DOS Games on the Game Boy Color - ADG Filler #96
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- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- In today's Ancient DOS Games filler video, Gemini's taking a look back at three Game Boy Color games which were based on three different games originally made for DOS, to see if they're any good or hold up at all compared to the games they were converted from.
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Additional Information and Corrections:
* Here's the archived page where you can download the files to play the unreleased Tyrian 2000 for both the GBC and GBA, again remembering that the GBA version is FAR less complete; it doesn't even have sound or music: web.archive.org/web/2014072311...
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Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
ADG on Pixelmusement: www.pixelships.com/adg
Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: www.pixelships.com/adg/index2....
Kris' Patreon Page: / kasick
@Pixelmusement on Twitter: / pixelmusement
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Chapters:
00:00 Duke Nukem
07:37 Commander Keen
13:28 Tyrian 2000
21:32 Credits 
Игры
I’ll be honest, Keen & Duke seem like fine games to adapt to the GBC, conceptually. They’re run & gun platformers that were basically “what if we don’t need Mario?” on PC. What blew my mind was when I saw the Windows Entertainment Packs on GBC. I never got a copy, because frankly I had the floppies. But the concept really knocked me for a loop.
A very interesting idea for the ADG Filler! Please, continue! There are so many fun stuff people overlook I'd loved for you to talk about! There is a Heroes of Might and Magic port on GBC and HoMM2 even but its not HoMM2! There is an Eye of the Beholder on GBA with combat like in GoldBox games! Lots of crazy stuff!
Yep! I'll keep that stuff in mind but I picked these three specific games due to prior experience with them. I have no experience at all with any of the other ports/conversions of DOS titles to the GBC! :o
You have my respect for even knowing about Akazukin Cha Cha. Such a funny show. I believe the song's the second ending theme.
_"Wait. Only, like, two English-speaking people out of a million are going to get this reference."_ 😆
I watched the show a few years ago. It holds up surprisingly well if you're into light-hearted 90's era anime.
Yep! The game's intro even mimics the visuals of that credits sequence to a degree! :D
@@Pixelmusementthat show really should be better known. There's a manic energy to it that's just so endearing.
@@MortimerZabi The main reason it never really went far from Japan is because it is SATURATED with Japanese puns and references, thus it's very difficult to translate to other languages as a result. Virtually every single episode of the anime has at least one joke which requires context to make sense. Not to mention, unless I'm remembering wrong, I seem to recall at least five or six episodes where one or more characters get drunk. :P
@@PixelmusementThe cultural difficulties are true. It's a minor miracle that it got an English dub in the Southeast Asian Cartoon Network, considering how nearly every pun only works in Japanese. Anyway, the show is up there with Azumanga Daioh as one of my favorite animated comedies.
Cool video, I've always been fascinated by portable ports of games now that it's a bit of a lost art. I grew up on Gameboy a lot so I experienced a ton of games on it instead. Other PC conversions I can think of off the top of my head are Jazz Jackrabbit for GBA (which is meh) and the Microsoft Entertainment packs. There's also conversions of Heroes of Might and Magic 2+3 that are mostly complete. Pretty impressive for such simple hardware.
This was a great video idea. I’ve never played any of these but I played all the DOS versions.
Tyrian is an excellent game; it's a shame that the GBC port was never finished.
Addendum: I know I couldn't play Tyrian in grayscale like that for very long before it started blurring into white noise.
Chris, I've had some intense anxiety the last week. I've had your videos on loop while I sleep and it has helped me quite a bit. I really, really appreciate you.
If you need more such content, I recommend Scykoh here on RUclips, who hasn't been too active making videos lately, but has plenty of extremely well done LPs made over the course of many years with playlists for all of them! www.youtube.com/@ScykohPlays
I highly recommend content from SNESdrunk, Jeremy Parish and Game Sack as well, I've used all three for sleep aid and they do help a lot. All of them are highly consistent and have no loud noises, except maybe SNESdrunk's intro.
I'd love to see a few more of these! I know Wolf 3D was on GBA, and I think a few others were as well
Both Doom 1 & 2 also got GBA versions.
very interesting filler video, good job Kris!
Funnily enough, I never noticed all of the jank on gbc keen when I had it as a kid. I did have the manual, which does explain things like pushing switches, but the rest of it never seemed like a big issue to me. I had grown up playing the original dos Keen games when I was a small child, because I had an uncle that gave me a dos computer, along with several Keen games. We ended up having to sell that computer when I was in early elementary school, so there were several years where I didn’t have access to any Commander Keen, and I had really loved it. When I was a little older, the GBC keen came out, coincidentally right before a very long trip I had to take for health related reasons. So my parents bought me the game, and I spent quite a lot of the trip playing it. It was obviously not the same, but I appreciated that they tried to do something different. Through some combination of having not had access to the games for years, and the fact that I was bored out of my mind for an extended amount of time on the trip, I actually have some pretty decent childhood memories of this one.
