know, I don't think. Actually, it could have been much bigger. Well, if it came out in 85, maybe. Yeah, maybe. It could have. That resolution did work against it. It could create amazing box shots.

I mean, the Lynx box shots are beautiful. But it was actually kind of hard to make a fun game on Links because it was like Game Boy's limitations, but even worse. Yeah, Game Boy was 160 by 144 on the screen, and Links was 160 by 102. Don't ask me why I know this. But, yeah, it was definitely scrunched down. But it had this crazy sprite blitter that basically could produce infinite sprites. And, you know, the only cost to you was that it sucked battery.

Like, the more stuff was on screen, the more power it demanded. So, yeah, like, Handy or the epics, when they put together Handy, which became links, were just like shooting for the moon. And I feel like if it had launched six months sooner, it would have been a much stronger competitor. against Game Boy, but when it came out at the same time as Game Boy, and it's like, well, here's Mario and this cool Tetris game I just demoed, and, you know, there's other games that I recognize coming down the pipeline, like Castlevania, versus this very expensive system that takes more batteries and has blue lightning and electrocop, which is kind of like Robocop, but not. Yeah, it was a tough sell. If only it had been the 90s when it launched, and it was time for Clax. That might have saved them, but it was not yet.

Alas. So, yeah, the crummy tech of Game Boy really worked in its favor. And, you know, when Nintendo launched or when Nintendo announced its Labo VR kit made out of cardboard, there was a lot of, you know, mockery and complaints in the press. But all I could think was, you know, this is what Nintendo always does. They always put out like these super cheap, crummy solutions that, you know, maybe Labelobiles. VR is going nowhere, probably, but it's so in line with the whole philosophy that gave us Game Boy. And in its skilled hands, you could do so much with it.

I mean, you take Zelda for Game Boy. That's a beautiful video game despite those limitations. Or Ninja Spirit, Lord, RM's port to Game Boy is obscenely, exceedly beautiful. I don't know how they did it within those limitations. Yeah, I mean, look at Trip World, which is probably the most detailed and elaborate game. and also the most unconventional action game. Well, one of the most unconventional action games on the system. Yeah, I mean, people who understood the Game Boy's design and limitations did great stuff with it.

There was lots of really interesting, weird stuff that I think kind of gets overlooked. And we can talk about that later because I have a whole, let's talk about the software section. But, you know, because Game Boy was so cheap and it was so inexpensive to make games for it, like you could have a team of three people make a pretty decent game for Game Boy. and it probably only took them like six months or so. That's a very low development cost. So people got to experiment a little bit. So you had stuff that maybe didn't work as well as it should have,

but I'm glad that they tried it like Afterburst, which is this Japan-only puzzle platform-style game where you control a mech and your projectiles that you fire at enemies, like they have, you know, they're affected by gravity and then like the arc of the, the projectile and it's very interesting, it's very kind of clumsy, like it's

a Messiah game, and so it should be better, but it's not. But I like the idea there, the thinking there, or something like Cyrate, which is just super weird. Yeah. Like it's a puzzle platformer again, but you can kick ladders and make them slide across the floor. And then

every few seconds, this giant moon monster like walks off the side of the, like a door opens up in the side of the screen and this moon monster walks out and it causes the screen to shake which causes things to reappear that you've destroyed. I don't understand what they were thinking or what the idea

behind that game is. It's really weird, but it's good and interesting and then it got remade on Game Boy Color with a tie-in to a child's, kids show, yeah. Kids show license. Yeah, it's a lost star. I don't know. This sounds amazing. I have never played this. This is fantastic.

It's really great. I don't like it as much, but yeah. I mean, I think it's a bit too obtuse for me. Sure. I'm not saying that I necessarily, it's a game that I want to play all the time, but I love that it exists. I love that it's just like, what the hell is happening here? I don't know, but it's interesting. It has that Koussa Gay appeal. It's just like, what are they thinking? I wouldn't go that far. I don't think it's Koussa. I'm going there. Fighting words, Ray. I mean, come on. It was a license from a kid's show later. I mean, they had to, they had to understand. This is. Yeah, but I mean, there's some Kousa gay in here. What does that mean about, you know, Wonderboy games that got attached. to Monica. Well, I mean... Don't bet what's your point.

I don't even... What's your point? All right, so let's see. I've talked about how much Game Boy sucked. So one of the interesting things is that, you know, Nintendo was kind of famous for supplementing its low-powered hardware with add-on chips for its cartridges. You didn't really see that on Game Boy. There were a few different mappers that came along,

but there were only like two or three. And they didn't add radical new abilities to cartridges. Like some of the weird stuff like, you know, Konami's maver chips for Super Ineat or for NES or the Super FX chip on, on Super NES. But you did see a lot of kind of things that took advantage of the handheld form factor of Game Boy. So you had stuff like Barcode Battler where you got, it was like a plug in, correct me if I'm wrong. It's like a scanner, like an optical scanner that you plug into the cartridge slot, right? Yeah, something like that. It's based on the actual LCD toy.

But you could have that on Game Boy. There was a sewing tutorial instructor software thing. There were dictionaries and Bibles. Oh, yeah, Info Genius. Workboy, workboy. Well, Workboy didn't come out. Oh, it never came out? No.

Okay, damn. Trust me, I would have had it. Me too. I had so many meetings when I was eight. What is Workboy? Workboy is basically a combination software and keyboard. that hooked onto the bottom and it was supposed to be

like a productivity suite thing Let's turn it into a PDA Yeah But other than that There was the InfoGenius series Which was like Spanish and French phrase books And a spell checker and like a travel guide Those did come out

And yeah Those were the adult ones I think one of the reasons They went for more gimmicky hardware on it Was that you've talked a lot about it sucking And I agree with you there But it sucked in very calculated ways It was controlled suck.

It was controlled suck. That 160 by 144 resolution with the 2-bit color palette meant you didn't need that much power to do a lot on the screen. And it did have four times the RAM of the NES and four times the video RAM. Did it? It did. It had 8K of RAM and 8K of video RAM. Because one of the weird things about Game Boy that I, according to Matt Bozahn, who programmed Game Boy Color Games, you didn't actually have. have enough RAM, like working visual RAM, video RAM, to put a unique tile on every space

of the screen. So you couldn't do like a full screen graphic without reusing some tiles. Although there's some difficulty on the NES with that too early and early mappers, wasn't there? Yeah, but then you got the later mappers. So it took over. No, I don't want to pretend I'm an expert on Game Boy game design at all. And having more RAM doesn't always mean on a system that you can harness it the way that you want to. But in terms of raw ability, that Z80 at 4 megahertz or so was okay, but it did have a total of 8xK of RAM inside it, and the NAS was only originally equipped with 2x2, but you could access it in different ways.

The NAS's chip was more sophisticated than the Game Boy's, and that allowed you to do some other stuff. Yeah, some other weird things that showed up, or interesting or valuable things that showed up in Game Boy cartridges, you got some real-time clocks. I don't know what the first game ever to have a real-time clock. built in was, but that was a big part of Game Boy. I think, I know at least the second Tamagachi game that was Japan only, had like a battery in it for a real-time clock. And then Pokemon second generation did also.

