Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 303: Game Boy Color

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

The original power trio (Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Ray Barnholt) talk about the system that isn't a Game Boy. It's the Game Boy Color! A completely distinct platform! One that often gets overlooked. In this episode, we un-overlook it.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, the only podcast to activate your rods and your cones. Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish.

And this week, we are going to discuss the Game Boy Color. Now, last year we talked about Game Boy because it turned 30 years old. Game Boy color is not 30 years old. it's like 22 years old. That doesn't make any sense. That's not notable. That's not an anniversary of import. But a lot of people just combine Game Boy and Game Boy Color,

including Nintendo, who when they do the roll-up on units sold worldwide for Game Boy, they include Game Boy Color in that. But that, Friends, is wrong. Nintendo does not even know their own hardware. Game Boy Color is a distinct piece of equipment from Game Boy. You can tell because you cannot put a clear Game Boy Color game in a classic Game Boy and play it. That means it is not the same system. And so here to be semantic and obnoxious with me, we have...

Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I'm still waiting for my translucent switch. I'm Ray Bartolt, the color purple, which is a reference to EGM's feature article around the launch. Oh, yeah. Wow, that's kind of a weird... an inappropriate connection. A little highbrow for the EGM on you. Yeah, right. Okay.

Steven Spielberg-Rooze. Anyway, yeah, did I introduce myself earlier? I think I did. In any case, yes, Game Boy Color. I have a fondness for it, a soft spot. Last year, I actually kicked off a video retrospective series, chronicling Game Boy Colors Library, at least, I don't know, I don't know how far I'm going to go with it,

but it was a chance to kind of revisit the Game Boy Color's early days. and kind of see how those games stacked up compared to other portable games at the time. And I'm going to say, yeah, okay, what do you guys think about Game Boy Color? Well, gee, there is a whole lot of junk, but the jewels are really shiny. Yeah, I played a whole lot of it, like,

in my right after high school years, right before the Game Boy Advance, but I was also playing a lot of Game Boy Color during Game Boy Advance times, too. Yeah, so to kind of, address raise point about all the junk, Game Boy Color does represent kind of a,

I would say almost like a watershed moment in gaming. I would say Game Boy Color and PlayStation were the first consoles that really just had enormous libraries. I mean, you know, there were like 1,500 NES Famicom. Famicom Disc System games released worldwide over the course of like 12 years,

but Game Boy Color was only around for a few years and had nearly that many games. It was just, you know, the games industry had grown and publishers became more prolific and people were buying more games. And so you got a whole lot more games being released at any given moment, you know, instead of being like there might be a new game, maybe two this week, it would be like, hey, here's five, six, seven games coming out all at once. Especially around the holidays, you know, you just get inundated by a huge number of games. And, you know, both PlayStation and Game Boy Color were very successful. so they got a ton of these games and most of them were not that great.

Lots of license games. Game Boy Color was especially known for really scaled down ports of console games. I was just playing Torok 2 the other day. And let me tell you, that does not play a lot like the N64 version. But despite kind of the shovelware approach that a lot of publishers took to Game Boy color,

because the system was very easy to program for, it was very inexpensive to develop for, because it was 8-bit, You didn't have to create a huge amount of art assets for it compared to like a PlayStation or N64 game. You could have a team of like six people making a game and come up with something pretty decent. So it was just like shovel, shovel, shovel. But, you know, despite that, there were some really good and notable games on Game Boy Color. And I think its legacy is worth exploring separately from Game Boy.

And that's what we're going to do. So do we want to talk a little bit about the prehistory of Game Boy color? I think we should because I put notes in here about it. So I might as well get some use out of that. Yeah. So, you know, Game Boy launched in 1989. Game Boy launched. launched in 1998, flipped those two numbers around.

That's a nine-year difference. And the games industry had really changed a lot between, you know, the two. Like, when Game Boy launched, it was less powerful than the current leading system, which was the NES, but not radically less powerful. Like, you could have a pretty decent NES-style experience on Game Boy. And as the system matured, developers got better and better at giving you those great NES-style experiences. When Game Boy Color launched, it launched concurrently with, let's see,

Let's see, October, November, 1998, that would be Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Half-Life, Xenogiers, yeah, like, it was, it was, things were very different. And the Game Boy color was not that much more powerful than Game Boy. It was like Game Boy plus color, hence the name. So there was a much larger gulf in terms of quality and power and capabilities between the leading systems of the time. and this leading portable at the time. Yeah, it was turning into a 3D world outside of the handheld space.

Also, like the Dreamcast was almost out in Japan, so it was just like... It was out in Japan. That was June, June 98, wasn't it? No, no. No, it wasn't November? Okay. So it launched like a month in Japan. Had a game called July, but that's different.

Okay, that was my confusion. So, yeah, it was really in a weird place, but it was kind of like, well, they finally made a color one. That's basically it. But, you know, even though it was like, oh, they finally made a color one, that was still a step ahead of the competition. Around the same time that Game Boy Color launched, competitors finally came out with systems designed to take on Game Boy on its own terms. And so S&K came out with the NeoGeo Pocket. And a few months later, back I think in March 99, Bondi came out with Wonder Swan. And unlike Game Boy Color, both of these systems.

played black and white games. And even though they were more powerful than Game Boy, they immediately looked dated because, you know, as nice as it was to have a system as powerful as Neo Geo Pocket. When you've got Fatal Fury and Black and White versus, you know, Street Fighter 2 in color, like, which are you going to go to? If you're a little kid, you're going to be like, I want the color one. And so, yeah, it's kind of a weird quirk of history

that I feel like Nintendo kind of caught everyone flat-footed with this system. Do you guys remember the run-up to Game Boy Colors launch, like reading Nintendo Power or whatever? Was there a lot of pre-release hype for this system? Like, was it known for a long time that it was coming? There's a lot of marketing. I remember the marketing more than anything because trying to sell people on the Game Boy again,

like a decade later seemed like a tall order, even though it was a slightly different version. But it worked. It all worked. Like, the marketing was very, it was very hip and not totally in your face. I think it was very hip and sleek, the marketing for the Game Boy Color. I'm trying to remember, like, I imported Game Boy Color when it came out in Japan, which

was really stupid because it was a one month different. Yeah. What was it? You just couldn't wait for that new version of Tetris. I couldn't. No, I guess I just kind of started, very recently started importing games like the year before. And I was like, oh, this is fun and cool. I get to be like a few days ahead of everyone else.

And not that I knew anyone at the time who played video games or even cared, but it made me feel better about myself. But I seem to remember this kind of coming. out of nowhere. And it might just be that I wasn't paying attention to handheld gaming at the time. And this was kind of my entry point into handheld gaming. But I just, like, I didn't really, was not really aware of Game Boy Color. And then all of a sudden, here it was coming. And I was like, I think I'm going to get this. And I did. Like, that's why I imported it because I didn't realize it was coming to the U.S. so quickly. I was not paying attention. But I feel like, yeah, there just wasn't a whole lot of pre-release run up to it compared to like Game Boy Advance or something. something along those lines. Like consoles at the time, there was like a one-year hype cycle before launch or even longer. But Game Boy Color, not so much. It's not like they had a big unveiling for it like they did with the GBA and GameCube.

There wasn't like a big space world thing. Like, ooh, here's the Game Boy Color. It did feel a little bit sudden, especially in America because Nintendo of America basically had just released Pokemon. Yeah. All hype was built around Pokemon at the point. and then all of a sudden, oh, now it's the color game boy, which Pokemon also plays on, but it's not like made for it. Yeah, it was weird.

It was weird messaging. Like, hey, we just released this huge, awesome game. You should watch the cartoon and buy the toys and the stickers and the cards. And also here's a new Game Boy, which is what Pokemon runs on. Oh, but it doesn't actually take advantage of this new system. Pay no attention to the man behind the car. Well, the life bars do, actually. Okay.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, I remember at this time of my life, like being excited for hardware and fall on. everything I could with the limited internet and like magazine coverage that was out of day. But for this, it was my first semester after high school and I was taking the semester off before college. So it was just a like a part-time job and lots of disposal income and living at home. So I was like, well, I'm bored all the time. And I should have a new Game Boy because I think the last time I really played my Game Boy was maybe 96. And I got Pokemon and it got me into Game Boy games again.

But I played that on my Super Game Boy on a TV. That's how I played the original Pokemon. So I should have this. So I associate Game Boy Color, getting it in the fall, 2,000. and then bringing it on my first like real adult trip to Berkeley to visit an online friend. So that's where I live now. And I remember bringing

Warrior Land 3 with me and Pokemon Gold and I bought Metal Gear Solid at the airport to play. So it was a fun trip of me playing Game Boy too much and not enjoying the Bay Area as much as I should have. Yeah. Yeah, for me Game Boy Color was kind of overshadowed by the releases that fall.

Like you, I picked up Game Boy Color when it came out and one of the reasons was that I wanted to take it on a trip to visit an online friend. And we ended up playing Pokemon, which didn't really take advantage of it. And then it was over Thanksgiving, so Ocarina of Time came out. And once that came out, we were just like, let's play some Zelda. And Game Boy was quickly forgotten. But, you know, I did stick with it, even though I didn't like it nearly as much as Game Boy or Neo Geo Pocket Color. It had many more games. And there wasn't as much for me to do with Neo Geo.

