Has anyone noticed how much shovelware there was for the GBC, plenty of licensed games trying to make the most out of an 8-bit device in the late 90's.
Has anyone noticed how much shovelware there was for the GBC, plenty of licensed games trying to make the most out of an 8-bit device in the late 90&#...
I appreciate Digital Eclipse's games on it just for the fact they usually look impressive for the console.
Yeah and the Velez/Dubail games were also legendary. It's 2023 and the best Wacky Races game is still on Game Boy Color
We just had a dump of Wacky Races for the Genny recently too
No no, the Dreamcast game is the best Wacky Races game.
Shovelware always flocked to the cheapest, most readily available systems of the generation, when they weren't taking the shotgun approach of hitting everything on the market. Gameboy was easy and cheap to develop for, and had an enormous install base. That's why licensed games and shovelware have mostly made the shift to mobile games these days.
There's also just the stigma of the Game Boy being a kid's toy (I mean it's in the name).
Matt and Trey didn't want a fully developed South Park game being released on Game Boy Color, because it would be a kid's game based on a very adult show.
They didn't have an issue with there being N64 South Park games, though.
god, I miss console shovelware
We posting shovelware kino? I loved this game. It's just a clone of commandos but driving around in a tank running over people was great.
>Doesn't have the club music.
Dropped.
Only a zoomer finds licensed games odd. Whenever a modern comic book movie is out, I'm shocked that there are no toys, fast food promotions, or video game tie ins.
I think they do get fast food promotions 'cuz I have some Thor: Love and Thunder or whatever happy meal toys. Certainly the get toys too, I'm pretty sure boys mostly collect superhero action figures now 'cuz R-rated movies stopped getting cheap child toys and the new Star Wars content sucks and tries too hard to be for girls (girls don't care about SW either, hilariously).
DC comics still gets games WB is just wise enough to let the games be their own universe instead of being movie games. Marvel games seem to be rarer, I think because Disney struggles with trying to figure out the vidya market and it's as if they barely try (just selling off their IPs to the highest bidders instead of publishing games in house).
That game is a lot better than you would imagine starting with the idea of Blade for game boy color. A single plane beat em up with a counter stance that lets you fly through enemies if you can use it well broken up by cabal style shooting gallery levels.
call me a zoomer all you want, but I think GBC hardware was just way too limited for anything good. the CPU was barely enough to make enjoyable games that ran well. and most of the games on it looked awful, with tiny res and garish palettes—and that includes Nintendo's own games. I think even GB games looked better, because the palettes weren't so ugly, and Super Game Boy actually had some really nice ones, that had a nice pastel touch instead of oversaturated crap.
Pokemon GSC is perhaps of an exception. a small basic RPG like this worked perfectly on GBC, and the palettes were actually very well made.
NES games could—and did—look great and run great. GBC games looking good was more of an exception.
both the GB and GBC suck. they each only have a couple dozen good games out of 1000 games each
this argument is bad. you could have 50 good games in a 1000 title library, or 30 good games in a 300 title library. which is better? 50>30, it hardly matters that the rest is shit. as long as you have games like Pokemon and Link's Awakening, it's at least alright.
the issue with GB/GBC was just way too hard to make anything really good for. it's almost like Atari, you're way too limited by the hardware. can't even do NES-grade platformers well, at best you're left with something like GB Mega Man. most that you could do was basic RPG, puzzle, maybe some limited action like Wario Land series.
NES games could absolutely stand the test of time, like e.g. SMB3 or Mega Man games, where realistically there's nothing much to add and they're still a blueprint for their series years later. GB/GBC was just way, way too gimped, and also not taken quite seriously by most devs. it was part insufficient hardware, part being taken for "inferior" console that was just a way to pass time on school bus.
>you're way too limited by the hardware. can't even do NES-grade platformers
the Gameboy was in fact a bit better hardware than the NES in several ways. more powerful CPU, cleaner architecture, and easier to code for. it was mainly limited by the small screen resolution.
A big limitation of the original Gameboy was the mapper hardware, it basically worked like an UNROM game with a fixed lower bank and graphics data put in the main game ROM. You could only have a fixed engine and a bunch of the ROM was taken up by the graphics while NES games with MMC1 etc could have support multiple engines and store the graphics in a separate ROM which meant all of the main ROM was available for code/sound/level data.