It did, yeah. It was really cool. It was a lot more efficiently designed because the Tamagachi cartridge is like very extendy. Right. Yeah. The lovely teal. There was a tilt sensor for Kirby Tilt and Tumble, which I questioned the value of, you know, game where you're moving

the very poor screen away from your face, but I like the idea there. I just don't know how practical it was. There were even some infrared sensors. There was something called G.B. Kiss that I've never been able to find, but I have some G.B. Kiss compatible

games. And I think they could share data through infrared, which is something you saw on Game Boy Advance with some of the Pokemon games. Yeah, I mean, this was before Game Boy Color had the integrated sensor. So this was like a Hudson thing. That's an adapter.

Which is especially odd since you had the link cable. Why would you want to do that? Because link cable is just one extra part that you need to fuss around with and, you know, a thing to lose. And, you know, an IR sensor lets you play from a greater distance. And because it's technology and it's a thing that they could do to make their cartridges stand out and make them unique. Never discount the factor of novelty that plays into game.

development and publishing design decisions. Yeah, the gimmicks really ramped up around the time the Game Boy Pocket came out, among other weird trends. Yeah, you started to see the link cable used for things besides multiplayer, like the Game Boy printer. And you had the Game Boy camera, which didn't use the link cable to function, but it was a camera that you plugged into the cartridge slot. Yes, of course.

Which was pretty wacky. I mean, at the same time, you know, Apple was released. the Nikon Quickshot for like $600 for a digital camera that could take, you know, 20 shots at 640 by 480. So Game Boy camera was not that far behind the curve with its, you know, its limited resolution. And it was way cheap. It was a fun little novelty. And you could, they gamified it. They gamified photography.

Yeah. Before Instagram filters. Oh, you're right. They made it fun, you know, also with their wacky visual design and stuff. And because it was durable, you could turn it into an in-store kiosk and sell a lot of them. I mean, the fact was, another nice thing about a Game Boy and most of its peripherals in general is that you can use it to beat smelted iron into shape in your Blacksmith's forge and it will still function afterward. And so you could have the Game Boy camera plugged in at a apartment store for months being dropped on the floor by children. It would still work and they would still buy it because they were taking pictures.

I thought they were usually mounted, weren't they? The ones I saw you could hold. All those just may have been broken and, you know, people were rough in my town. The kiosk broke, but the Game Boy didn't. Yeah. That's Nintendo. Yeah. So there was a lot of interesting stuff that came up and existed around Game Boy.

And, you know, some of the things even took away the basic nature of Game Boy, which was that it was portable. The Super Game Boy came along and allowed you to play Game Boy games through the Super NES console. on your television, which kind of negates one of the core values of Game Boy, but on the other hand, being able to play Metroid 2 and not, like, strain your eyes to figure out where you are and, like, there's a certain value there. That was a certain appeal. Jeremy, I feel like you've missed the most important peripheral of them all,

which is the wide variety of third-party devices designed to allow you to see the screen in the first place. Oh, you know, so I don't have any experience with those because I didn't own a Game Boy back in the day. And my experience with Game Boy has been on, you know, super Game Boy or on modded systems that have bright back lights or, you know, playing on Game Boy Advance or whatever. I didn't use any of those until the, so tell me, yes. Oh, I didn't use any of those until the Game Boy color. I just felt like the worm light was the thing everyone had.

Yeah, it was just so cheap and it worked forever and it was perfect. But it seemed like I always had a light nearby or like even at night there was like a little light I could turn on to play Game Boy. What about you, Ray? You had one probably earlier than any of us. I had the original light boy, yeah. I guess Victorkeye made that or somebody did. That was the thing that snapped over top, right? Snapped over top.

It was one of the simpler designed ones, which was just, yeah, a magnifying glass that was, yeah, reached over the screen and also had like a couple of very yellow lights trying to light up. Yeah, that was like the first one that you would get. And then, yeah, there was also weird ones that not even lights, but like the speakers, like the amplifiers. that would bolt onto the bottom. The quest for me was always something I could play in the black suit of the car at night because the Game Boy's one true enemy was when the sun went down.

That was the magazine ad. Yeah, that's what you needed there. I think you're just ripping off the magazine ad. Most of what I say is ripped off from somewhere. I was talking about that, that's here's catalog, but when you look at the 1991 ad there and you've got all the games and all the first-party stuff

and then prominently on the page, the only third-party thing on the page is a light boy. So it's like, nope, this too, or you know, it's such a ridiculous Frankensteinian thing, but I wonder how many millions of them they sold. The Game Boy is a reverse vampire. It craves the sun. So before we take a break, I do want to talk about Super Game Boy because that was really my first meaningful experience with Game Boy. Like my brother had a Game Boy that he did not ever let me play. He lent it to me once on a car trip, and I beat Super Mario Land in my first go.

And he resented that. Was this the movie The Wizard or your life? This is my life. This is my life. I beat Super Mario Land on the first go, and he had never been able to finish it. So he was like, you can't play this anymore. So that was it. There was a Game Boy, you know, just like feet away from me whenever I slept and I never got to touch it.

But Super Game Boy came out. And so I went and bought a bunch of cartridges of games that I wanted to play, like Zelda and Metroid 2. And, you know, for a very brief window of time, there was probably like six months in there when I was really heavily using Super Game Boy. And it was a great, great little device because it gave me access to Game Boy games that I, you know, for a lot less money than buying an actual Game Boy system. And I got to, you know, make use of them with colorization. And it was just a friendlier experience. I loved the fact that they, you know, they kept the actual Game Boy resolution on screen and then gave you borders. And there were fun and goofy borders that you could put around.

there and then, you know, later games came out that would have custom borders program into them, so the Super Game Boy would recognize them and boot up with those special borders or special color palettes. Nintendo being Nintendo, of course, it programmed the Super Game Boy to give Nintendo releases a little special advantage. They programmed it to recognize Nintendo First Party carts and give them, like, default palettes that were different than the standard palette. So, you know, playing a little bit of favorites there, but that's fine.

I bought one. I'm not even sure why. I had a Game Boy, but I think just the sheer novelty of seeing those games on a TV was more than enough for me. I mean, they were selling it with Donkey Kong. That's true. That's true. But I never bought Donkey Kong. Okay.

I don't play that until much later. I don't know why I didn't buy the enhanced games. I was like, oh, it'd be fun to play this on my TV. Yeah, I didn't know that Donkey Kong was a good and interesting game until many years later. I was like, well, Donkey Kong. I remember that when I was a little baby. In general, for those of us who were paying attention when it came out, it was like, yeah. Yeah, you buy it for Donkey Kong, essentially.

But they put Metroid 2 on the cover of the Super Game Boy. Yeah, I do feel like, Jeremy mentioned Metroid 2 earlier, that the entire Super Game Boy existed because someone inside Nintendo was just furious they couldn't finish Metroid 2. I feel like that is the canonical Super Game Boy release. I like it. Let's go with that. By far the greatest Super Game Boy release is Space Invaders. Space Invaders came out a couple of times.

There was a Japan-only release in 1990 that was just Game Boy Space Invaders. But then much later in the Game Boy's life, Space Invaders came out with a special Nintendo published enhanced cartridge that combined not only the original Game Boy release of Space Invaders from several years before, but also the Super NES release of Space Invaders that had just come out around the same time. And you could actually boot from Super Game Boy into the Super NES ROM. So it was like getting two versions of Space Invaders in one. It's really wild. There's also, they added, you know, like some color overlay options specifically for the Game Boy version of the game. So you could imitate like the cellophane strip version, which has, you know, little fake simulations of the off register cellophane overlapping each other. So some color clash at the boundaries.