I think it's important to remember that even though there are flaws with all three of these games, none of them I would consider to be anything worse than "below average" in terms of overall quality; there are FAR worse GBC games out there. The trick is that there's a point of reference for all of them: the DOS originals, so there's kind of an unfair comparison going on here intentionally in order to showcase the differences and oddities. :B
I am always a fan of unexpected Chacha.
Shoutout to Cannon Fodder also on GBC - interesting filler, thanks Gemini
Cannon Fodder was on DOS, but was also on Amiga and maybe on consoles, so it wasn't an exclusive. That's probably why he mainly focused on just 3 games, since those were DOS exclusive. I know Duke Nukem isn't really DOS exclusive, but the game the GBC version was based on is a re-imagining of Duke Nukem 2, which was an exclusive.
Actually, I picked those three because I already had experience with them thus it was really easy to capture footage for them without having to learn new games and mechanics. I know it doesn't look it but I intentionally try to keep the effort level down with fillers just to help give myself a break. ;)
People sometimes argue which Keen is the worst: 2, 3 or Dreams. No, the answer is Keen for the GBC!
Jazz Jackrabbit is in a similar position. Great DOS/PC games, but there's also a meh GBA game later on
If it wasn't cancelled, the answer would now be the mobile game for sure!
Also, 2 and 3 weren't exactly bad games. They just had the misfortune to have really cheap enemies, such as the Vortiguards from 2 and the Vortininjas from 3. Keen Dreams wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to resort to flower power that only stuns enemies temporarily. Even the Keen Dreams mods try to remove that annoyance completely.
Sweet, I've been collecting those for a while, I hope you'll eventually make a follow up!
In the Commander Keen game, Keen starts with one hit point, but gets a second if he collects a scoring item. Keen gets knocked back when he loses the extra hit point.
OK, that makes sense, but it's still weird that there's absolutely no visual indication anywhere as to when you do or do not have this extra hit point. :P
Hoh, Michiru Yamane (TMHT composer) did the music for Castlevania: Bloodlines and Symphony of the Night, later, of course. Also, Bloodstained, recently. Knows her stuff.
I also feel more games should have balanced banana costs.
Those banana costs. Aw geez. And I thought having to pay 2 banana coins in Donkey Kong Country 2 every time to save was dumb (Even worse when that aspect carried over to Donkey Kong Land 2. Given that's a portable game)
3:16 Ouch, seem that tiny ammo box on the screen on an original GBC screen is probably quite difficult.
Tyrian looks like it might be something difficult to see on the dark LCD of a real GBC. But again, if that was an issue, would've been something address in final testing if it had been released commercially.
I suppose the biggest reason a game would support GBC only, aside from color issues and/or needing to debug two modes, is that the GBC had more RAM (4x) and VRAM (2x) than monochrome, so it would naturally be an issue if games needed that extra space.
It also had a hi-speed CPU mode, but I've heard licensed devs were discouraged from using it needlessly to conserve battery life.
Typically what happened is a decision would be made at the start of a project to decide whether to target solely the GBC, or both the GB and GBC together, since that decision would have a massive impact on what was possible given the increased specs of the GBC. You can also tell which kind of cart you have as GBC-only carts are clear plastic and missing the power switch notch, while GB+GBC carts are black plastic in the original GB cart shape. :B
14:40 There are GB emulators which support link capability. I'd recommend bgb. Though I believe that one uses a PC's Wi-Fi capability to exchange data between two copies of the emulator running at the same time (as I hear one program trying to read another's RAM space is something that Windows and security software really don't like).
There is also no$gmb which could emulate multiple Game Boys running the same ROM image (which does the job for most monochrome games but doesn't work for games like Pokemon where you'd want different save files and maybe even different games versions on each emulated console), but is not suggested because it's really old, and shareware, charging registration to unlock Color mode emulation beyond a trial mode. Also since it's so old the sound emulation was REALLY poor.
I'm familiar with a plethora of GB/GBC emulators. TGB-Dual was the big one years back for running two ROMs simultaneously, but I don't believe it's been updated in forever, it has issues with Windows 10, and it also doesn't have the greatest game compatibility or sound quality. :P
good job !!