Whereas this, you know, you had Mario game, a Mario game, you had, I'm going to cheat and look ahead, you had a remake of Zelda, you had, of course, Metal Gear, yeah, lots of RPGs and platformers and, you know, I continued buying games until up in, like, whenever Chantay came out and Tokitori at the very, very end of things. Yeah, and getting this in 2000, it made me go back to, you know, play some of the later Game Boy games. Like anything post-96, I was going to use game stores. And then everything was just so cheap for Game Boy. So I was able to catch up on a lot of things I had missed. Yeah. And you could tell they were new because they had stickers on them that said, new, this is a Game Boy game that just

came out, please buy it for the love of God. The desperate Game Boyers. Yes. Also with all those fighting games they released. Yeah, I mean, I think the best example of that is Wario Land 2, which came out in Europe and America on Monochrome Game Boy. and had that new sticker on it. But it did not come out on monochrome Game Boy in Japan. They held out for a few more months, and it came to Game Boy color in a tweaked version that was backward compatible with the monochrome Game Boy,

but was designed with full-color graphics or mostly full-color graphics. And then that came out like nine months later in America and Europe because we already had that game. I did get the color version, thank God. Likewise, yes. I was kind of playing catch-up because I'd been like portable games.

What are those? This is black, the black cartridge, right? For War II, so black denoted that it was compatible with both hardware versions, but the color had better features, more features. Okay, so there were three kinds of Game Boy cartridges. Ray, do you want to go into this? You can. Okay. So there were the gray cartridges, which were just monochrome Game Boy.

They would work on any Game Boy system at all. Black Game Boy cartridges worked on either Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, or Super Game Boy or Game Boy or Game Boy. color, and if you plugged it into a Game Boy Color, it would give you, you know, a different version of the game. Usually the different version just meant it had more colors. It had color, like, especially programmed into it. But a lot of

those black cartridges, if you plug them into a Super Game Boy, they would have really elaborate Super Game Boy features like, you know, animated, maybe not animated frames, but frames, and some color enhancements over and above what you would get automatically. Mario Land too had that, right? Yeah, I thought so.

And let's see. Then there were the clear cartridges, and, okay, so clear cartridges started arriving, the transparent cartridges started arriving in 1999, like spring. Yeah, it wasn't too long after. Yeah. And those were Game Boy Color only. They were not backward compatible. And those games were more likely to take advantage of Game Boy Color's full set of features,

which was a faster processor and I think more RAM. So, you know, they couldn't be played on Monochrome Game Boy. They didn't have the data built into them. and they would not work on Super Game Boy, but I think black of Game Boy cartridges accounted for like one-third of all Game Boy Color releases. So there were a lot of these cross-compatible, backward-compatible games. Yeah, I think there were more towards the later years, more incompatible ones. Yeah, I mean, for the first year or so, you were more likely to find a black cartridge than a clear one.

And then after a while, you just started getting just the clear ones. And that's, I think, when Game Boy Color's real potential. started to shine. Like, if you compare Wario Land 2 on a black cartridge to Wario Land 3 on a clear cartridge, there's a big difference between the two games. Like, Wario Land 3 is bigger and

more complex. I think it plays faster, too. Like, Wario Land 2, you can really, like, you can really feel it's straining in places. Yeah. Yeah, 3 is really underappreciated just how complex it is. Big fan of that game. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of unappreciated

color games there, and I think we'll get into it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, Nintendo waited nine years to come up with a follow-up to Game Boy, But it's not for lack of interest or planning or trying. I mean, Virtual Boy was kind of supposed to be the replacement or successor for Game Boy. But then, you know, I think Nintendo realized well into development of that, like, oh, that's not going to happen. This is not going to supplant Game Boy. This did not turn out the way we wanted.

It's neither hand nor held. Yes. I think I seem to remember a comment that Gumpi Yokoi has attributed to him. the lead designer, like the lead designer, overseer on Game Boy and Virtual Boy, that the constant changes and compromises being made to the Virtual Boy hardware was equivalent to, you know, the frog that's in a pan of water and the temperature is being turned up one degree at a time. Like, it doesn't seem like a big deal as it's happening,

but then all of a sudden you realize, oh, I'm boiling to death. So that's kind of, yeah, Virtual Boy, we've talked about that, didn't really turn out so well. Didn't know he was a biologist. Yeah, believe it or not. It was one of his specialties, the frog-boiling game. You know, for the frog, the bell, the water boils. Anyway, so Virtual Boy didn't pan out.

And around the same time, Nintendo started to develop Project Atlantis, which was going to be a 32-bit full-color handheld replacement for the Game Boy. And Ray, do you want to talk about that any? There's not that much knowing about it. Yeah, I don't know what else to say. You know, they showed it very briefly out of the GDC thing. and that's where people actually knew it existed. But there were rumors before that, and, yeah, I think you said it.

It was going to be a 32-bit color portable. Their prototype looked about the size of an old Game Boy, so. Maybe actually bigger. Yeah, I mean, just because of the fact that, you know, that level of technology might not have been too attainable in even the mid-90s. So, yeah, they didn't have much to do with it. I mean, didn't have much to go on. Yeah, I feel like Game Boy, like the ambitions,

they had for the Game Boy successor, it just wasn't practical with the technology that was available at the time. Game Boy Advance came about, you know, it became possible once the arm architecture for handheld, like for embedded devices, basically, like that CPU family, once it kind of matured and came to a point where it was drawing low power but offering, you know, good performance benefits in return. But it is interesting how just far Nintendo looks ahead, even today, I think, because, you know, the Virtual Boy was 32-bit. Atlantis was going to be 32-bit. So they wanted to put something out there that was going to be 32-bit, and even the GBA, I think, is technically.

Yeah, GBA is 32-bit. It runs on an arm chip, like an arm-five, I think. Yeah, I have a feeling that was their moonshot, sort of, that eventually we're going to release 32-bed handheld next. Yeah, I think they kept iterating on it, and it took them six years to come out, you know, from between Virtual Boy and Game Boy Advance. But in the meantime, it's like, oh, well, we can make this new panel that, you know, can give you color graphics, but, you know, it doesn't have a backlight or anything, and we still kind of have to use a Z80 and whatnot. But we can sort of bump up the original Game Boy. Well, I think what happened was in 1996, Pokemon launched in Japan, February 1996, which was, you know, like the kind of the thick of Project Atlanta's development. And a few months later, Pokemon had exploded their word of mouth into a big hit.

And I think Nintendo realized, you know what, we don't actually have to rush this. They had kind of taken their time with Project Reality in Nintendo 64, and that came out like a year and a half later than it was supposed to. And so I think they were kind of feeling the pinch. And then Pokemon was sort of this miracle that showed up, like this quirky little RPG that had no hype and just exploded into success. They were like, wait a minute, Game Boy is okay as it is. I think it turned out cutting-edge graphics and technology didn't matter

because the first Pokemon game is very ugly and primitive. like a 1991 game released in America in 1998. And I think just the world around that game made people imagine it looking better. The sprites are very attractive in battle, but everything else in the game is just so primitive. It's not a Nintendo game. It's a game freak game. And it was kind of, you know, hacked together for those two guys there. Yeah.

And it was a social experience. That was what it sold on was playing with your friends in a kind of new and interesting, different sort of way. like a competitive game, but it's an RPG. Like, how do you make a competitive RPG? That's interesting and different. Yeah, totally. And, you know, that showed off kind of what Nintendo had thought all along, like what they had wanted all along with the link cable.

Yeah. And fun, interesting, excited, exciting uses of technology that had never been experienced before. That was the whole premise, though, you know, the withered technology or seasoned technology, lateral thinking, et cetera, et cetera. We've talked about that a lot. Pokemon was kind of, you know, it took a long time to come out. It was like seven years after the systems launch in Japan. Here it was, finally, like the sort of thesis statement for Game Boy.

But it meant Nintendo could kind of back off on a successor and released the Game Boy Color as sort of a stopgap measure. And the Game Boy color ran on the same chip as the Game Boy, except it ran twice as fast and had more RAM and it had support for color graphics. But even then, it still had a lot of limitations. I know a couple of years ago I interviewed Matt Bozahn at Way Forward about creating Chantay, and he said, you know, one of the things you had to be mindful of with Game Boy, Game Boy Color, was that there actually wasn't enough video RAM in the system to draw a unique tile on every space of the screen. You had to, like, reuse tiles or create blank spaces because there just wasn't enough video RAM to fill the screen at once. So it was a very limited system, very compromised, but still it was better than Game Boy. And, you know, it was just enough to kind of give the system a shot on the arm and keep things going for a couple more years until Nintendo could release the Game Boy advance. That's why I think it's interesting because in America, Pokemon took two years to come out.

And, you know, from 95 to 98, the Game Boy was kind of like getting pinched, especially in the West. And there wasn't a whole lot of software coming out anymore. So I thought that's why I say it was weird. It's because, like, you had the launch of Pokemon in the West and then the Game Boy Color. And it was kind of like, well, now we have two things, two big boosts to deal with, I suppose. Yeah, Nintendo's saving grace during that time is that no one else cared about handheld games. Yeah. Like, Game Gear had pretty much faded away.

And Lynx had long since died. And you had, like, nomad. You had, you know, even Turbo Express was gone by that point. But there was just like this kind of wasteland. It's really weird. It's like there was this whole market segment that everyone just left to Nintendo for several years. And I don't know if everyone was just so focused on the next generation race and coming up with these 3D systems that all their resources were tied up there. I don't know what happened.

But basically there was an opportunity there for someone to swoop in and basically eat Nintendo's lunch. And no one did. And by the time competitors finally stepped in and were like, let's make some systems that have the same strengths as the game. Game Boy, but are better, Nintendo already had something else in the works. Yeah, now they dominate that space so long. That's the only space they work it anymore. It's like, this is who we are, and this is Play Your Switch. Switch was the stealth portable system.

They're like, hey, it's a console, and sometimes you can take it on the go. And then two years later, they're like, actually, it's just a portable system. Please enjoy. So Game Boy Color is also interesting in that it's the only game system I can think of that had a game launch for it a month before the system came out. And that was Dragon Warrior or Dragon Quest Monsters in Japan actually launches a black cartridge in September of 1998. The system launched in October 1998.