They put a lot of heart into that release. But just the fact that they slipped an entire super NES game ROM into a Game Boy cartridge. That you would have to buy separately in Japan. Right, yeah. They were released separately in Japan. That was only in America. It's such a unique and weird release. I just love that it exists.

It's so great. Jeremy, when in life did you discover Super Game Boy 2? When I started doing Game Boy works and people were like, why are you using Super Game Boy? That's stupid. You should be using Super Game Boy, too. They were very nice about it. And then someone, someone let me, or actually donated a Super Game Boy 2, which was very generous. And so that's what I have been using.

And Super Game Boy 2 is great because it, one, it's translucent blue plastic. And as we all know, 90s translucent plastics are the best plastics. Yep. But two, the Super Game Boy, people were, you know, pooing that because the processor is like 3% off the actual Game Boy. the actual Game Boy itself. So it does manifest in like slightly off-pitch sound. So, you know, I can see the complaint there. But also Super Game Boy 2 adds a link cable support port for game.

That's the big deal. Yeah. I love that. I didn't even know the thing existed until I moved to Japan in about 2008, stumbled on to one and felt like I found like one of the lost cities of gold. I'm like, what is this? I don't know. But I do like to imagine some kid in the late 90s sitting with her, you know, a little sister in their living room together. One game boy plugged into the link cable, the other one.

Like, I don't know how many times in history it actually happened, but it sounds amazing. I'm sure it did happen from time to time. Yeah, I was contemporary with Pokemon. And then you could also hook it up to the printer. Yep. And, yeah, it's quality stuff. And I was going to say something else and I forgot. So let's take a break.

Thank you. I'm going to be able to be able to be. I'm going to be. So, Jared, you mentioned something about having found the lost city of gold. Let me tell you what the lost city of gold for Game Boy means in my world. And that is rare and unique games on the Nintendo. power flash ROMs that they distributed at kiosks in Japan. Oh, wow.

Like, I'm still on the lookout for Balloon Kid, or I guess Balloon FightGB. Yes. Yeah. But, yeah, in Japan, rewritable kiosks were a thing. On Famicom, it was disk system writers. But once you got to Super Nies and Game Boy, they produced cartridges that had rewritable flash inside of them. And I've, you know, whenever I see those and they're reasonably priced, I pick them up.

Super Famicom carts like that can be very, very expensive, but Game Boy stuff is usually still cheap because no one has any respect for Game Boy. So I've picked up, let's see, Street Fighter 2 and Kirby, one of the Kirby games, Blockball or something maybe. but I haven't found anything that I wouldn't otherwise be able to get. And there were a few games, just a handful, that were released only to the kiosk. One of them was Balloon Fight G.B., which was a Japan-only sort of reworking of Balloon Kid, which is the extremely good sequel to Balloon Fight. You can think of it as Blune Kid DX. Pretty much, yeah, it's a colorized version, I will. So we're all these, I know you use original hardware and software, were all these games dumped?

Are there any missing ones that have not been? I don't think so. I mean, I have, I have, oh, go ahead. Oh, some of our Nintendo gave away on 3DS because I have balloon fight GB on 3DS. I'm through their club Nintendo in Japan. I did not know that. Yeah. I did not know that. I missed out. Is that like a download only thing? Yeah, it was.

Okay. It was an e-shop thing. Also, Mario Deluxe, which, yeah. I have an illegally burned cartridge of balloon fight GB. And I feel okay about that because I own Balloon Kid. and there's also Tingle's Balloon Trip or whatever it's called, which is like a reworking of the same game. I do love me some balloon fight. If you feel too bad about it, just go to Frank Sevaldi.

He'll absolve you. Is he the priest of video game? He'll absolve at PRG. Yeah, you go into a little, just speak to him through a screen. You go out and you have to repeat message board threads five times in a row. Sounds terrible. I don't know if absolutely. is worth it.

Anyway, that's the kind of stuff that I'm always on the search for whenever I'm in Japan is like, what can't, what's really esoteric and weird? What can't I get on eBay? And that's what it's all about. Okay, so for the second half of this episode, the second, I don't know, the final third of this episode, I just want to talk about the games because that is ultimately Game Boy's strength. Yeah, the hardware was inexpensive because it was bad and it was ubiquitous.

but the reason it was ubiquitous was because it had so many great games on it. This was Nintendo at the height of their power, the monopolistic control over the world market. And as a result, everyone made games for Game Boy. There's even Sega games on Game Boy. Well, at least one. Not that Sega published it, but, you know, it did end up there. So it counts, by God.

And, yeah, like the Game Boy Library is fantastic. So I've kind of broken this up into a few different categories. But first of all is classic Nintendo franchises, because that's what everyone thinks of when they think of great Game Boy games. They're thinking, you know, Mario Zelda, Metroid, Kidacris, Balloon Kid, Donkey Kong, even Game Boy Wars, which was only in Japan. But you guys, have you had any experience with these games? Well, you mentioned Game Boy Wars. I played quite a bit of that. I really enjoyed it.

I didn't even know it existed until I moved to Japan again because I'm not a – I loved the Game Boy, and I played it throughout my life, but certainly – no way she perform a Game Boy scholar. But one of of the nice things

about the simplicity of most Game Boy games is that you don't have to

have a mastery of Japanese to enjoy even a lot of the Japanese

titles. And my own rudimentary Japanese was enough to get me

through Game Boy Wars. And so a very strange series of games

there, a collaboration between intelligence systems Nintendo and the later Hudson.

It's just Famicom Wars on a Game Boy. And again, for a low-res, low color screen, that sort of very deliberately paced game, is kind of perfect.

I enjoy it a lot. There's a turbo version of the original because there is. I have that. Oh, you have that. Okay. I haven't played it, but I haven't. Yeah, it does take a while to make up its mind. That's, it's one weakness, but they address that with that version.

Oh, is that why it's turbo because of the AI? Yes, it's actually just a sped-up AI that's smarter and quicker. Got it. Because the AI in Game Boy Wars is not spectacular in the first game. Yeah, I mean, I have played some like showgi games, and there's one episode of Game Boy Works that I put together where I actually show the game making a decision in real time, and it takes about 45 seconds for the computer to make a single move. So I can definitely see that with Advance Wars. It's not as complex as Go, but yeah, that Z80 processor, 4 megahertz, not really a powerhouse for artificial intelligence. There is. I don't remember which of the carts it is. I don't know if it's one or it might be two.

But the cover of the cartridge is just like a photograph of a bunch of buff GI guys in fatigue, staring. And it's lovely. It's the most non-Nintendo. Is that Game Boy War? Or Game Boy Wars? That's Game Boy Wars 2, I think. It might be one. But I think it's two because I think I remember seeing a Hudson label on it. Okay. Yeah, I like Game Boy Wars Turbo just because it's one of the nine-hundred. in games that came in bandage tins. Oh, those are cool. I don't know why they did that, but they were, I don't keep a lot of games. I don't know.