>the Gameboy was in fact a bit better hardware than the NES in several ways.
I'm reading up on this. it's more complex than that. you have to take a deep dive into architecture, handling of sprites, etc. moreover, NES had mappers, which even further complicates things.
to me, if GB was indeed "better", it hardly ever showed. even Mega Man V on GB flickered like hell as soon as you had more than 1 enemy on screen. many games ran in 30fps too which didn't help. yes, there were games like Kirby's Dream Land 2 that looked good; but then again, the NES Kirby also looked great, was in color and had way more stuff on screen.
resolution indeed was a big factor too though. 160 x 144 is tiny. it's just 37.5% of the total NES resolution. this is one case where pure numbers matter. you can't have anything fast paced because of LCD ghosting and tiny screen space. you can't have more than a few enemies on screen. even menus and HUDs become a problem.
>many games ran in 30fps too which didn't help
That was done deliberately to prevent ghosting. A few early games like SML run at 60 fps and developers quickly learned to not do that because it smeared like hell.
>NES had mappers, which even further complicates things
The Gameboy had mappers as well but there were really only three of them and five standard ROM sizes--32k, 64k, 128k, 256k, and 512k (Pokemon was 1MB and the only games in the library that big). They also locked $0-$3FFF so that area had to contain the game engine and you couldn't bank it out. Hence games could only use a fixed engine whereas many NES mappers let you switch any portion of the ROM you wanted so multiple engines were possible. A game like Silver Surfer was one example; it has two different engines for the horizontal and vertical scrolling levels. The Gameboy could not do that.
there were very few 32k Gameboy games and they were mostly early ones like Tetris. a 32k game is incredibly limited and more limiting than an NROM NES game since some of the ROM space is also occupied by graphics and can't be used for additional code or other stuff.
in fact Nintendo had meant to use a color screen in the Gameboy but Sharp offered them their chipset for an incredibly low price they couldn't refuse, but they also had to take their shitty B&W screens as part of the deal
the CPU is a customized Z80 with the instructions specific to the Z80 removed and a couple unique ones added. so basically it's an 8080.
>Z80
It's not a Z80. It's not an 8080. It's a Sharp SM83.
I dont like thie argument, picked up an analog pocket to play gba games and have ended up spending tons of time of gb/gbc.
- Links Awakening
- Quest Bryans Journey
- Oracle of Ages / Season
- Mario Land 2
- Pokemon
- Pokemon TCG
- Telefang
- River King
- Pocket Bomberman
- Crystalis
Those are just the ones ive played so far, got about 15 more to get through. Its a great little console
ALSO SHOUT OUT TO TOBU TOBU GIRL DELUXE a homebrew game that supports GBC and is literally one of the best games ive ever played
Nah, the GBC was plenty capable, It's just that most devs didn't put the effort in. Pokemon is a weak choice, honestly, it's charming visually but far less ambitious than even GB games from years before it. Palettewise it felt limited, too, since GS were GB games.
GBC had some decent games but it felt pretty unnecessary considering it only had a life span of roughly 3 years and GBA made it completely obsolete in every way
It had a much better library
based off the Project Atlantis info Nintendo probably could have gotten out an equivalent to the GBA out in 97 or 98 but they chose to wait since the original Game Boy still held an 80% market share for handheld gaming devices, I imagine Pokémon then exploding in popularity led them to stick with that decision and instead do the Color as a stopgap since it's marginal improvements over the original meant it was cheap to make
>it only had a life span of roughly 3 years
pretty insane how successful it was, considering thats how long the Dreamcast lasted
Every nintendo system is loaded with shovelware, except the virtual boy.
GBA had way more
In terms of shovelware
DS > GBA >>> GB=GBC
i agree the GB is easier from a programming standpoint but also a lot more limiting
gbc was a shitty stopgap for children. try not to think about it any harder than that. it was absolutely loaded with trash to capitalize on pokefad.
And furthermore like mentioned above Gameboy games all work like UNROM. The graphics data is stored in the main game ROM and copied into video RAM as needed. It didn't have the NES's separate video bus and CHR ROM which was a bit faster and also saved on ROM space since the main ROM doesn't also have to contain the graphics so there's more room for other stuff.
The MMC5 was a test bed for several planned Gameboy features including vertical split scrolling.