So because the black cartridges were backward compatible, people could jump into the game, start playing it, start doing the Pokemon-style monster trading and so forth, in black and white. And then when the color version came out, they could switch over and all of a sudden they'd have a full-color experience. That's really strange. But I feel like it kind of speaks to the sort of like,

what are we doing kind of attitude that sort of surrounded Game Boy Colors launch. It was just kind of like, here it is. We've got a system. Exactly. Like the closest possible thing was at the same time, again, to bring up Dreamcast when they released that Godzilla VMU that came out before the Dreamcast ever did. Oh, I didn't know about that. Yeah, that's right.

But then it would link up to the Godzilla game that would come out. So what was on the VMU? Like a Godzilla mini game thing, like a Tamagachi type thing. They just released it as a toy, but it was a VMU. I did not realize that. It was months before. Huh. Okay.

So this was the era of people. trying to figure out what to do with their game watch. Yeah, system watches. Of course, the Game Boy Color had all the compatibility that original Game Boy had, except Super Game Boy. Super Game Boy couldn't run Game Boy Color clear cartridges, but you had the link cable. You also had an IR cable or port, so you could do infrared trading. And Game Boy Color couldn't do Super Game Boy features for like the one or two games that actually did that. So Donkey Kong 94 and something else were like two games that had a Super Game Boy features built in.

Sure, yeah. Several games did. But yeah, if you're talking about like custom. Donkey Kong 94 was a black or, you know, a gray cart. Right, right. But they were built for, to take advantage of the Super Game Boy with like sound clips and specialized. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the Super Game Boy features did not carry forward into Game Boy Color.

That's right. Game Boy Color did have the ability, it gave you the ability to add color pallets. to your monochrome games. And you could, like, change them somehow? If you held one direction on the D-pad, different directions on the D-pad would cause different color palettes to gain. When you boot up or something like that? Yeah.

It's like three layers of palatunes like there are, yeah. Right. But, you know, other than that, it was pretty much like it would either default into a certain color palette. If it was a Nintendo developed game or Nintendo published, it would have a special palette built into the hardware, just like Super Game Boy. But, yeah, it was kind of like a sort of half measure.

And then you had some games like, you mentioned Pokemon. Pokemon Yellow was released as a gray cartridge in Japan, but because it came out, well, I mean, technically it was yellow, but as a monochrome cart in Japan. But because it came out several years later in America, they actually went back and tweaked it to make it a, give it some kind of limited color support. So it was much more like graphically varied in terms of color palettes than it was in Japan when it hit the, U.S. But it still wasn't like a full color game. No, but they bundled it with a special edition Game Boy Color. Over here. And then there was also Pocket

Pikachu, which was a totally different thing. Yeah. But then they made Pocket Pikachu, too, which was in color. Oh. And not even gold and silver were not color games. No, they were. They were. Crystal cartridges. Crystal. Or clear cartridges. Okay. Wait. Are you sure about that? Yes. Oh, no. Actually, gold and silver were

black cartridges that were colored. And Crystal is the first Game Boy Color only card. What I was thinking is that the box art, you know, it has the Game Boy Colored logo on them. Right. Yeah, I mean, if they had not been specially colored cartridges, they would have been black cards. But even by 2000, they were still being conservative where they said, well, there are still people with old Game Boy, so we'll be playing these mega hit games. So it wasn't until Crystal, they were like, okay, we're cutting you off now.

Right. Right. They just weren't willing to rip off that Band-Aid. The way they are these days, just cutting all the Pokemon's out of Sword and Shield. I hear, that's a bad thing. I don't care. Oh, one other weird thing is that around the time Game Boy Color launched in Japan, Nintendo also released the Game Boy Light.

Yeah, it was like six or eight months before. Wasn't that long before? I thought it was just a couple of months. It was a short period. I know that much, but it wasn't like, I don't think it was like a month or anything. It was a few months at least. But still, that's two different hardware launches within the same year for the same platform, sort of. What year was pocket, 97?

96. In America? Yeah. Okay. And Japan, I think. Yeah. Yeah, everywhere. It had a much lesser, I mean, it was the same hardware, but with better screen, right?

It was a, I know we talked about it. Yeah, it was a slimmer system. It used fewer batteries. It had a much better screen. It was just a better experience all around. Just great design. Having lived through the pocket and the launch of it, it was a real, like, who cares, shrug from people I knew and from like... Well, yeah, it ties in what I was saying.

It was kind of a doldrums for Game Boy. in this side of the world, at least. And there was, like, nothing coming out, really. I mean, Nintendo was putting things out, but it was, like, very sporadic. So I was just like, well, okay, here's, like, Tetris attack. Yeah. Here we have some players' choice games. Yeah, I think I assume that Game Boy Color would be the same thing

where it would be like, okay, we found a way to, you know, make the screen better and give you different color palettes, but that's it. But then after maybe 18 months, that's when I got one. And I was like, oh, there are reasons to buy this now. When they announced it, I was like, who cares? I don't need to do this anymore. But they finally gave me a reason to care. Well, the launch games here were, like, not that exciting either because it was Tetris DX, and it's like, it's a good game.

It's a good version of Tetris, but it basically has like the same design patterns of the original game, and it's just like a little bit color and it has like the psychedelic backgrounds and things to show off the system. Well, no, actually, I want to say Tetris DX is kind of like a transitional Tetris game between like the original Game Boy rules and the more like the modern fixed rules that Tetris Company. requires. Yeah. I'm not kind of in between. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, they did improve it and tweak things, but it's just like, at first glance,

it's just like, well, it appears to be. I didn't really know how it was different until I saw your video, but. Yeah, and I've actually forgotten what I wrote. But I think it had infinite spin, didn't it? Or like partial infinite spin? There are differences, but not enough for someone who lived through the original game. It would be like, oh, Tetris.

Like, I don't know. I mean, it made sense to re-release Tetris, but I was not something that made me run out to get one. Like, the launch lineup for me was the reason I didn't. care until like, again, Metal Gear and Wariolan 3 and Pokemon, gold and silver and things like that. So we mentioned Game Boy Pocket. I believe I read in a Benj Edwards retrospective written by Benj Edwards that Gumpay Yokoy was

going to retire from Nintendo after the Virtual Boy launched, and it turned out to be such a disaster. He was like, this is not how I want to go out here. So Game Boy Pocket was actually his project is kind of like, this is my final statement with Nintendo. This is my final, you know, creation here. And so it was like the perfected Game Boy. So that was kind of a stopgap measure, but it was also sort of like a farewell from Yoko and kept the Game Boy family going for a while. And I feel like that did give the Game Boy a shot in the arm.

Like I remember a lot of advertising, a lot of games kind of being built around the Play It Loud. No, that was before that. Right. But they did start releasing it in different colors. And so, I mean, they did their best to keep marketing going and, yeah, before Pokemon even. Yeah, I feel like the pocket sold really well because I, you know, those are really easy to find on the aftermarket. So clearly lots of people bought them. Yeah.

All right, so we can talk about the Game Boy Color launch windows. As Bob said, it was not very exciting. As far as I can tell, there were five games launched in the U.S. or Japan at the launch of the system. Europe is harder to determine because just, dates are not kept very well, but I think there was one unique game released there. So between the U.S. and Japan and Europe, the launch games were Tetris Deluxe, which we just talked about. Tetris Deluxe had like a save system, so you could save your high score. You could pause and save the game in the middle of a session.

You could like, I think if you paused it and turned the power off, when you turn the power back on, it would just automatically take you to where you were. Wow. and had more modes. And as I was saying earlier, there were some physics differences, and this is broken down on a wiki someplace. I'm sure it is. It's extremely particular.

It's like when you spin a block, it rotates around this pixel in this direction, and it's like really fussy and specific. But people who are really into Tetris, it's very important to them because it's going to affect the way they play and their strategies. There was Hexite.

Ray, did you, I can't remember. Did you say you played that one a lot? No, I played logical. Okay. Okay, that was later. Yeah. Hexite is interesting because the more I read about it and the more I researched about it, the more I found about it. Apparently it was, it started out as a board game that this company called Landdwarf created.

Land dwarf? L.A., like Land dwarf. Okay. Or land dwarf, like it's the local area network dwarf that likes to, you know, play multiplayer games, little CNC, a little Warcraft. Anyway, yeah, so it was a board game, and at the same time they developed a Game Boy Color and a PlayStation version of it. And I kind of feel like it was like this someone's very much a passion project. The website for this game is still online. Oh, boy.

And there's kind of a rabbit hole. Like, the more I clicked through, the more I was like, wow, this is, this is like, someone's really into this game, but it's not actually that fun. I don't enjoy it. Yeah, that sounds about right. Sounds like it's bulletball or something. Yeah, I feel like it's one of those games that would have been better if they hadn't tied it so closely to the board game, but it has to be bound by the limitations of a physical board game. And it's a very literal interpretation, and it's just not that enjoyable. There was pocket bowling, which is the sequel to virtual.

Bowling by Athena, one of the world's most expensive video games, it's like a $2,000 virtual boy game. If you want the same experience as virtual bowling, which by the way is a goddamn good bowling game, I'm not even to bowling that much, but it's a really good bowling game. This is a pretty good scaled down version of that with more features and more options. Like, I strongly recommend pocket bowling. I did see your video on this. I just don't understand the idea of a bowling game.

It's like a golf game where you're making the same shot every time. Very satisfied, though. The physics are good. It looks good. Well, you know, there's the speed element. Like, you're making the same shot every time, yes, but like you have to get the timing just right. I love stopping meters. Don't get me wrong.