Like, I buy them to document them, photograph them, and publish them, and then I get rid of them, like, you know, saw them or whatever, give them away. But this, I said, these are really unique and cool. I want to own all of these. So I did track down all nine-o's games, and they are one of the few things in my permanent collection. I, yeah, like, do you know anything about the history of those, Ray? No, I just think they wanted to stand out. They did. Yeah, they succeeded.

I mean, some of the games are actually pretty good. I mean, I don't have much to use for Momotaro Dintetsu, but... Who does here? Right? A board game about creating trains or something like that. But then they have, like, a collection of bonk games, and that's great, a collection of Bomberman games. It's not just one, it's four.

That's fantastic. It's a good value proposition. Well, I will say, Jeremy, a decade ago, you wrote a lot for one-up about the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy. Oh, I did? Okay. You wrote a lot. Just Ray. And Ray, too.

Sorry. I think this is something that Jeremy wrote about. I think you wrote a lot about Mario Land 1 or was that Ray? I don't even know. Okay. It's on the Internet somewhere. Somebody find it. But you convince me that's not a bad game, but it's still a game I really dislike Mario Land 1, and I can respect it for trying.

to that hard to be a Mario game that early with their knowledge of the software. But even at the time, I didn't like it. But I feel like what Mario Land would eventually become is what I really like, the Wario games, Mario Land 3 and onwards. I mean, I categorize that under new Nintendo franchise. It's such a different take. The whole thing about what I hate about Mario Land 1 that they fix in the second game is like the jump is wrong. Like the jump is off. He falls like a brick.

The jump just feels bad. And that can't happen in a Mario game. And I could never, even as a kid, I was like, the jump is wrong. So, but I understood it. I was on board with a weird Mario, but. I feel like, yeah. It's kind of like the N.S. Metal Gear of Mario. Oh, wow.

Yeah. You don't have any of the original developers making it. That's a little mean. No, I didn't. I mean, is it not any of the original developers when the people who worked on it had worked on stuff like Mario Brothers and Wrecking Crew? Yes. It is just like.

I don't know. I feel like I think that Mario Land, at least. Unlike NES Metal Gear is a fully functional product, I enjoy it. I think they did a lot of smart things, had the very small sprites, which I think it was easier for them to start small and build up so that by Mario Land 2 that it's a little prettier, but they still have good real estate management. And that first level loop, that music is so good. Music is really good. I think it's brevity works in its advantage. Yeah.

And novelty, too. It's just like we kind of mentioned the. Batman game-boy game, and Super Mario Land is kind of similar to that because it's like tiny characters, things are a little off, and then half the game is a shooter, or like a big chunk of the game is a shooter. So you take Mario into the toy pop and the sub-pop, or what is it called? I think Sub-Pop is a record label. It is.

Anyway, yeah, you're in a plane and a submarine, and the final boss is actually an alien and a flying saucer that you have to gun down. I don't hate Super Mario Land, but it's quirky. So, like, in the context of its time, it really feels like a middle step between game and watch and Super Mario Brothers. Like, with the tiny graphics, very simplistic play, sort of rigid physics, you know, and you don't shoot fireballs. You shoot the super ball that bounces around the screen at 45-degree angles, like the diamond and Symphony of the Night. I really feel like it's this kind of midpoint between those two things. And I think it works in that context.

No, if they had made another game exactly like that three years later, that would have been a disaster. But this was, you know, the very beginning where they were like, what can you do with a handheld system? And we didn't talk about Nintendo's, like the Game Boy's predecessors, but it was not the first handheld system. It was not the first handheld system with, you know, interchangeable cartridges. But what had come before was Microvision, which had, what, a 16 by 16, you know, monochrome one-bit display. And then there was Epic's Pocket Game Computer. which was less limited, but still more limited than Game Boy, and only had like four games for it or something like that.

Yeah, they're a pretty decent poor to scramble and not much else. It had Soko Bon. Yeah. So there's that. Yeah, actually, we're going to be recording about that with Crayman, her friend who actually owns that collection. He's going to be joining us at Midwest Gaming Classic to finally let me play an Epic Pocket Game Computer

and we'll record an episode about it based on those real-time impressions, it's going to be great. But, you know, looking at what had come before and what, you know, the departure that Nintendo took with Game Boy, like, you understand why Mario Land coming day one was kind of janky and simplistic. But, you know, in that context, I think it's really strong. And I think, again, you know, if they had kept, you know, in that same vein, it would have been bad. But they, you know, went steps beyond that for the secret.

So it's fine. You kind of You kind of Perfect segue here. in Game and Watch twice, but speaking of Nintendo franchises that sort of came back to life on the platform, Game Boy Gallery is one of my favorite things on Game Boy. I loved Game and Watch growing up, and I didn't even know contemporaneously that it existed. I only discovered it later, but to find these wonderful versions of the Game and Watch games improved in just about every way, playable in Game Boy. That's a really neat thing.

Yeah, a lot of what you saw on Game Boy from Nintendo first-party development, developers was from R&D 1, so they were building on that individual studio's legacy. So Super Mario Land kind of does feel more like a sequel to Mario Brothers than to Super Mario Brothers in some regards. You know, they're kind of reaching further back into history before Super Mario Brothers sort of defined Mario. Metroid, you know, that was R&D 1, so they made an actual proper sequel. Kid Icarus is of Myth and Monsters, is, would you consider that a sequel or a

remake. I feel like it's not just a remake. It's a different game. It's a different game. It's a better game for sure. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Balloon Kid takes balloon trip from balloon fight and turns it into like a full-fledged game with some interesting mechanics. It's almost a platformer, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you can stop and let go of your balloons and run around and then, you know, you're never grounded because you can just create new balloons by taking a few seconds to inflate some more. And you can, you know, there's kind of this tactical element to it where each balloon you inflate requires a set amount of time sort of stuck on the ground motionless. So you can, you know, just quickly inflate one balloon, but then that means if something hits you, you can only take one hit before you fall and die.

But if you take a little longer, you can inflate two, so then you can soak up an extra hit. Yeah, that was a game so good they put Hello Kitty in it. Yeah, Hello Kitty World. Yeah, Hello Killip World on Famicom is, it's even got the same music. It's got same, it's got Balloon Fight music. It's great. But Balloon Kit is also, I was going to say it's one of the first great Nintendo localizations, but I don't know if it was because it never came out in Japan until Balloon Fight GB for Game Boy Color, like 10 years later.

But, you know, the background is like, you know, school desk utensils, pencils, pencils, and pins and stuff. And so it takes place in the land of Pennsylvania. So even back then you saw Nintendo saying, let's do grown-worthy things in our game localizations. That's like a Dragon Quest-worthy pun. That's terrible. It's right up there, yeah. And then, of course, you had, you know,

you did have Nintendo EAD or R&D4 or whatever it was called at the time, Miyamoto's group making their own games. And those were notable because they were less, quirky and weird than the R&D 1 games. They were more like kind of bread and butter Nintendo games. I mean, Link's Awakening is kind of the weirdest Nintendo Zelda game, but

like Donkey Kong is just taking the concept of the original arcade Donkey Kong and amplifying it to the nth degree. What else is there? I feel like there were other games. Oh, Mulmania. Molmania was a totally new game. And it's just a great kind of

like puzzle action game with that kind of Miyamoto kiss of appeal. Yeah, but that was a late release, so I feel like a lot of people missed it. I certainly did. Yeah, until... I didn't look through to us.