When the Famicom first started most console games were 8k or 16k. This literally meant 8 or 16k. You could have a 16k Colecovision game and that was all you had. The code, graphics, sound, and level data had to fit in exactly 16,384 bytes. Nintendo cleverly used a separate ROM for the graphics so the main 16k game ROM would have space freed up for more code/sound/level data. This was particularly beneficial in the early days although it made the games more expensive. It was also helpful because the Famicom used a 6502 and 6502 code takes more space than Z80 code.
all cartridge-based game consoles except the NES store the graphics in the main ROM and blit them into graphics RAM
while true it was more beneficial on 8-bit ones because space was so limited. on the 16-bit consoles it wasn't a big deal.
The Master System was pretty limited for that reason. It didn't use a CHR ROM system like NES and its graphics had 5 bit color depth instead of 4 bit so took twice as much space to store.
details?
The SMS stored its graphics in the main ROM and copied them to video RAM as needed. This meant a portion of the ROM was taken up with graphics data and the graphics also took twice as much space as NES graphics due to the higher color depth. It generally resulted in simpler and more limited games as you couldn't fit as much content without going to a larger ROM size.
ok not super versed in the technical details of that
what he said. Gameboy games are a little more limited than NES ones as the mappers fix the first 16k in place so it can't be banked out. NES games with MMC1 or MMC3 do let you bank that so you can have more than one engine.
Nintendo had three different Gameboy mappers. The first two supported 256k ROM max and the third supported up to 1MB. two also supported battery backed save RAM. So basically like UNROM on NES but with the option of supporting save RAM.
Do people really console war GB/GBC/GBA games? You can play a GB game on GBC. You can play GBC game on GBA. It's pretty much the same platform granted the GBA addon really ups the graphics.
I'm just pointing out most original Game boy games haven't aged well
The GB/GBC is where a lot of Euro demoscene groups landed after the demise of the C64 and Spectrum. Not sure if it was the low development costs or the Z80 hardware. A few of them managed to hang on as late as the 3DS era, like VD-dev.
Most of them played exactly how you'd expect from games made by ex-demosceners.
many of them also did Mega Drive games
Poor chaps
portable gaming was always fricking shit. in the early years it just had shitty ports of home console games that you're better off playing on home console (Street Fighter II, Game Boy), and in the later years it just had the same games you had on home console that you're better off playing on home console (Borderlands 2, Vita)
GBA and DS had lots of soulful original games
I thought the Tomb Raider games were decent, better than the GBA ones
the NES was much more dependent on cartridge hardware than the Gameboy to the point where the console's capabilities and the type of games you could make changed quite dramatically depending on the hardware used.
all true but the vast majority of the US NES library (like 80%) was CNROM, UNROM, MMC1, and MMC3.
MMC3 could be slightly tricky to emulate because of the scanline IRQ which is quite timing dependent. I thought they had to decap an MMC3 to properly understand how the IRQ worked.
That is true. The Gameboy had only a few mappers and they don't really do much but simple bank switching and providing save game RAM.
Nametables are one of the most headache inducing parts of the NES and they have to be dealt with even on NROM games. You have to understand how they work or games won't even scroll properly.
>ez to dev for
>team of like 1 or MAYBE 2 dorks locked in a dark room
>5wks to ship """"complete"""" game
all you need is someone to pay the licensing fee which usually gives free reign to pump out turd after turd for a few years for next to no money
people scoff at shovelware, and 90% is irrevocably shit
but MOST of your favorite games wouldnt have been made were it not for the poor sods tasked with making Blade™ only for the Nintendo™ GBC™ and other games of its ilk
your studios gotta eat FIRST, and only then you can do all the weird arthouse shit that /vr/troopers will be waxing poetic over 30yrs later
ex:
daggerfall and morrowind would literally never have existed were it not for some bad terminator games
>bad terminator games
Future Shock was pretty good and helped popularizing the standard WASD controls
thats very polite of you anon, but its still not great
ill give em credit
there were very few people in the world at that time who knew how to make that whole 2.5D thing work in a game, and julian was one of them
The Gameboy mostly feels like an improved, tidied up NES. The NES is janky and has a lot of weird behaviors that have to be accounted for. One issue is that the CPU and PPU run at different clock speeds so timing is a bit hard to pull off and even many professional coders got tripped up by it which is why you sometimes ended up with games like Double Dragon that had a lot of graphics glitches. The Gameboy has some odd behaviors with its IRQs but generally they're not as hard to figure out.
the PPU is definitely quite annoying to work with compared to the Gameboy's graphics hardware. it would have been nice if you could access the PPU outside blank as you can do that on Colecovision/Master System/Genesis (not on SNES though) but they wanted to make the design simple and cheap as possible.
yeah the NES is a royal PITA to code for. the Master System on the other hand is incredibly easy to program, it's like coding a Flash game. maybe that was one reason it wasn't a success, too easy and programmers didn't feel challenged.