Yes. I love stopping meters. Like, when you stop a meter and you stop it successfully in the right places, you're like, yes, I stopped that meter so well. I don't know. There was Game and Watch Gallery, too. Yeah. Love it. Love the whole series.

Two and three are especially good beyond just being fun versions of those. classics. Yeah, do you want to, I mean, you want to talk about the concept at large? Okay, yeah, sure. Well, we did describe this in the Super Mario Land episode, but... And probably other times before that, but yeah, basically Nintendo, quote, unquote, ported a few old game and watch games to Game Boy, but also give you, like, modern versions with newer graphics, usually with, like, Mario characters in it.

Basically the same kind of gameplay, but good as, like, little score attack games, and just also great soundtracks. They give you other little bonuses and things, like a soundroom to listen to that great soundtrack and the first game was monochrome only but then two and three are on game boy color and then four was on gba but mostly a remake of the first one uh but yeah two and three are the best ones in my opinion and uh yeah and the modern versions of the games add some mechanical tweaks yeah so like in the game chef uh you know you're basically i think originally you were just like a dude in a kitchen with a frying pan and you were trying to flip eggs and sausages and stuff

and keep them in the air, keep them from falling. So the Game Boy color version is the same thing. Like you have an exact replica of that game. But then you have the modern version where it's Princess Peach, of course, because a woman, why wouldn't she be in the kitchen? Bake that cake. She's flipping sausages and eggs and stuff. And as you flip them, they brown, they crisp.

And once they get just right, like they get cooked. properly, you can let, you could flip them over to Yoshi, who's like kind of hanging it out in the background. And if you flip him a, you know, like a set number of perfectly cooked sausages or eggs or whatever, then he will lay an egg and another Yoshi will come out. And then you can make that Yoshi grow and become an adult and then lay an egg by feeding it. But if you cook, if you flip stuff too long, it'll get burnt.

And if you feed Yoshi a burnt object, then he'll get upset and, like, take off. Yeah, no one wants that. So, like, there's this kind of element that was not in there. Bad Yelp review for me. But it's like, I think it's like five or six games, and then you can unlock ball. Yeah. And then if you master every game in the original Game and Watch Gallery, you can link the two games together and get gallery images of all the games you've completely mastered in Game and Watch Gallery. I can't imagine playing it that obsessively.

Yeah, it's a little tough. I love those games, but. But, I mean, this was like a perfect time wasteer. for a kid, you know, when portable games were still pretty simple and primitive. Yeah. So kind of cool. And then there was Warioland 2, and we'll probably do an episode on this game in greater length, but guys, take it away. Oh, God. So much to talk about. I mean, I did the Wariolan episode back almost seven years ago, so we will revisit these again because we covered every Wariola game in that episode,

and you can definitely zoom down on all of them even more. Two is the one that's really the seed for the rest of the series. Yeah, yeah, it's a subversion of the platformer. We talked a lot about this before, so not to be able to the point, but it's a Wario game. It's about exploration. Wario can't die. Instead, enemy attacks make him change forms. Use these forms to, you know, navigate different parts of these big complex levels.

And I will say the one thing I forgot about this game when I replayed it about six years ago was that there's a Castlevania Symphony of Night style twist where the game is actually twice as long as you think it is, which I totally forgot about that part of the game. So yeah, it's super surprising. It was a time of history where like seven games did that and then nothing ever did that again where it's just like, oh, you thought the game was over? Here's the rest of the game. Yeah, it's 25 stages and then you beat it and you're like, oh, it's actually 50 stages. Yes. And finding the extra stages.

So sometimes kind of challenging and makes you think in unconventional ways. Yeah, yeah. It's where the Warrior Land real brilliant started. The Mario Land 3 is amazing and it's really good, but it was still a little too close to a Mario game. here it's like let's do a different thing and unfortunately it didn't last that long for the series but two three and four are really really good and they start doing their own things and as far as i can tell the one europe exclusive launch game for game boy color was uh let me guess tin tin no but it could have been it was uh no it was a game boy color companion to touroc two

seeds of evil on n64 and uh it's it's it's a bold little game i just played it for the first a couple of days ago expecting nothing good from it and it was actually kind of okay it's like you know think of all those European platformers where we have the like just the huge meandering levels and you're like what am I doing but instead of just being huge and meandering you have just a little bit of room to explore and travel around and there's kind of like a puzzle element with unlocking gates but the levels are a lot more focused so you never feel like what am I doing why am I just like wandering around these identical spaces? It's more like

it's more structured. They somehow managed to get all the weapons and power-ups from Turok 2 on N64 into this tiny platformer. Like you can even get shields which you know cut your damage in half and the shield absorbs like half the damage that your body does.

Does that include the cerebral bore? I love that name. Actually you know I don't know if the cerebral boar is in there but there's like grenade launchers, shotguns, pistols, bow and arrow. So it starts out really badly, but then once it kind of gets going, it's surprisingly good. It's one of the more unexpected twists that I've experienced in covering Game Boy Color. Was it made by Eurocom?

No, it was made by Bit Managers. Okay. They're here to manage your bits. Not really. This is the Bitmap Brothers? No, they are a Spanish company, apparently. But they did an okay job with it. They did some great manager.

It's nice. There's some weird alternate modes where you like fly on a teradactyl or run into the screen Crash Bandicoot style which sucks and I hate it but aside from the weird sort of like hey suddenly you're playing

a different game bits and the fact that the checkpoints are horrible it's weirdly decent not what I expected anyway so that was the launch Hi! Ray, and this is my friend Alex.

Hi. And we do a show called no more whoppers. Some call it corn. We call it therapy. We're adults with the virility of men. Want to hear us read snack food copy and talk about Japanese chips?

Too bad! Join us every month or so on the Greenlight Podcast Network. Welcome to Casual Magic, the show where we explore the fun side of magic together. I'm your host, Shivenputt, and each week we delve into everything

from casual format to explorations of creatures and card types to interviews with designers of the game. At Casual Magic, believe that it just isn't magic without the gathering. Come along and play. Matt, I've got a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right?

And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them. But maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea. Let's do it. And eat snacks. Movie Fighters, an original idea on the Greenlit Podcast Network. There weren't actually a lot of notable accessories specifically made for Game Boy Color. I feel like, was the Wormlight?

Did that exist before color? No. I mean, not as such. There were light accessory accessories. Right. But the Wormlight. NICO Wormlight. I mean, they made.

a million of them, but a bit different companies, but there was never a Nintendo Wormlight, right? What, no. Yeah, I didn't think so. An official one, no. No, the worm light was specifically designed to complement the colors, the atomic purple game boy color. Oh, man, that's what I like most about the Game Boy color.

It's like the batteries, you use two instead of four, right? Double A batteries for the Game Boy Color. Yeah, just like Game Boy Pocket. And they lasted forever, even with using a wormlight. I felt like you got so much out of the two batteries. I think the difference was the old. old light accessories for the original Game Boy, just had like bulbs, right?

And the worm light was an LED. That's right, yeah. Well, and on top of that, it didn't have a separate battery. It plugged into the link cable port. Is that right? It did, yeah. So it was kind of like a precursor to US. I guess USB existed, but no one used it at that point.

It was brand new. Yeah. But it was kind of the same thing. Like it drew power from a port that was not really meant to be a power port. But it did, and it powered this LED. And it was called a worm light because it was kind of, had like kind of a phone cord

Yeah, thin to it And you could twist it around to just the perfect angle And they were so cheap Like most people didn't have like accessories for their Game Boys because they were a little more expensive But a worm light was like maybe $4.99 at GameStop. Yeah, they were super cheap

And you can still buy clones brand new off eBay for like $5. So that was kind of the big one. Like I think everyone owned a worm light. Oh yeah. There was also, I think just in Japan the mobile phone adapter that allowed, it was like a modem

Vodem for your Game Boy Color, barely any games used this. No, in fact, they moved on to the GBA. Some GBA games used it. Yeah. Like the Silent Hill Sound novel. That's nuts. I need to pick up a copy of that for Game Boy Advanceworks. You need to go back in time and download whatever DLC was on.

Yeah. Boy, boy, boy. Mobile adapter GB, they had a special version of Mario Golf without Mario that used it. They take away features. Yeah, it was just like, boy, in Mobile Golf, G.B. it was called. Yeah, that was back when, like, Japan was really into, like, the mobile internet because nobody was really using desktop computers, or at least not to the extent that you

would with your little flip phone. So, yeah, Nintendo got on that train. And then there was the transfer pack, which I never used. How did that work exactly? Oh, for the N64? Yeah. I remember doing Mario Golf. So I love Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color.

Yeah. And I believe you could import your character into the N64. Mario Golf. Yes. But mostly people used it for Pokemon Stadium, right, Ray? Came with Pokemon Stadium. That was the real reason you got it.

So you could, uh, you know, see your Pokemon in 3D and or play like a cut down super Game Boy version of Pokemon if you wanted to. But I went to the, uh, the pack slot in the back of the N64 controller. Correct. It just like slid in and clicked in and then you could slide a Game Boy cartridge into that as well. Yeah. It's really good.

Really cool. I still have it. I was wondering if I should sell it or not. Hmm. I'm sure it'll be valuable someday. Yeah. when someone creates a game that uses it again. Anyway, so, yeah, that was kind of it for the notable accessories made just for GBC.

It wasn't really around long enough to have a huge number of accessories. I couldn't find any others online. There was Chi Chi-Chi Alien. Not necessarily an accessory. It was like a game that had that clip-on shade where the conceit was that aliens would beam down through the infrared port. That was made by creatures. I don't know about that one. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, we didn't mention the infrared port where could you do multiplayer with it or just simple transactions? It was better for simple transactions. Yeah, you couldn't move it. You couldn't move it. So it was just like, the instructions were always keep it still. Do not move it until everything is done transferring. It really facilitated Pokemon trades because you didn't need to bring a link cable. I did trade through the port a lot.