Link's Awakening felt to me like a proof of concept for what you could accomplish eventually with portable gaming. That was one where it was very weird, very experimental, very humorous and lighthearted, and then turns around and kind of punch you should in the gut there at the end. In an action game in a way, I didn't expect at all, This is an action-adventure game. And at a time, you mentioned earlier, Jeremy, that even today, Game Boy, in some ways, gets very little respect.

But at the time, it was completely considered a throwaway by most of the market. Link's Awakening felt like something that was trying to make you experience something a little deeper than just momentary entertainment. It had a beginning, middle, and an end that were designed to elicit emotion in you. And I feel like it was an important step in portable gaming for that. Yeah, I mean, it's a game good enough that they can basically do a one-to-one remake of it with better graphics more than 25 years later. I do hope that they will change the power acorn music, so it's not constantly interrupting the experience. But other than that, it seems like it's a pretty direct adaptation, which says a lot, you know, about the quality of Link's Awakening. Oh, yeah.

So, you know, Nintendo did come up with new ideas or published new ideas. They had Pokemon from Game Freak. I don't think we need to talk about that. Kirby was a Hal game that Nintendo took under its wing. And that was kind of the point at which Hal became like a powerhouse, I would say. They struggled a lot before that. But this was them at their best. Wave Race got it start on Game Boy.

And, of course, Wario Land. We've had a full Wario Land episode. But I don't think we ever spurn the opportunity to talk about Wario Land. Is that correct, Bob? It's true. May it rest in peace. What? Oh, I brought it back with WarioLand Virtual Boy.

Oh, that's right. Yes, that's one I need to play. But, yeah, I mean, it's back now. We did an entire episode like six years ago almost now. It's number two of this independent run. But it's Mario Land 2 was a much slower game than a Mario game typically would be. And then Mario Land 3 was Wario Land. And it was like, let's give you big levels.

You explore vertically and horizontally. And the point is to find things, not just to get to the end. So they are really understanding like a Mario game. game can't be fast on the Game Boy, let's give you a slower character, a slower, bigger character. Also, note, Mario's Picross. And that series lives on without Mario.

There's like a new Pickross game from Jupiter every two or three weeks, I think, at this point. Is there like a smartphone one that is really predatory to, like, a Pokemon one or something like that? Not exactly, like, official? Oh, no, there's like a 3DS one that's like that. There's some weird three to play one, yeah.

That I've heard nothing but complaints about. Oh, yeah, yeah, I did play that a bit, and was like, oh, there's, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure about this with the time rest feature. No, thanks. I don't need that. There's mini now. There's mini, mini, mini. Yeah, but, you know, Jupiter is still publishing Picross games on Switch, and like I said, they've, I think there's like eight of them now.

There were nine on 3DS, and there's like three on Switch now. Oh, I thought it was more than that. Okay, well, in any case, that's one, you know, like one every year or so. Yeah. And that's, you know, with 150 puzzles or so, it's plenty. I mean, one of them is anime license, so. Ah, no. I do kind of want to play that Konami

Pickross game. It's only on iOS. It's a good attempt. It's not the same. You probably won't like it as much as far as playing for comfort. No one else quite gets it. No, I don't know why.

Yeah. Maybe there's some patents. I don't know. So what else? I'm kind of running low on time. So I'm just going to run down the list. Sure. Speak in.

If something here piques your interest. All right. Load Runner. Do we have thoughts on Load Runner? I like Load Runner. I saw the commercial for it in Japan. Really? Really?

Really good animation or something? No, it was just really smooth anime animation, yeah. I tweeted that a while back. Okay, I missed that. The Game Boy Port of Load Runner is an expert's only kind of thing. It is not a kid-friendly game. That was like all of them after the first one. Yeah, the first one starts out really easy.

And I guess they just assumed, oh, everyone's played Load Runner all the way through. So let's start with expert level and just go from there. Is that one of those series that really took off in Japan, but not some much? much in America. I feel like there's a game in America, and then, like, Japan really liked it more than us. We had quite a few games, but I don't... Ray, do you want to talk about this? Okay, well, really quickly, it kind of goes both ways.

There's lots of load runner games in America, yes, but in Japan, they were just made by different people, like mostly Hudson and such, so it was kind of like a Hudson franchise over there, and other ports and things came out on computers and stuff over here. So, I mean, it was made in North America, so, I mean, it is a computer classic. The designer was Doug Smith, a very American kind of guy. And I think the series owes its popularity in Japan to the fact that the port for Famicom and for several different computers, I think like the, what is it called, the MX-1? Oh, M-Z whatever? M-Z, yeah, M-Z-1.

There were a couple of ports for PCs that all happened almost contemporaneously with the American release, which didn't really happen that often. There tended to be a delay in localization, but they just, you know, those came out. out over in Japan really, really early when the game was still hot and new and burning up the Apple II sales charts in America. And I actually interviewed the team at Tozai Games, which owns Load Runner now. They actually bought it outright. And, you know, their feeling is that, you know,

load Runner was one of the very first third-party Famicom games that showed up right as the Famicom was exploding. So that helped lift Load Runner. But Load Runner was already really popular. over there, so they say, you know, we also think that Load Runner helped lift the Famicom at the same time. So it was just kind of one of those mutual things, but it did sell incredibly well. Hudson produced a few extras, and then the license jumped over to IREM, who had done, like, the arcade conversion of Load Runner right around the time that the Famicom game launched. And the guy who runs Tozai, Scott Sumura, he was actually with IREM's arcade division at the time.

And so he has like a close relationship with Lod Runner going all the way back to like 1984 or so. That I didn't know. I played it way too late, which is why I don't like the game very much. There's a piece up at Polygon that I wrote about Tozai that you might find interesting, right? You should check it out.

I think the Apple 2 version is still the most playable one today. It's probably still the best. I love the Apple 2 version. But the weirdly, this is one case where another hand held out, the Links port of Lod Runner, I think, is better than the Game Boy one. I didn't realize it was on Links. there's links port So let's see

What else In the puzzle field Worth mentioning Amazing Penguin Which is You ever played that one? Which penguin one is that? It's the Natsumei penguin one

Okay so you're like There's like lines And little Points on the line that you're trying to It's kind of like a territory Claiming game Yeah okay yeah yeah Yeah it's pretty fun

Yeah It's really expensive now Which is a shame Tetris Yeah Never heard of it Yeah That's a good pass

Bubble Ghost Yay bubble ghost Yay, bubble ghost. Now that's also interesting, sort of like Lodrunner, because it was like a British computer game originally, but then they made a much better Japanese game boy version in Ivan. I think Ketoshi Sakamoto, that was his first game he did music for. No kidding.

I was looking at his discography the other day. I was like, wow, I didn't know he did the music for bubble ghosts. Okay. I had no idea. That's awesome. Yeah. It rules. Another of those PC games that made its way over to Game Boy under a different title is CatTrap,

or started out as Pitman. Yes. And it's like a game where you are a cat. Cat Boy or Cat Girl running around mazes full of Frankensteins. And what makes this game interesting is that it has a full braid-style rewind feature. So if you mess up, you can just rewind. It's like an undo, yeah. Yeah.