I don't know anything about the Master System tbqh.
It's as I said. the SMS is about as difficult as coding a Flash game. just learn what the h/w registers do and write to them, boom, done. you hardly ever have to worry about timing or counting clock cycles.
I don't get how Sega fricked up so badly with the Saturn because all of their other consoles were remarkably easy and forgiving to code for.
Programmers love a challenge, they complained the PS1 was too easy so Sony made the PS2 a lot harder.
The sound hardware on NES is pretty annoying too. Especially the DPCM channel which has a lot of weird behaviors and bugs such as requiring DPCM samples to be in $8000-$BFFF and interfering with controller reads. games like SMB3 do a couple reads per frame to ensure they're not missing anything.
SMB3 uses the DPCM channel quite a lot for extra percussion iirc
makes sense they had to do some hax bullshit to make sure it didnt destroy the actual game tho lol
thats cool tho since usually in vidya itd just be the music that would get cut
Most games only limited DPCM samples to fixed screens with no action going on like the IMMM BAAAAD in Bad Dudes. Not many other than Nintendo themselves wanted to attempt in-game DPCM.
shame too since for actual vocal samples its fricking garbage
definitely under-utilized for an extra percussion channel, where it actually seems to work pretty ok (embedrel, the "bongo" is DPCM)
i suppose compressed drum samples is kinda what people want in electronic music anyways, so you can get away with it
the Famicom version of Crazy Climber used a unique reverse UNROM that locked $8000-$BFFF instead of the usual locked $C000-$FFFF. I think that was done because the game had samples in it and something to do with them having to be stored in the upper bank.
oh yea the other annoying idiosyncrasy that i remember is that theres no velocity on the triangle channel
like at all
thats why the iconic megaman space-drum is so fricking loud. normally most wouldnt use it for anything other than basslines. the waves first harmonic would make it sound 8va, but quieter. that way you could get a nice-sounding bassline, but without it completely overpowering the square channels
lmao but those capcom guys just said
FRICK THAT
THIS IS THE 80s
ROCK N ROLL D00d
the triangle channel's volume also drops when DCPM is used for some reason
I believe Spartan X was the first game released to actually use samples and it was done by Nintendo themselves.
also having to refresh the OAM table every frame or so so your sprites don't disappear or get corrupted
without a mapper this is all the space for graphics on NES you have
it is funny when you hear modern gaymers b***hing about muh pallet-swapped enemies in old games
its like cut the poor guys some slack. people get more gfx space making shitty banner ads to shill people dildos and vapes than those guys got for a full game
it probably just fricks up the harmonic which is usually the only thing you can hear anyways
although i could be totally wrong and its just some weird hardware quirk like most of the system apparently
so it's like this.
>mappers on NES could let you switch different graphics sets in various granularities, usually 8k, 4k, or 2k
>you could also bank the PRG ROM in various granularities most often 8k or 16k
>some added scanline counters
>and extra sound (but we never got that in the land of the free, sadly)
>sometimes improved mirroring or graphics RAM
>and support for extra cartridge RAM to have battery saves or additional storage space
note that NES mappers generally did not add actual extra processor power to the console the way some of the SNES cartridge chips did
I know the first Famicoms had overheating issues and Uemura mentioned Baseball as being one game where this was known to happen (sprites disappearing as the PPU warmed up).
the initial Famicoms did get scalding hot and they put a silicone rubber heat sink around the PPU. this issue was fixed after a few chip revisions. my guess was the first ones might have been 5 um and Ricoh did a die shrink which reduced operating temperatures.
the PPU was largely copied off the TMS9918 and the early versions of that were 5 um and needed a sink.
the Gameboy is overall not hard to program, the most tricky part being some of the IRQ handling. but it's much cleaner than NES and there's other niceties such as the CPU being able to see the VRAM.
>handheld demake is superior to the original game