Yeah, Hudson had released a handful of games for the original Game Boy that had infrared built into the cartridges. They were the games that came in the little Band-Aid-type metal tens. Yeah. Some of the games

in that series had... The GB Kiss games. Yeah, GB Kiss. They had an IR port built in and you couldn't really see it. They were like... I think instead of having

the glass window, it was basically just like a really, really thin patch of plastic over the IR. And I guess it just beamed through the plastic. But Game Boy Wars Turbo, I think,

had it. Game Boy Wars, too. Both of those were, you know, Game Boy Wars was a Nintendo game developed by intelligent systems, but for some reason, the remake, like the high-speed, smarter AI version came out from Hudson. I think it's because they had that technology, and then Nintendo built it into the system. I just thought of another weird accessory, the clip on DDR pad. Oh, nice. How did that work?

They just basically almost how I explained it. It was just like a little, yeah, the four arrows for DDR. as like a clip-on thing that goes on to the front of the Game Boy and you just play it with that instead of the regular buttons. Oh, and there was also a barcode thing, the barcode...

Barcode Tyson Bartigan. It was a barcode reader, but instead of reading, like, any barcode, it came with special cards, and I think they released, like, expansion packs, but those were the only cards that worked in the game. It was not like Barcode Battler or Monster Rancer or something,

where it was like, hey, bring a bunch of stuff into the game. It was like, hey, buy our cards. But it was a barcode reader. Yeah, as far as like hardware things, a lot of those were all in Japan, really. Oh, and of course, how could I forget? Because I bought one of these, and it's taking up a huge amount of space. And I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. The singer sewing machine. Are you kidding me? Wow. You got one, huh? I did. I found a good price on it. The Isaac, correct? What is a good price for it? I'm not talking about it. It was more than I wanted to spend. What does it do? What does it do? What is it, I mean, I know it so's so's things. Okay, so you plug in a Game Boy color that comes with the system and there's a cartridge. Good value. And it like, yeah, it sends patterns to the machine and I guess it automatically soes stuff for you. This is going to be a video, right? It will, yes. I would not have bought this just for my own enjoyment. But I have to figure out how to set it up. I also have to figure out how to use a sewing machine. So my parents are coming to visit soon. My mother used to do a lot of suzing. No, my mother used to do a lot of sewing.

with the sewing machine. So I'm going to be like, mom, teach me to sew. How do I use a sewing machine with a Game Boy? That should be the video. I guess it could be. Your mom can unbox it. It's not too late to become a YouTube show. This week in Retronauts.

Hi, Mom. Yeah. So I don't know what's going to happen with that, but we'll see. But yes, that was great because it's so IMac looking. It's like a white machine. And then it has like the translucent, bondy blue. bulbs on it. Very of the era.

Yeah, it's very curvy and white and translucent blue. Yeah, good times. I mean, yeah, other than it doesn't, it has nothing that would suggest it is connected to a Game Boy. I mean, of that design. But it ships with a Game Boy that you plug into it. I don't know, man. I don't know what I was thinking, but...

So the NESA machine never came out, but this did. Right. That's correct, yes. Okay, interesting. However, there was that those Famicom Disc games that did teach you how to... Yeah. Yeah, but no hardware attached to that. Okay, so I guess there were more peripherals than I thought, but they got kind of esoteric and weird.

Yeah. The sonar thing, that was for the original Game Boy, right? Yeah, I was just trying to think about that. I couldn't remember if it was or not, but yeah. Go fishing. Honestly, there was a lot of our machine for your Game Boy. Not to get off track, but it wasn't just Game Boy. They had all these esoteric sort of accessories and things.

It just seemed like a typical thing going on in that in electronics. I mean, there's the Wonder Swan pregnancy test. Yeah. Oh, man. One use only, right? I guess. That's wild stuff. Oh, man.

All right. So now that we've been through the accessories, why do we talk about some of the more interesting games to come out for Game Boy Color? There's not really too much more to say about the system, but the library of unique and exclusive games was actually kind of good. Some of it was kind of bad, but in an interesting way. So I've kind of just made an alphabetical list here of the things that caught my eyes. I went through the complete library. And we'll start with 1942 in Ghost and Goblins, courtesy of Digital Eclipse. Oh, yeah. They are games that made me angry. I remember I'd name dropped this earlier. We were talking about Mario Land and Mario Deluxe and stuff. Were they porting the Micronix versions or were they starting over? These are the NES games.

Not good. Straight up. And if you thought Ghost and Goblins was hard before, wait until you can only see about a third of the screen real estate. But they did feel better. I feel like Ghost and Goblins is a little bit better. I'm not saying it's great, but it just feels a touch smoother than Micronix. So I had my own little website at the time of these games release, which was just a, like, focused around 2D games because that was a dying form.

And I was like, I'm going to make a website that just covers 2D games, reviews them, announces, you know, covers news, like 50 people a day read it. No one, no one cared. My website was getting like five or 600 views a day, which was a lot back in 1999. I was one of the 50. And then I was like, you know what? I'm going to switch to just talking about 2D games because no one's doing that. And the traffic dropped precipitously. But I don't care.

Then I got a job doing this sort of crap professionally. Anyway, I reviewed those games pretty harshly on my site. And some people wrote in and were very angry about it. Like, no, these are great. Great ports. I don't know about capital G great, but they were better than you'd expect. Some people had opinions. They were not straight ports.

Let's just say that. Did you guys ever play Azure Dreams on Game Boy Color? No, I only played the PlayStation version but this was an interesting and ambitious kind of reinterpretation of that. I think so. I didn't really play the Game Boy Color version that much. I think it does

like follow the plot and everything. Yeah, it is kind of a port. It loses a lot of the town development stuff that I remember correctly. But still, it's a rogue-like with a companion character on Game Boy Color. That's kind of cool and interesting. Oh, yeah.

Okay, so you mentioned this earlier before, but not only was there, a DDR pad, there was also Beat Mania G.B. And pop and music. Konami went all in on their rhythm games for a system that had a very primitive sound chip. I think Beat Mania G.B. was like

the very first game I ever imported. Strangely. Really? Yeah. Everyone's got a first. Yeah. But now I have all those classic eight-bit versions of the Beat Mania tunes stuck in my head and now it's just, I'm burned out. But yeah. Bob, what was your first import game?

Oh, my God. I didn't do a lot of importing actually because I was too I never learned Japanese and I was too impatient That stopped us Yeah, it's true It was a PC game actually It was a Zvi for the PC

Which is now recently has been translated And then sold on Steam It's a Falcom game Yeah, yeah Yeah, so yeah I bought that in 2001 It's a little Yeah

I think my second one was Oendan and maybe there was a third one But I don't do a lot of importing I never have. Okay. My first was Castlevania Symphony the Night because I'm always on brand. Bionicamando Elite Forces.

Did you guys play this one? Yes. No. I wanted to ask, like, there are, so NST did this in Crystalis. Yeah. Which game is the one they changed a lot of? Is it both of them? Crystalis is a, we've got them on the list, but we'll talk about it now.

It's pretty much a straight port until you get to the very ending, like the final fortress. that you have to fight through, and they change up the final battle. And they change the opening, so it's 1987. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, they add this, like, really bad new story and really bad new artwork. The thing about NST is that it was a lot of grads from DigiPen. So you have a lot of, I think, young kids, let's say, yeah, and, you know, sort of amateurish art being applied to these classic games that didn't really work out. I mean, Bionne a Commando is an original game, but it's still.

And there was a Lady Commando in that one? Yeah, you can play as the Bina Commando. or the Bionic Command Dett, who has, like, she wears, like, leg warmers. She's very 1980s-looking. Yeah, yeah. I always played as her because I was, like, leg-warmers, that gives me extra strength

when I kick people as I swing into them. It's from the Dance Roebuck's universe. Yeah, pretty much. But, yeah, it's a pretty total reimagining. It's actually a sequel, yeah, like, or brand-new game, basically. Yeah. It carries forward a lot of the mechanics.

It's a little tough because, unlike Bionicamando Game Boy, they went with full-size NES Sprites. Yeah, but they also over-animated them. They did. So the game plays a little slower. Yeah. But then they added, like, those MDK-style sniping sequences, which is very strange.

And then the final stage is actually basically the same as the final stage of Bionic Commando Game Boy, where you're, like, on the flying Albatross Fortress ship and you have to swing underneath it. Yeah. But, yeah, I think there's, like, an experience system just like on game, or NES in Game Boy. It was okay. It was at the time where I felt strange. like, wow, should I be feeling nostalgia for Bionicamando? I guess, but now it makes sense.

But back then, it's just like, oh, yeah, Chrysalis. I got that for Christmas in 1990. Like, I guess I should feel some sort of feeling about this. I believe those are NST's first games that they, like, hmm, managed to get out the door. They might have been very, very early in the... They did improve after that, so I don't want to be too down on them, but... Elite Forces is okay.

It has some weird parts. But on the other hand, it also has a scene where you grapple by launching your wire arm into a sphinx's nose. so that's good. Blastermaster Enemy Below was a compromised port of the NES game, if I'm remembering correctly. Not a brand new game. I played it on 3DS, virtual console.

That's when I first tried it. I'm not sure how to differentiate it from all the other NDS ports on GBC, honestly. Like, yeah, it's cut down because of the resolution. It's a little bit slower. I'm not a super Blastermaster Master expert, so I can't like inventory all the changes between the original game. But at first, like, I was confused if it was actually like an original game, sort of like Bion of Commando, just with the old graphics and layouts and stuff with the NS game.