But it's like comprehensive all the way back to the beginning of the stage. That's incredible. Yeah, it feels really way ahead of its time. It's a really good game. Diedelian Opus. Yeah. How dare they name it that? Yeah.

That's the Bloom County. Yeah, it was just called like Adventure Road in Japan. I don't know why they said. Oh, yes, Diedelian Opus. Puzzle Road? A puzzle, yeah. Oh, it's adventure. Boken puzzle road.

Yes, yes, yes. Is God on the cover of this game? Like a guy with a big beard? It is a deity of some sort. It might be a... More of a Jesus-ish. Not so much God. But, yeah, I mean...

I guess that's not actually in the game. You and I have to talk about it because it's basically a clash of demonhead semi-s sequel. Kind of. But it has nothing to do, like, gameplay-wise. It's just the same art. It's just the same... Yeah, it's like the same art, same typography. Wow.

There's like an old man with a white bristly mustache and a little fairy, and they're like, well, you solve this one, let's go on to the next. But the gameplay itself is actually that 3DS street pass game. You know, okay, so you know the haunted manor? Yeah, the favorite one. Okay, so, yeah. So, you know, occasionally people will be like, oh, also, I found this puzzle. Would you like to try to solve it? Like those little bonus puzzles that you get, that is the entirety of puzzle road or a dideline opus.

The back of the box tells you how to pronounce the game's name, which is a... You could tell it's a mistake of it. If you need to include that guide with it. It's pronounced Guy R Us, right? That's also wrong. Oh, damn it. One more, I want to... One more game like that.

Nail and Scale, which is a... I haven't played that one yet. Spiritual sequel, I guess, to a game that came out on MSX called Quimple. Yeah, it's basically... It's a puzzle platformer where you basically shoot nails into the wall and use that to, like, climb up and reach the goal, sort of that. It's very fun. I want to try that out.

Yeah. And then finally, Quicks, which we, I think Jared mentioned before, was developed, co-developed and published by Nintendo, so it has Nintendo characters in it. You get, like, racist versions of Mario, whatever you can put your own. Mario, it is most racist. It's a shameful past. Oh, I went to Spain. Apparently, now I'm a foolfighter.

They had graphics. They were going to make even Native American Mario on that that they did not use. Oh, perhaps. Wow. Bullet dodged. Nipped in the bud, yes. Okay. They cannot re-release release Mario, like.

into then. So I mentioned balloon fight and Metroid 2 and Kidacris of Myths and Monsters, but Game Boy actually had a lot of NES ports and sequels that are worth mentioning, beginning with

Bugs Bunny his, what is it, Haunted Castle? Crazy Castle, that's it, yes. Haunted. Yes. Oh yeah, Bugs Bunny and Haunted Castle, taking the place of Simon Belmont. That's what I want to do.

I think I'd rather play Bugs Bunny and haunted castle. But that has a weird history behind it. It was like a Roger Rabbit game, and then it was Mickey Mouse on Game Boy. And then when it came to the U.S., they were like, it's Bugs Bunny now. It didn't end up Woody Woodpecker eventually, too. Woody Woodpecker and eventually Kid Clown, who normally lives in Nightmare World. Yeah, one of my mom's favorite games ever.

She never played Tetris, but she did love Dr. Mario and Crazy Castle. She's a little. You don't have a Blastermaster Boy on here. Yes, that's not a Blaster Master game. We finally got a true Blaster Master sequel this week. Thanks to IntiCreates. It's only taken 30 years. Well, wait, that's the second one, though, right?

Well, no. Zero was a remake of the NES game. Ah, got it. Blastermaster's Zero 2 is finally a proper actual, honest-to-God sequel to Blastermastermastermaster. And it's horny now. Oh, good.

Oh, no. I was waiting for now. Why? Can you play a gal gun in this or something? Is the tank hot now? No, there's just some chesty things. Okay. That's not good.

All right. Anyway, back to the happy days of Game Boy. Yeah, DuckTales was a good port. Oh, yeah, it was pretty good. You know, and Boor Eye Fighter also. Those were both games where they took the NES graphics and scaled them down just a little bit. So they kept all like the sort of superficial detail, but they were more playable. They gave you more maneuvering room, which is something we talked about earlier and something that I lament many times over in Game Boy works.

Which was first, Kid Dracula Famicom or Fit Kid Dracula Game Boy? Because I don't know. I like Kid Dracula Game Boy way more, but I don't actually know which one came first. Don't know, I couldn't tell you, actually. I didn't come prepared. I know that one of them cost $1,000 now, and one of them does not. Well, since they're both out there and available, we'll just pretend at support of the NES game, because that's a darn well-done little platformer.

It just seems perfectly made for Game Boy. Yep, yep. Let's see. Battle of Olympus. Did you guys ever play that? It only came out in Europe. Yeah, but it's like a direct conversion of the NESK. game and it's kind of bad.

I did not know that. It has some issues. I love Battle of Opus on N. I had no idea there was a Game Boy version. I interviewed the creator of Battle of Olympus a few years ago, Yukio Horymoto. And I asked him, like, did you have any involvement with the Game Boy adaptation? He was like, there was a Game Boy version? He had no idea.

He had some money. That's, you know, that's a good sign. That's great. Let's see. There were some pretty good Bomberman games, including one called Atomic Punk, which I don't know why they did that, but it's like straight. up, like, the original Bomberman plus an adventure mode. And Mario was in one of those.

Mario Blast. Mario Blast, featuring Bomberman is the official title. Include him in there. And Blastermaster Boy started out as a bomber man game, didn't it? It's Bomber King. Yeah, Bomber King. Yeah. Which is the same as a Robo Warrior, right?

Yes. Yes. Love those localization choices. Good times. Flashback to the Wonder Boy. I'm a big man of Ninja Guideon Shadow, which is not a ninja guideon game. It is a shadow of the ninja game. That Tecmo was like, you guys totally ripped us off.

We'll just buy this from you and publish it as our game. No, that's good, but I do want to lean in for a second on Ninja Spirit, S&ES, or pardon a Game Boy Port. Have you ever played it? No, you mentioned that it is very beautiful. It is not just beautiful. It's eminently playable. You probably played this on Tropicraphics, if you played it in America. But I think this is a port of the arcade game.

It shouldn't work, but they get the screen scaling just right. It's smooth. It's gorgeous and detailed. All the weapons are there. All the levels are there. It's startling how well it's realized. I stumbled on to this in a game shop years. It's like five bucks in Japan.

Nobody has bought this. I'll have to look it up sometime. Let's see. On the more traditional side of things, you have variable quality Mega Man and Castlevania games. Some of them are good and some of them are not. I don't know why they couldn't be more consistent, but there you go. And then a Boyna's Blab got a sequel, which was basically just like a few little sequences from the NES game. Oh, yeah.

It's like the NES game, but with most of the content stripped out, it takes like 10 minutes to beat if you know what you're doing. Yeah, for sure. It's a weird, yeah, kind of, but I mean, there's more like, I know what you mean, though, yeah. Yeah, there's more roaming around and stuff. It's just like the Game Boy version is, hey, remember that Switch puzzle? Well, here it is again, and that's it. I think it is cursed by the Game Boy Resolution. It's one of those games that really, one of those NES trends exposed games that doesn't work as a resolution.

