I always died to a water trap in level 5 of Sonic 2 LCD, but never the same one, and the levels weren’t randomly populated, so as far as I’m concerned that game could be eternal.
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That DJ program was pretty much the beginning of the not-written-for-games chiptune scene.
There were, technically, some people who wrote their own sequencer for the GB before that, but basically once people discovered that app they started clubbing with it. Better options came along, but that GB Camera extra really had a big influence.
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Yeah, but the specialized graphics hardware is the defining feature of the kind of games you can make and what they look like. ROM size limitations were also similar between SNES and GBA. It’s not wrong to call them similar even if strictly speaking they share no common piece of technology.
Always has been and still is. The only popular platforms to do software raster I can think of are the Atari 2600 (in the spirit of cutting hardware features to the bone), and 80s/90s PC games (because that was not really a gaming system, rather an overpowered workstation repurposed for games).
Anyway, to bring this sidetrack somewhat back to the original topic, I feel like the hardware limitations tend to make “large” GB games also feel sparse and lonely. Metroid 2 and Mario Land 2 especially come to mind. It’s clearly hard to include lots of sprites all at once on the GB: Kirby was able to pull it off but at the cost of bullet-hell-shmup-style lag. I think hardware limitation is why Metroid changed its emphasis from the combinatorial and lively challenges of the NES game to becoming more exploratory and puzzley.
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if I were to be really pedantic… the SNES only went up to 4mb, the GBA went up to 32 (bytes in both cases, not bits), but some of the SNES coprocessors were near-exclusively used to decompress some of the larger games, so they probably do shake out somewhat similarly.
this reminds me that the sega nomad was actually really awesome for 1995, particularly with how quickly the price dropped. always loved that it was shaped like an old analog camera on one side. and the 2P and A/V out! I wonder what 68k lithography was like at that point.
Wario Land seemed “large” to me, when I played it 20 years ago. Big levels with lots of verticality, hiding many secret passages and hidden treasures, and even a whole secret world. And of course that awesome organic overworld (also seen in World and Land 2) that changes along the way. I really like how every coin in this game kinda matters, as you get different endings depending on how rich you are at the end of your journey. One of the few games in which I didn’t mind 100%-ing it.
Wario Land 2 felt so tiny in comparison. Instead of exploring this whole world, you’re “only” inside a big castle.
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did you never get out of the castle stages?
I generally prefer ML3:WL map flow, but the branching paths of WL2 were pretty neat
Edit: also, yes, racism http://www.mariowiki.com/Escape_from_Maze_Woods#Hidden_Treasure:_Big_Face
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I feel kind of bad that I beat Wario Land but have almost no memory of it. When Game Stop was liquidating all there GB games at three for the price of one (or something like that), and I was working there, I just sat in the back stacking GB games I’d always meant to play. All the Warios were part of that bounty, but as an adult the first one was underwhelming, and I don’t think I ended up even popping in the others, though I know that they go to amazing places.
Guys.
I confess.
I missed jumping.
Like: good jumping for points.
Wario Land is the first game I beat and probably inspired a lifelong obsession with charge-dash attacks.
In that vein play Joylancer, TRONMAXIMUM gets it. It’s an action game built to roughly Game Boy specs and pixel size.
oh shit hey I know her real well glad to see that got finished
oh cool, I’ve talked briefly but not in a while. Are they doing ok these days?
yes
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oh man I never did play that!
Wario Land is kind of obviously a better game than SML2 but gets no credit for that because it’s not Mario. And the devs knew that would happen even as they were making the game (dat ending)
Yeah, Wario is a perfect mutation to the ‘off’ Mario Land one. I can imagine derogatory whiteboard drawings left “mysteriously” unerased when EAD visited R&D1, leading to their reclamation of their own mutant Mario.
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Yeah, the good GB games are the ones that deeply understand the platform. SML1 is one of them. SML2, by attempting to be more of a “real Mario” while compromising on a lot of details, remains off-brand in all its settings and powerups, has weird floaty physics and an usually low viewing distance. Like they still couldn’t bring back the iconic one-up mushroom because that relies on color. It leaves me with this kind of dissonance, like Mario is trapped in this lonely black-and-white nightmare.
I think Nintendo learned a lot from the mistakes they made in SML2. Wario Land leans into the weirdness of the GB by making it a cheerful parody of Mario. Link’s Awakening leans into the dreamlike loneliness.
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I haven’t played Wario Land II in ages. I got the original (uncolored) Game Boy version right when it came out. I 100%-ed it as well, but I can’t remember much except that it felt a lot smaller than the “big and sprawling” world of the first game. And that I wasn’t super happy about it moving further away from action and more towards puzzle platformer. Maybe why I couldn’t get into Wario Land 3 at all. Though that might be the largest of them all?
Actually, compared to the smaller scale of Wario 2, I think Wario 1 might be too big for its own good at times. Many levels felt overly long to me and there were a few too many for my taste. Virtual Boy Wario Land pretty much fixed that by “cutting out all the fat”. It’s my favorite in the series. I’m still hoping for a 3DS re-release.
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yeah, warioland 2 and 3 were popular here in the ic era but I’ve always thought that Japanese companies and Nintendo in particular make really mediocre adventure games (cf. the new Paper Marios); the complexity is usually not even on par with your average zelda which at least has the pretense of an action game to keep it interesting, and there’s basically no writing to speak of.
(relatedly, I have never been able to get into deadly premonition, the setting doesn’t make up for the clunkiness for me)
I may have 100%ed the original wario land as a kid; can’t remember. it persisted in my sister’s filthy old gameboy well into the aughts.
you really oughtn’t to talk about your sister that way
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WL1 is the peak of the series, and I’ve really grown to dislike WL4’s harshness despite the plethora of great sound effects that got reused in Wario Ware.
can we get this in KoP