But people say it is a straight port. I played through it anyway. There was an attempt at the time to bring back Blastermaster, because you also had Blastermaster blasting again for PlayStation, the budget game at the very tail end of PlayStation's life. Bomberman Quest and Bomberman Max. These were more like adventure-style games, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I missed Quest, and now I just saw a video of it. It's Bomber Man, but it's Legend of Zelda. Quest is good. Yeah, it looks really neat. I named dropped it when I hosted Axel the Blood God recently, and I was like, because I was talking about games series that were turned into RPGs, and it's like, yeah, it's kind of like it's basically Zelda thinks Awakening, but as Bomber Man, not as great.

I want to be clear about that. There's a certain level of expectations with all Bomberman games, so I'm not saying it says it great as Zelda, but it is a very good. companion to it. Bar Man Max is just like the Pokemon sort of version of that because they released two versions of it and yeah, not as much to say

about that. Yeah, there's so many Pokemon clones. I've only done like seven or eight episodes of Game Boy Works Color at this point and I've already encountered Pokemon clones, Sanrio TimeNet. It was the style of the time. It was. It was very in vogue. And the only notable thing

about the Sanrio TimeNet is that you can't actually capture Hello Kitty or Dear Daniel. Too important. But you can use as your starter a mountain of poop wearing a diaper, which is the most amazing character. All right, yeah. Can't wait until I go to Sanrio World and buy plushes of that way.

Yeah, what's its name? I don't remember. It's poop wearing a diaper. Bugs Bunny and Crazy Castle 3 and 4, there's no escape. What's are really a need for this? Crazy Castle is a big deal. It's my mom's favorite series. I won't have anybody toarnish it here on this pocket.

I'm just wondering what other franchise. as this was released as in other territories. No, they kept it, they did not screw around with it after the color game. Marmaduce. This was always Bugs Bunny now until it was

Woody Woodpecker. Monica, did Monica show up? No, I don't think so. No, definitely no asterisk. Hugo was one of them. Oh, yeah. Boy, howdy. Let's see, Atari released a bunch of

ports of classic arcade games. I don't know if these, I haven't played these, so I don't know if they were like re-envisionings or if they were just straight ports, but they had Paperboy, which I think was... Oh, Paperboy. Paperboy, I think it was closer to the N.S. version. Yeah, probably. But you had Centipede, Asteroids, Pong, Frogger, Missile Man, and Yars Revenge. I probably missed some in there, too.

I got Yars Revenge. It was done by telegames, and I bought it at the very first classic gaming expo. Wow. 99, yes. On the more adventurous side, you had Conquers' Pocket Tales and Dicatana, both of which were kind of like top-down action RPGs. Conquer's pocket tales is interesting because it was like the original concept for Conquer, which was cute, annoying, like, mascot characters. That scene in Diddy Kong Racing. Yeah, Diddy Kong Racing was preparing us for a world of rare that did not exist.

That would not exist. Like tip-top the turtle and other things. Tip-top, tip-top, I don't know. Yeah, so this is like this weird kind of outlier where they actually did release a game about Conquer in kind of their original vision. And then we're like, wait a minute, what if he said cusses and there was poop? Yeah. And that's what we got. Meanwhile, DiCatano was...

It's a good version of that experience. Yeah, it's kind of like based on the FPS, but it's more like a top-down shooter. It's developed by Kimco. So it's made in Japan. Yeah. It looks like an RPG. Like, it looks like a JRPG the way it's designed. It's kind of wild.

And I think, didn't John Romero release it, like, as a ROM on his website? Oh, I think so, yeah. Yeah, he's just like, yeah, it's out there now. Here you go, everyone. Play it to your heart's content. Because it was unreleased in America or? Was it unreleased in the US? Maybe it was Europe only?

Some territory didn't get it. It might have been honest. We'll find out sooner later. So, Dejavu 1 and 2 and Shadowgate, which were ports, speaking of Kimco, of the Kimco, Kimco releases of those NES games, originally created by ICOM simulations. But DejaVu, too, never came out for NES. So this was actually like a game dredged up from, you know, the recesses of history. One of the first I can think of.

And that was previewed. So there were like two Kempco games that were previewed for NES, but never came out. I think Spy v. Spy 2 was one of them. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know about that one. I think eventually it was a Game Boy game. Hmm.

Yeah. But for some reason, they were Kempco games. Kempcom would just cut them or something. Yeah. There was Dexter's Laboratory, Robot Rampage. You might think, who cares about Dexter's Laboratory? Oh, come on. That's a great part of it.

But this was actually Elevator Action, I think, EX for Game Boy Color. Yeah. And they just put Dexter's Laboratory skin on it. We're like, you're killing robots, but it's elevator action. It's very funny. You know, they did the same thing years earlier with that Jetsons game for Super NES, which was that goat-sucking game. Oh, I didn't know about that. Yeah.

Give us a Jetsons makeover. Wow. I'll have to check that out. Donkey Kong G.B., which is not Donkey Kong 2001? No, so I can't remember here. I think Donkey Kong G.B. is a Japan-exclusive color adaptations of Donkey Kong Land 3. Yeah, it's Land 3.

Which was released only in monochrome here, but in Japan, they got the full color version. That's right. That's right, yeah. Yeah. So if you want a slightly better compromised port of Donkey Kong Country 3, that's... No, actually, the land games are unique, right? They're unique. They're new content.

But pretty much the same thing. Pretty much, yeah. They straddle that line between port and... Dragon Warrior 1, 2, and 3 got pretty decent ports on Game Boy Color. Oh, yeah. If you ignore the fact that the text box hits half the screen, really, really cool versions. Yeah, they're based on the super NES ports, minus the animation, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, three I played the hell out of. And that is a Game Boy Color-only game, if I correct. One and two was the black cart. Yeah. Then there was also Monsters and Monsters 2. And those were the Pokemon version of Dragon Quest. Oh, yes.

And those have been remade for 3DS, but only in Japan. I wish I would have gotten into that series, but I just didn't want to play a Pokemon-like. Now I like those characters a lot. I didn't really have an affinity for them until later. You can capture and use the Dragon Lord. Yeah, it's true. Who doesn't want to do that? Now I love all of those monsters.

Sorry, Ray. No, I just don't like the series. Yes, the monsters are great, but the games are not. Yeah, I played both of the Joker games and never really got into them. These ones are probably the best ones, the 8-bit. Okay. Yeah, I played probably like 10 hours of each Joker game. It was like, oh, I played through both, and I'm an idiot.

But, yeah. Not everything that Dragon Quest touches is golden. Yeah. There were ports of Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto 2 to Game Boy Color. It's nuts. But remember, those were originally top-down games, so it wasn't as huge a stretch as you might think. Like, if GGA3 showed up on Game Boy Color, that'd be something.

Was there a Dragon's Layer, Full Motion Video, adaptation for Game Boy Color? I believe there was. I was to say yes. Yes, there was. That's crazy. And they made it, I mean, it's like four-color animated gifts, however they make it work in such low compression,

but it actually functions like the arcade game. That was also a digital eclipse, I believe. Do you guys have feelings about Hamtar? Yeah. Okay. What's up? Well, they're just really good games for kids, I think. They're made by Nintendo or published by Nintendo.

Were they Alpha Dream? Alpha Dream worked on those games. At least the GBA ones. I think it was some of their first stuff. Yeah. RIP. I'm not too sure about this first one for GBC. But yeah, I mean, they're just really good adventure games for kids.

And Hamtero is cute, of course. And I don't know what else to add. They're just wholesome in that sense. If you want a nice, wholesome, easy adventure that, you know, and you don't mind. being a little bit pandered to as an adult then fine. All right, that's good. It's good to have kids games.

Kids deserve good games. That whole series up until Nintendo starts, stopped making them. Kirby Tilt and Tumble, which is an interesting idea executed poorly. Or maybe it's a bad idea executed well. Yeah. Awful taste, but great execution.

I will only say that God, I wish they had made that sequel for GameCube. Oh, I didn't know about that one. Yeah. It was going to be linked to the GBA. You'd have like the gyro cart and the GBA and then play this 3D. It makes a lot more sense. That would look so good.

God damn. But yeah, so the premise of this is it's a gyro-based game. Yeah. And you were basically kind of rolling Kirby through landscapes and hazards and challenges and puzzles. But the thing is, like, Game Boy Color, it was already hard to see the screen. And if you have to tilt the system, that just makes it harder. Like, there's nothing appealing about that prospect to me. Like, it was always such a challenge to get the Game Boy color situated just right.

So you could, like, see the screen optimally. And here's a game that's like, screw you. Keep turning the game around. Yeah, to be fair, I mean, I did play this and doesn't require a huge amount of movement. But depending on where your light is, you can just have a giant glare dancing around the screen. Like, depending on what you're sitting under next to. Even the worm light couldn't save this one. Kirby versus the glare monster.

Yeah, I think on a backlit screen, it's probably a lot better, but I've never played it that way. Yeah. Europe and maybe Japan, but definitely Europe exclusive, was the Konami Gibi collection, one, two, three, and four. Yeah. Where they ported a bunch of their classic Game Boy games and colorize them. And I'm always, I'm still kind of chapped that we didn't get those. Yeah.

Some of they were probably better than others, but, you know, some of the classic Konami portables were pretty good. I don't think you got the license stuff like Turtles in there, but you had Castlevania, you had, twin-bee. Yeah, and nemesis. I guess they did rename a Gratius, but yeah.

That's also interesting because they were monochrome in Japan. They did not come out in color there. Oh, interesting. So Europe's the... That's so weird that there are these very region-specific color versions of games that came out in monochrome other places.