No one that does work, that actually, again, it's kind of perfect because the Game Boy's aesthetic is Solomon's Club, where you have a Solomon's Key downscale, and it works really well. Yeah, Solomon's Club, Bomb Jack, Bubble, Bobble. There were a bunch of games kind of converted over that did pretty well. Gargall's Quest works pretty well on Game Boy. That started out in Game Boy. That was a Game Boy game, and then they released a Game Boy sequel, and then they said, let's put this on NES also. And let's see, what else?

Double Dragon, actually, they adapted the NES. game and kind of expanded on it. So it's kind of like a remake and kind of like a sequel. I don't know. It's very hard. There's no mercy in the checkpoint system in that game. Yeah, I don't like that game.

There's even some super NES ports, including Mr. Nuts. You're starting off, starting off strong. Excuse me. Forget it. So you mentioned RPGs. We talked about Final Fantasy legend. Final Fantasy adventures, you know, an action RPG. We talked about Sort of Hope, Gargoyles Quest.

Also, worth noting, is Legend of the River King. and Survival Kids, which was Konami's like survival... Was that Game Boy Color? That's Game Boy Color, I think. Oh, I thought it was a hybrid game. Maybe it is. I could be wrong. I don't know, but it lived on with Lost and Blue.

I love Survival Kids. That's a wonderful game. But, yeah, Final Fantasy Legend 2, I think, is still pretty playable of those three. And finally, I do want to give a shout out to some hidden gyms on the Game Boy. Anything with the Meldak label, I think, is good. Heyankio Alien I would be remiss if I didn't mention but it is a very good conversion

of a very old game It was more than 10 years old By the time it made it to Game Boy They did a nice job with it Then they added like Kind of a remix version With new mechanics and new graphics Mercerinary Force is

Wacky I love it It's hard You want to talk a little bit of that one? Let me see if I remember it correctly It's kind of like a shoot-em-up But you basically choose a party of warriors set in medieval Japan.

Yeah, yeah, in Japan. And then I guess you basically try not to have the monkey die. Right. You can change formations on the fly. Yeah, that's right. I can't control the characters individually, but you can, like, shift their configuration with the press of life. It's trying to remember what kind of game that was like.

It's sort of like a schmup, but where you're controlling your options. Like, if you have grandiose options, you can move them into different formations. It also kind of reminds me conceptually a little bit of Bokoska Wars. Maybe not really, but I don't know, just the idea of like a team of people kind of fighting their way across the countryside. And the hidden secret in that game is that you can beat it, but you don't get the true ending unless the princess character is in your party, who is, by the way, the weakest and most vulnerable character. I did not know that. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, though. They almost localized it as Ultima shots. It was going to be a shoot-em-up based on Ultima. Oh, my God. Yep. Good time.

Cave Noir, which is like I keep hearing it's really good. It is. Am I going to enjoy it? Yeah, it's from Konami, so it has Konami quality to it. Yeah. The good old days. The sharing port to Game Boy outside of the Japanese language stuff is excellent.

It's really a lot of fun. Someday I will play that too. There were actually some pretty good racers on Game Boy. F1 Race was the game that shipped with the four-player adapter. It's solid if you like F1 racing. Roadster is a top-down, racing game that I expected nothing from, but really, really liked when I

played. That is from like Tonkin House or something. Is that the one that has the pipes in it? No, that's Dead Heat Scramble and it is pure liquid shit. I hate it so much. I really liked Super Off Road for Game Boy. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's

a game that, like, that's just fun anywhere. Yeah, yeah. I recently covered that on Super N.E.S. And it's just so fun. One of my better purchases for Game I've never played the Game Boy version. All right. There's Chalvo 55, which only came out in Japan. The Drug Runner?

No. It's a, it's a podcast. It's a sequel to the unreleased game Bound High from Virtual Boy. What is this called again? Chalvo 55. Oh. Atomic Runner Chalvo? No, no, you guys, you're totally in the wrong.

No, it's like this little bug-eyed guy. It's from Japan supply system. It's a very late release for Game Boy only in Japan. Okay. But, yeah, it's a pretty fun little platformer. Related to bound high. It has to be good. Yeah.

Trip World, I mentioned earlier. It's a Sunsoft game, beautiful, amazing soundtrack with, like, nonviolent gameplay. You're like just roaming the world and just seeing what's out there. People think it's like Mr. Gimic. It's not exactly. I mean, in that, it has great music and graphics, but it's not exactly like Mr. Gim. And we would be remiss if we didn't mention for the Frog the Belt Holes. Yes.

Play that, everybody. It's been translated unofficially. And if you like Zelda games, it's not like a... Zelda game at all, but has the same kind of sense of humor as Link's Awakening and a lot of fun puzzles. They need to include a remake of that as a bonus on Link's Awakening. That would be neat.

Wouldn't that be too good for them to actually do? They should do that. They really should have released that game originally back in the 90s. I think it would have been a fun and popular game. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say also X is another big one that Nintendo published. It's another game. I don't know why they didn't release that here. It's so cool.

Almost did. Yeah. It was going to be called Lunar Chase. There's a ROM of like the the first stage floating around out there. Oh, yeah. Yep. That's another one that's pretty accessible, even if you don't speak on Japanese. Yeah, I mean, well, kind of.

If you don't speak Japanese, you're going to be like, what am I supposed to do here? You need a guide or something, for sure. You need to say it with a fact and do it, though. Yeah. Revenge of the Gator, a great pinball game. Actually, the hell, the good pinball game

before Kirby's pinball wound. Yeah. Anything that hell makes pinball-wise is so good. Yeah. And I've played some other pinball games on Game Boy that are a good reminder. of why Revenge of the Gator is so good. The physics on the ball, the movement, the animation,

like they make it feel very, like you have great control over the ball. Whereas the, what was it, the pinball party by Jalico? Oh, pinball quest? No, pinball party. It's a Japan-only game. It's like all these Jalico mascots

hanging out in a pinball game, and it's really kind of bad. It's disappointing. And then finally, I don't know, did you have something else you I got a few. Sagaya is actually still fun, I think. That's a Darius game, right?

Yeah, it's a Darius game. It's well done with the shaving on Game Boy. Most shooters, I mean, SolarStrikeers, okay. But this one actually, you can see what's going on the whole time. And that's hard in a Game Boy shooter to pull off. Ray, did you get that one on Switch? Yeah. You did order the bonus version.

And I can't believe it's a separate app. I'm really bummed that I, it's stupid. I don't need that on Switch at all. But I'm sad that I missed the 30-minute window in which that was a Oh, I'm sorry. Well, you're not missing much. I know. It's just the principle of the thing.

I know. Samurai Showdown is way better than has a new business being. That's one of the super deformed fighters. And it feels more like a NeoGeopocket game. Yeah, I'm saying, is that where they kind of came up with the guidelines for NeoGeo? Same with Battle Arena to show. Oh, sorry. I do want to say, one of my favorite things to talk about Game Boy is when Nintendo of America started just releasing a bunch of fighting games in like 95.

