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»Life After Color
"Welcome to the world of Color."
Introduction
Nintendo’s portables not having color is just a fact of life. It’s how things
are, we’re used to the shades of yellow and green, or black and silver if we
upgraded to Game Boy Pocket. Portables having color just doesn’t work, they
weren’t meant to. Game Boy did fine without them, it beat all its
non-monochrome competitors in both sales and games. Sega makes tons of
consoles, Nintendo uses only carts, and Game Boy is black and white. That’s how
gaming is and always will be.
Yes, that’s how things were at one time. For 9 years the black and white Game
Boy dominated the portable market, and it having color just seemed impossible,
black and white was what defined Game Boy. Then in 1998 things changed forever.
The Game Boy Color was released, and the portable market got its first real
technological upgrade (real as in not defeated and outlasted by the weaker
system) since Game Boy itself way back in 1989. The impossible had happened and
Game Boy had color. GBC wouldn’t reign for as long as the black and white Game
Boy, but for the next two and a half years it dominated portable gaming.
History
Rumors of a color Game Boy had existed from the point the black and white
original was released. Nintendo seemed determined to do every half step towards
it before going all the way, with the non-portable semi-color Super Game Boy,
the higher screen quality Game Boy Pocket, and of course the color Game Boys
where the system itself was a different color. By 1996 there were already
rumors not of the 8-bit Game Boy Color, but of a 32-bit Nintendo handheld code
named Project Atlantis, which appears to have become the Game Boy Advance.
Then, in early 1998, we actually got official confirmation of a color Game Boy.
Releasing the Fall of that year, Game Boy Color and the North American release
of Pokémon (despite it not being a GBC game) brought attention to Game Boy
again. Game Boy Color signaled portables returning to the attention of gamers,
instead of just being a consistently selling system in the background of
gaming, people started to take notice of how incredible it was that the
graphically simplistic Game Boy had ruled the portable market for nearly a
decade, remaining in complete control even as Nintendo’s console fell into
second place. Along with Pokémon being on top of every sales chart for the next
two years or so, this was a major turning point in the mainstream presence of
portable systems.
Strengths
Like Game Boy before it, Game Boy Color’s strength was in an elite group of
really, really great games. Despite being two generations behind the home
consoles of its day, when developers really tried they could make GBC games as
good as any console ones. Metal Gear Solid for GBC is quite possibly the best
example of this, playing almost identically to the then cutting edge
Playstation 1 version. Not only did it have a great story and superb gameplay,
it actually had more extras than the special edition of the PS1 Metal Gear. The
Zelda Oracle games, Pokémon GSC, Wario Land 3, and Bionic Commando are more
examples of great console quality GBC games. These were the true elites of the
Game Boy Color lineup.
Another strength of Game Boy Color was that it finally allowed faithful
portable NES ports. Although Nintendo and other developers really got carried
away with ports on GBA, during the GBC games playing real ports of console
games on the go seemed incredible (we also didn’t know it would be eight years
before we actually got a new 2D Mario). Many NES classics were ported to GBC,
including the arguable best Mario port Super Mario Bros DX, and there were even
some pretty decent SNES ports like Donkey Kong Country and Mega Man Extreme.
And of course, Game Boy Color was backwards compatible and let you play all the
games of the original Game Boy. Although not as robust as the Super Game Boy
colorization, GBC would add some degree of color to black and white games when
played on it, and Nintendo even programmed in custom color palettes for some
first party GB games.
Weaknesses
Also like Game Boy before it, Game Boy Color’s weakness was the quality of
games besides the elite few that became classics. Portables have always
magnetically drawn the worst third parties to release quick cash-ins on them,
but on GBC the mid and even some of the upper tier publishers just dumped quick
licensed or console franchise based games on GBC. Seemingly every even remotely
popular console series got a bad GBC version, with only a few exceptions like
Metal Gear Solid.
Basically, there was very little middle ground for GBC games. There were some
absolute classics, but hardly any good, solid games to add quantity to the
library. Third parties just didn’t take it very seriously, flooding it with bad
2D platformers based on reasonably well known console properties at the time.
If you weren’t well informed about gaming picking out the rare gems was almost
impossible.
Game Boy Color also opened the floodgates for console ports to portables. While
this seemed like a good idea at the time, mainly due to earlier portables being
dominated by severely downgraded pseudo-ports, this was not a positive
contribution to portable gaming as a whole. Nintendo spent around five years
obsessed with porting every game they ever made to the Game Boys, finally
getting over the annoying habit with DS.
Article by: KI Simpson
Posted on: Aug. 29th, 2007 |
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Genre: Action
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release Date:
Save Type: 1 Slot
Players: 2 |
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