I don't get it. All right. How have we not done an Oracle of Ages and Seasons podcast? I'm just talking about that on the Link's Awakening podcast we just did, talking about the remake. Those games, I think, were overlooked because of when they came out a month before the Game Boy Advance launched. And I think people associated them with like, oh, some other company made. made them, but the guy who directed Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword, these were his first Zelda games he ever made, the director of these games. They're very, very good and super, way expanding on the scope of Link's Awakening.

They are on the 3DS e-shop, and I really hope that Nintendo remakes these like they remade Links Awakening. I would say it's a foregone conclusion. I feel like if Chris Culler were here, he'd be like, yeah, that's a foregone conclusion. Yeah, so there were three Zelda games on Game Boy Color. One of them was a remake, Links Awakening Deluxe. But the other two, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, were brand new games developed by flagship, which was an offshoot of the dot com. I think they're working with Nintendo.

It wasn't just them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't just them, but they did the heavy lifting. They were the contractors on that one. But, you know, they got credit for it. So, you know, I think they had more to do than just, like, we programmed it. They probably did design work on it and kind of hooked with the content. I don't know.

I also think at the dawn of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, it was a bit odd to, play a game that you was using the eight-year-old Link Sprite from the 1993 Link's Awakened. It was just like, hmm, this feels weird. I still enjoyed the game, but I was just like this is just an odd, an odd game, an odd fit. Yeah. That was just my opinion at the time. Yeah, but I enjoyed

those games. I played them through them again about a decade ago, and I was like, oh, these are so good. I can't believe these games are old enough that you could have played them again a decade ago. They're almost 20 years old. Boy, howdy. Yep. All right. Um, Lufia the Legend Returns. That was the one that had like the rogue-like elements to it, I think.

I have no Lufia experience. Yeah. Magical drop. I have no magical drop on Game Boy experience. No, that's actually surprising. I feel like, aren't you a magical drop fan? I thought you had like a... No?

Okay. I think you're thinking of Christian Nut. Am I? Sorry about that. Magical Tetris Challenge? It's Tetris plus Mickey Mouse. Yeah? All right.

Mario Golf and tennis. You guys have something to say. Oh, Mario Golf. This is where it all began for Mario Golf. It's best one. It started, yeah, it is the best one, and then it went on for one more game. Nintendo was like, no more RPG elements. And then whenever I had an appointment with Nintendo.

I have Golf Story. Golf Story, yeah, yeah, they replaced the, I mean, there's no need for the Mario Golf RPG. But whenever I had an appointment with Nintendo for a Mario Golf game, that's the first thing I would ask, they'd be like, oh, no, and then I immediately lose interest. So they just leave. They can see you two now. Thank you. I'm not writing this preview.

His eyes glazed over. What happened? But yeah, they, it was great. I mean, you did not play as Mario or Luigi. You played as a custom character. That worked your way through a story mode with RPG elements and equipment and very, very full of extras and fun details. And I played the hell out of Mario Golf GBC. Nice.

Tennis was that was also like an RPG-ish, right? Yes, yes. So both Mario Golf and Tennis for this and Game Boy Advance had the RPG stuff baked in. Yeah, these were developed by Camelot Planning, who then went on to create Golden Sun. And I think the world was worse for the change. And then they made the GBA versions of Golf and Tennis. which looked like golden sun. Yeah, they still have like the vibrating, undulating characters.

I don't know what it is about those, but those just like gross me out. After Shining Force, these were their best RPGs. I have like, I literally have a, like a gag reflex when I see those little pulsing sprays that they use. I don't think it's so much the pulsing is just the, you know, gingerbread house aesthetic in general of those. Yeah, but even in like beyond the beyond, like the way those characters, instead of animating them, they're just like, what a, we make them vibrate. It doesn't bug me that much. I don't know.

It really upsets me. I don't know what it is. I just don't like those rotund characters. Anyway, so speaking of compromises, we have Mega Man X-Tream and X-Tream 2. We're in the land of X-Stream. Yeah, it's kind of like the Game Boy original adaptations of Mega-Man 1, 2, 3, 4, where they take elements from one X-game and another X game, combine them. But trying to play Mega-Man X on.

Game Boy, when the series was designed around like the full Super NES controller, it's rough. It has a real bullshit conceit. Like X went back in time and now he has to play through the old... Oh yeah, he has to erase the soul of the robots. SolarRacer was actually

the title in Japan. Yeah. Too bad they couldn't keep that. Yeah. Anyway, they're kind of rough. The second one was better, but not great. One of few super NES ports on Game Boy Colts. Yep. Metal Gear Solid on the other hand.

And have we done an episode about this? I don't think we have. Who's the developer on this again? It was Tosei with Kojima Productions. It's a real cool game. It's really good. Yeah. It is, you know, I hadn't played Metal Gear 2 when this came out.

So to me it was a revelation like, wow. Me too. They've managed to take all of Metal Gear Solid and somehow turn all these mechanics into Game Boy Color. That's crazy. Not realizing that Metal Gear Solid was basically just like, hey, what if we put 3D on Metal Gear Solid? too. But it's, you know, even knowing that, it's still really impressive. It has an all-new story. Like, this game is, it's not Metal Gear, like an actual adventure for Snake. It is ultimately you discover that it is Riden, like a virtual reality simulation. That's the final

reveal, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I just spoiled the game for you, but shut up. It's, it's a great game that you should experience anyway. It has all, like, the weird Kojima enemies who have like a cool boss battle conceit and then they talk to you for a long time when you kill them and it's got like the nerdy hacker guy except in this game he's kind of unpleasant and surly it's got the cute female character that Snake falls in love with and his companion

and help there's a guy whose name is Weasel and guess what? He betrays you. No way. I wish they would have let this game keep the subtitle in America because only through preview coverage and websites that I know but this is not just a port of the game. It's a new game with a new story and everything. I think people thought it was just the same game,

and they just ignored it. And it did not do nearly as well as it should have. It's so good. To me, it's the highlight of the Game Boy Color. It's the best game on the system. It's very sophisticated. Yeah, I put it up with the Zelda's. Montezuma's Return, which is a sequel to Montezuma's Revenge.

All these diarrhea games, I don't understand. There was a great port of Mr. Driller. Mr. Diller works very well on even Game Boy Color because it's such a simple game. I like that one very much. There were lots of Pokemon games, Silver Gold, Crystal Card Game, and Puzzle Challenge, and I think Card Game 2 also. Not in America, though. Oh, my God.

It's weird that they didn't localize a Pokemon game for America. I do like Pokemon card quite a bit. I always end up liking the spinoff games more than the actual main Pokemon games, but yeah, trading card game is all right. So I don't think I put Project S11 on here. Was that someone else? I did not. Not me.

I must have just been in a fugue state. I don't know anything about that game. There was a Puyo Puyo game, of course. Quest Brian's Journey, the spinoff to Quest 60s. That's right. No way. So Quest was a standout on 64 because there were no other RPGs. But on Game Boy Color where there were lots of RPGs, no.

This and Dai Katana are two peas in a pod. I don't know. I feel like Dicatana turned out better. All right. Well, in terms of weirdness, I guess. Okay, okay. There was R-Type Deluxe. Rayman 1 and 2.

This is the, I think, the only 2D version of Rayman 2. The other versions of Rayman 2 were 3D. So this is like the Rayman 2 version that plays like the original, which is kind of neat if you like Rayman, which I don't. Revelation's the Demon Slayer, which was the same. second, no third, third Shin-Megame Tensei game to come to the U.S. after

Jack Brose and Pros and Prisona, Revelation's persona. And then there was the... They had the Revelations name here. It was going to be a brand and they were like, the hell with it. Let's just call it Shin-Magamei-Tensei. Do we aboos love it? I don't know if this was a Game Boy Color game around this time, but they

had their own Pokemon spin off like Demi-Kidmy kids. That's for Demi-Kids. That was GBA. What was that in Japan had a much more offensive name? Devil Children. Devil children. I love it. Yeah. They went all in it. They had the last Bible for Game Boy. Yeah, yeah. Good times.

Shantae is one of the highlights of the system, although in hindsight the game doesn't play that great. It's kind of rough in terms of design, a lot of backtracking, a lot of tedium. Enemies take too many hits. But it was like this kind of cute monster boy or Wonderboy Monster World. Yes.

It's all very confusing. Wonderboy style action platformer, sort of nonlinear, lots of backtracking. much backtracking with nice animation, very nice animation, great music by Jake Kaufman. It kind of, I think for a lot of people that put way forward on the map. If not this game, then some of the sequels. But it took forever for them to be able to make a sequel because this game came out at the very, very ass end of Game Boy Colors Lifetime and sold like a dozen copies.

Now it's very expensive because no one bought it. But basically Capcom, I think, probably lost a lot of money on this. So whenever they shopped around the sequel, like there was going to be Chanty Advance. That apparently is in a pretty decently completed state from what I've heard. Everyone, every publisher was like, no, we're not going to do that because we don't want to lose money. So nothing happened. Space Marauder was a port of Bori fighter, which... I never actually heard of this, like the fact that...

I discovered it by a mistake when I was covering Bori fighter. Yeah, Space Marauder. Wow. How did this happen? I missed out on that. Space Station Silicon Valley got a GBC port. Did you ever play that one? Oh, God, no.

I just remembered that, though. That was another one of those games that was about possessing characters, right? Like you were possessing robot. Yeah, it was like a Grand Theft Auto. I mean, it was by DMA, right? It was by DMA. Yeah, would be Rockstar North. But, yeah, it's one of the games people that played it for N64 at the time really love,

but I think it's really hard to go back to that kind of game. Yeah, and there were some pretty good RPGs. Star Ocean Blue Sphere was only released in Japan, but is kind of considered a high watermark for the system with really great visuals and carry over the Star Ocean game style pretty closely. Star Ocean expectations of having, you know, high memory cartridge and a bunch of crap stuff. Yeah.