So they did a lot of the Takar games and they just did Street Fighter 2 and Killer Insinct and it was just like what was the idea there exactly but I mean hey at least we got them It was good. It was content that was out there and probably very easy to localize. Yeah, I think it was yeah

but it was like right before a Game Boy Pocket so they were just trying to like refresh the system somehow. Yeah, because in 1995 the system was pretty well dead. Yeah. At least here. Like it still existed but I didn't know anyone who was like yeah, Game Boy. It's like, hey, here's still Shindon.

Well, I stand by, my belief, that the only good battle arena to a shenning game is the Game Boy one. That tracks. It's actually quite fun. It's a low bar, but yes. And then the Bioniccanendo port, the black and white one, is really good. Yes. It is, it's very good, actually. It's a great example of retooling the graphics to make use of the limited available space.

Because Rad Spencer, he's so tiny in that one. But you really need. room to maneuver in that game because you're swinging around and they really whiffed it with the Game Boy Color game where your characters are huge and it's nice that you know

their character is nicely animated and the lady has leg warmers but like it's it's really hard to know where you're swinging and that's not a good way to play a video game I also feel honor bound to enjoy Godzilla

even though it's not good because it is the only compile game on Game Boy that is not a Pollo game and I just You're allowed to enjoy Puyo Puyah, though Yeah, Puyo Puyo is wonderful But it's still They tried

But it just plays like China Warrior On Gameboy Nope Nothing No time. And as I expected, we could have just kept going and going, but

we'll have to stop here. So I wanted to ask if you guys have any final, like a final word on Game Boy for this episode. I'm sure we'll revisit the topic someday. Maybe on its 40th anniversary. Oh, my God. If you want to... Wow, I just felt the chill of

the grim reaper reaching your shoulder. If you want to collect loose carts, if you just want to collect old games, play them, have them. and have hardware that works with them. I think the Game Boy is the perfect system. I collect a lot of Game Boy games that way, and it's relatively affordable.

The games are interesting. And because generally when you're collecting like that, you're only playing them for hour bursts anyway, it's kind of perfect. You can play the whole game and then sit it down and maybe not pick it up for another year. Yeah, I mean, I've made it difficult for myself with Game Boy Works by wanting to document the packaging.

But if you don't care about the packaging, gameboy games are an easy, cheap pickup, up, especially, you know, if you want to pick up import stuff, just go to any Japanese gaming shop in, like, Tokyo or Kyoto or whatever. And they're just going to have a wall of games and little plastic blisters. They're also, they're also going to have a box full of Tamagachi. Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to Hardoff, and it's just like multiple crates full of just Tamagachi and like Oni one. Not all four of them? No, no. It's usually one or three.

Okay. I would say, you know, the Game Boy really did a good job of, like, keeping alive the lo-fi 8-bit technology. And I think things like the Wonder Swan, and if you want to go simpler, like the Tamagachi, like I said, or the pocket station owes a lot to the Game Boy still kicking around for so many years, more than a decade. And, yeah, it really showed that you can keep making good software with that kind of low-powered technology.

Yeah, I mean, I would say the spirit of Game Boy continues to inform Nintendo. The Switch is basically an underpowered, invidia shield, but they did interesting things with that technology that Nvidia did not do and so instead of being like a thing that happened and no one cared about became, you know, one of the fastest

selling systems of all time. Nintendo, when they, you know, when they say let's, let's keep costs down, let's do interesting, innovative things with kind of underpowered, you know, seasoned technology as the phrase goes. That's when they're at their best.

Absolutely. It has such an impact on me, that I call every Nintendo portable system a Game Boy and it confuses people, except for the Switch. What's the Game Boy? What is this? I don't call the Switch a Game Boy. It's the first one where I haven't done that, but I would be hanging out with like a girlfriend or a friend like, oh, have you seen my Game Boy? Game Boy?

My 3DS. That's not a Game Boy. No, no. A 3DS is a game boy. Bob has his own grandparents. That's exactly. I'm going to be the old man I still calling the remote a clicker. I feel like that's going to be me. Someone at Nintendo right now is just crying. It's no, Bob. My third pillar strategy, no. I think if you call every

Nintendo system, a Game Boy, you have to call it Nintendo, not Nintendo. Nintendo Game Boy, yeah. I think the Switch will break me of that because if I can play it on a TV, it's not a Game Boy, I guess, that's what my brain works, but I still posit the 3DS is a Game Boy. Where does Super Game Boy fit into this rubric? Oh, that doesn't count.

I'm thrown out. I almost got you in a logic loop, but I guess I can't beat the supercomputer this time. I pride myself on my logic. All right, anyway, so for me, Captain Kirk and the rest of the Retronauts crew, this has been the Game Boy retrospective 30 years of Game Boy episode.

Yes, that's correct. So anyway, hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, GameSpite on Twitter, a guy at retronauts.com. Otherwise, and Retronauts is a podcast, as you may have noticed. You can find it on things like iTunes, Lipson, various and sundry other podcasting things like Google Play. We're all over the place out there. And if you want to, if you really love Retronauts and are like, I have to get more Retronauts into my life sooner. You can go to patreon.com

slash retronauts and subscribe to us where you get every episode a week early at a higher bit rate with no advertisements. It's $3 a month, which is less than a coffee at Starbucks and is a lot better for you. So I highly recommend it.

Jared, where can we find you on the internet? I make a little show every now and then called Pockets Full of Soup, which is stories about people and who they're thankful for. I also make a few little video game series over to a place called Hot Blipin'A Jump.com. You can go to Hot Blipin'AJump.com and find my stuff there.

Occasionally stream old games on a series called Recollection. And just generally around pontificating and babbling and coherently into various microphones. Ray, yourself? I ain't doing shit now. No. I'm just kidding, sort of, because I kind of just lost my job and I'm doing freelance stuff. But I did just get back from GDC, and so I should be working. on game development some more.

You can follow me on Twitter at RDBAAAA in my game company, B-Peddle Dog. Yeah. That's about it. How's, what's the latest with Blast Rush? Working on something related to it. Not announcing anything today. Is there an expanded universe for Blast Rush?

No. I had, the funny thing is, I wrote the fiction. I wrote the story of the game, like, about three days before it came out. Okay. You got to make it sex here. Yeah. So no story of Bible is what you're saying. No, unless I hair somebody for it.

No, no novel featuring Marjade, Talancard, all the rest. No. Bob, let's wrap this thing up. Yeah, let's do it. Hey, I'm on Twitter. It's Bob Servo. I also have a lot of other podcasts under the Talking Simpsons network. It's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

We have Talking Simpsons. What a cartoon. And we're currently doing Talking of the Hill. That's a Patreon exclusive podcast along with things like Talking Futrama and Talking Critic. If you want those, you've got to pay for him, buddy, but it's pretty cheap. episode, go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons for that and so much more. All right. Well, that's

it for all of us, and that's not it for Game Boy. You should keep playing Game Boy for many years to come. Play Game Boy for another 30 years. Keep it alive. The old hardware will probably keep running for another 30 years. So it's a great investment, a great time, lots of great games. And, yeah,

if you are enjoying Game Boy, you should definitely check out my Game Boy Works series on YouTube. It's kind of on hiatus right now while I look at virtual Boy, which is kind of the same thing, but it's out there. And if you want to know more than you ever thought possible about every Game Boy game in chronological sequence, it's there. And by God, it's grayscale.

Thank you.