Survival Kids, which was, how would you describe survival kids? It is a desert island RPG, sort of. Sort of, yeah. It's got like, it's kind of got a harvest moony kind of element. It's like nudging right up against Lord of the Flies, but not really because it is about kids getting stranded on an island, but you don't really like, you don't rise up or anything. It's like the predecessor to Lost in Blue and things like that. Oh, yeah, yep. It was before survival games were popular, like a popular thing people wanted to play.

Yeah, I was really interested in it. I didn't end up buying it, but I had to play it. And it's like, yeah, it's a really interesting concept. It's kind of a cute game. There was also Toki Tori, and if you would like to know more about this, I interviewed the creators of the game from the developer two tribes about a year ago. They talked very earnestly

and frankly about the challenges of being indie game developers. But this is a great little platform puzzler. Really nice graphics, good, interesting gameplay. It's been remade. There was a sequel to it. So you should definitely check it out.

I think it kind of started out the same way as Chante in that you had the same bad fate, but now it's just like both of those have come back. Sort of, although two tribes. is no longer around. Well, Tokitori is. Tokitori is, yes. But, yeah, those were both games

published by, along with Metal Walker, by Capcom at the very end of the Game Boy Color's life. It didn't do that well, but they were good games, and I was, like, the only person who paid attention and enjoyed them. There were two Tomb Raider games, which were very much in the Prince

of Persia style. Not that good, but kind of impressive looking. There were Tony Hawk Pro Skater games. Oh, yeah. And then just to wrap up the list, we had a couple of more Way Forward games in the form of Wendy Every Witch Way, based on the Windy cartoon. And apparently that's really good and also very, very expensive now. And Extreme Sports, where they applied the traditional way forward art style, great animation, et cetera, et cetera, to, you know, a multi-mode extreme sports. What do you want to say?

Like snowboarding and rollerblading and that kind of thing. You mentioned Star Ocean. There was also a Grandia spinoff. Yeah, there was. Oh, parallel trippers, right? I don't regret about that one. It has kind of a stupid setup where it's about kids falling into the world of Grandia. It's a Grandia Isakai.

Oh, no. It's like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, right? Yeah, except they actually team up with the actual heroes of Grandia and then go on an adventure. Ah, very exciting. Hooray. So, no, like, what was Square doing at the time? We were doing WonderSwan at the time. I thought so, yeah.

They had had a falling out with Nintendo, and we're not going to dignify Nintendo with the time of day. Yeah, I forgot about that period. It was, like, it was found off anti-taxic advance that was the great handshake, like, we're back together. Actually, it was Crystal Chronicles, wasn't it? Those were all, like, 2003. Yeah. I feel like Crystal Chronicles was kind of the big sort of, not on portable so much, but just like the big, like, make good for Square Inix or Square Soft. and Nintendo after the big falling out

because, you know, they put their chips behind Sony and Bondi. Sony did great, Bondi not so much. So they were like, we got to get some of that portable cheddar. So let's kiss up to Nintendo again. And it probably helped that Yamauchi retired, right? When did Yamu? Yeah, Yamauchi retired in like 2003 because he wasn't with the company when Nintendo DS launched in 2004.

So I think his leaving the company also helped because I think there was a lot of bad blood there. Yeah. He seems like the kind of guy who could have held up grudge for a while. Yeah, maybe. A bit. Anyway, that's, um, that's Game Boy Color. There's not too much to say because it did have a very short life. We really ran through all the highlights of the platform.

I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, like, junky kids games, especially in this, in this country. We're just like all that Nickelodeon crap and things like that. Yeah. Sports games, wrestling games. This is when EGM would be just bloated with game reviews and other content. And I just remember them being so furious over here's another Mary Kate and Ashley game. Here's another Barbie game.

Yeah. Eventually they just gave Sean Baby a page at the back of the magazine. We're like, please just trash these games. But I would say because of that and I think also just the general sort of opinion, a lot of people are like, oh, I don't play handheld games. I don't you do that. That's for kids. or that's two, you know, the graphics aren't good or anything. A lot of people did miss out on stuff like Metal Gear and the Oracle's games.

And I think that's why now those are in demand. And, you know, it's, you know, bittersweet, I guess, for the Game Boy Color, but nevertheless, they did get some good, pretty good games. Yeah, it was a very transitional platform, but in the two to three years that it was relevant, there was some good stuff for it. And if you supplemented it with NeoGeo Pocket Color, I was going to say game.com, but don't know. Or if you wanted to import WonderSwan, you had a really nice slate of portable games. And then Game Boy Advance launched,

and I think that's when portable gaming really started to be taken seriously by people because it was a much more advanced system. It really felt like, oh, I'm playing like a super NES, but it's handheld. We didn't even do 3D. Sorry, we didn't really talk about the form too much about how small and handheld it was and actually like

so this came at the perfect time because in 1990 in the late 90s early 2000s you probably didn't have a cell phone and you probably your clothes were all too big and didn't fit you because that was style at the time so. You were wearing cargo pans and you had so many pockets. You could just drop that thing in any random pockets. You were a Rob Leifeld character. You could spend 20 minutes finding your Game Boy

color in your giant pants. Yeah. But that's what I don't miss wearing clothes that don't fit me but it felt like I could always have a Game Boy on me at this era. Yeah. But that was just of the time, a moment in the time. You can't do that with a switch these days. No.

No. Everything's too fitted. You can't have those Italian-style suits and slide a switch into your pocket the way you could with a links and a jeans jacket. If anyone bought the Tommy Hillfigure branded Game Boy color. Oh, God. When it came out, please let us know. It's right up there with the Marble Row branded links.

I tried to find it at the time. I went to J.C. Penny's and I'm like, what? I don't know. I didn't know how to get it. The tribal GBA is the height of that, I think. the tribal tattoo, which in the ad, it's a canon that Mario has a tribal tattoo. Canonically, he does.

Yep. He might have had it erased by this point, or maybe he's had it, like, expanded into something more interesting. One of those Bowser statues that shoots lasers, he got it lasered off at one of those, so... Okay. He's fine now.

Good thing Mario advanced, too, came out. All right, that's it. Game Boy Color. I like the system, even though it is kind of... It was just sort of there, and then it was gone. I mean, even if someone does just lump it in with Game Boy as a whole, that's still great because you still have a lot of good games included in that. We have given you at least three dozen games that are worth tracking down and playing. So do it.

Go play them and say, you know, Game Boy Color, you weren't too bad. And then you can move along to Game Boy Advance and be like, oh, yeah, that's the stuff. But, you know, for what it was at the time, it was pretty darn good. And I have some good memories. Like I said, it was the system that was really kind of my entry point into portable gaming. I did not own an original Game Boy. I had Super Game Boy, but Game Boy Color was the first portable system I purchased and owned, and that was my entry point into basically everything I do now.

Because I was like, hmm, these games that are kind of backward and primitive compared to what I'm playing on PlayStation and then 64, they're actually pretty good and I still like them. And maybe old games have value. Let's keep playing. Imagine that. My ultimate dream is that in 18 months, Nintendo's Switch will launch a channel. They will never update again with like 20 Game Boy games.

And maybe some of these will be on it. Oh, yeah. Get them all on. Yeah. All right, guys. Thanks for contributing to this conversation about Game Boy Color. We are wrapping up now. So let's talk about ourselves and where people can find us to hear more opinions about

things that aren't necessarily Game Boy Color. We've exhausted this topic. I am Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. And you can find me doing Retronauts podcasts every Monday and every other Friday along with Bob. And you can find that at Retronauts.com or on iTunes or other services along those lines. You can also support the show on Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. That is what keeps the lights on here. It allows us to travel to San Francisco, to record, to meet with people

like Ray who live in the area and know lots about video games and can make the show better than if it were just two dudes in a room. It's three dudes in a room. Sometimes four. Sometimes what a three dudes and a lady? And a woman shows us. Sometimes two dudes in a lady or two ladies. It's wild. You never know what's going to happen. There's going to be these two dudes here. But beyond that, who knows?

So you can support the mystery and the excitement of not knowing who's going to show up in the podcast studio through Retronauts. Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts three bucks a month, folks. And so many mysteries will unfold before your eyes. It's worth it. Okay. Well, I got a few things. I'm on Twitter as RDBAAAA. I made a game for mobile called Blastrush.

That's a couple years old now. That's at Blastrush.com. You can get it for any of your favorite phones, probably. Let's see. I have a podcast called No More Whoppers. We just have our page at no morewoppers.com where you can find it in any podcast service, I believe. And I recently set up a co-fee page.

It's not exactly Patreon, but you can nonetheless tip me a couple of dollars every now And then that's also at that website as R-D-B-A-A-A-A-A-A-I-A-I think that is it. I'm also on Twitter as Ham-Tar-Hentai, 60. I knew it. Nice. That's your horny off-man account, right? I have that 18-crossed-out emoji on it. Excellent.

I am Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And I have other podcasts, by the way, that aren't about video games. They're still about old things. That's Talking Simpsons to Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons. and what a cartoon where we look at a different episode of different cartoon every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts for free, but if you want to go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons,

you can sign up for our Patreon. You can get episodes a week early as with Retronauts, but you can also get access to a bunch of exclusive miniseries. By the time you listen to this, there will be probably almost 200 exclusive episodes on that Patreon for you to hear that are not available to the public. So check it out at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. All right, that's it, folks.

Thanks for listening to our talk about Game Boy Color. We'll be back in a few days or a week or something like that with another episode. Until then, keep the worm light on inside the birdhouse in your soul. You know, I'm sorry. Thank you.