Yeah. A Bonus episode! 😊
tyrian 2000 on gb is my MOST FAVOURITE game on the Gameboy, i love it even more than pokemon and tetris!
Cool to hear 8-bit DN3D theme there!
Wow, you sure did a good job making sure this video was 20 minutes long.
I have been making custom cga pallets for nes and game boy emulators lately :P
1:29 Duke violating the Geneva Conventions
For added PC to GBC absurdity, there's even ports of Carmageddon and the Microsoft Entertainment Pack
True, these aren't ports of the DOS games. They're caricatures.
you might already know this, but an enterprising coder recently ported ZZT to the GBC
I did not... Also, that doesn't sound like it would go so well given the severe lack of resolution to do an 80x25 text mode on a GBC screen... :|
lol, you should check out the version of Grabbag in the Genesis "port" of Duke Nukem 3D.
I mean, that was specifically for the Brazilian market where Sega's 8-bit and 16-bit consoles were reigning supreme for far longer than anywhere else in the world, so naturally the expectations (and budget) aren't going to be too good. :P
Nice. The Commander Keen one seems to differ a lot from the DOS ones. Different mechanics and quite different level designs. The original had pits too but not under the entire level.
Also, the Goodbye Galaxy games are super hard as well but effectively have built-in save states to mitigate it. :P
@@Pixelmusement Goodbye Galaxy games are kind of my blind spot since I grew up with those but I suppose they will be hard for new players. A bit like the Secret Agent/Crystal Caves games that can also be quite unforgiving.
Oh man, kid me would have killed for a portable Tyrian
Despite being a 90s kid growing up with DOS, I was late to playing Tyrian. I was mainly focused on Major Stryker at the time.
11:50, you should lend this game to James Rolfe, his character will have a fest with it. 🤣
Imagine if James did an episode of DOS games on handheld devices. It would be rather awkward since he never grew up with DOS. And as much as I'd like for him to review the other sports games from Epyx after only covering the NES version of the first Winter Games, he wouldn't have much else to say that hasn't already been said, since they all have those same distinct C64 type controls.
Also, as of this moment, I have absolutely zero ties with anyone from Cinemassacre, so the chance of any kind of collab happening anytime soon is 0.00000007298%. And yeah, from what James has talked about both in his AVGN videos and in non-AVGN videos, he didn't really grow up with computer games. Not that he never played any, as he quickly commented about Round 42 one time, but also consider that AVGN is more of a spectacle than a proper review, which means it's important to be able to find ways to entertain the audience while talking about a game, and I myself don't see either the GBC Duke Nukem or Commander Keen games holding enough weight on their own to make such a video... not without having other games in the mix. :B
It's worth noting something that a emulated environment wouldn't convey - Late '90s LCDs still were pretty hard on the eyes, and while the game boy color's screen wasn't the absolute worst you could get stuck with...it wasn't really great, either. Motion blur would make action heavy games like Tyrian 2000 a hard sell, especially considering the fact that the Tyrian port was going for dual Game Boy/Game Boy Color compatibility.
That said, some kind of motion blur ended up baked into the raw footage I captured for this video and I'm wondering if my emulator was doing it... :o
12:40 welll.... it is actually explained in the manual how the switches work...
I would hope so given how incredibly obscure of an activation method they have! D:
I am at least vaguely aware of what Akazukin Chacha is.... anime vaguely based on Red Riding Hood, isn't it?
I, the mythical 3rd person who knows about this, can better explain. It's primarily a comedy series about kids who do magic, go to magic school, and have magical adventures, and the main character rocks the red riding hood get-up. The anime version also gives it a magical girl plot that's done mostly seriously and in my opinion probably for merchandising purposes due to how out of place it seems.
"Vaguely" is putting it mildly. The main character, Chacha, wears a red hood... and that's literally all the relation. ;D
@@Pixelmusement Yeah I wound up watching the first episode and reading some of the manga because of your mention. I'm guessing her boyfriend is the closest thing we ever get to a Big Bad Wolf... just, ya know, he's neither big nor bad.
I believe the "Magical Princess" plot absent from the manga but put into the anime was more-so to capitalize on the popularity of Sailor Moon, as there's notable similarities, though it definitely helps to drive the series forwards as once that sub-plot concludes the series gets a LOT more random and wacky. :B
@@Pixelmusement Yeah, I watched a few episodes, tho I wound up getting distracted and seeing another magical girl show called Yadamon which is just adorable.... tho after a few eps of both I said "Okay, I have enough cuteness to kill a horse now" and had to go watch something more serious. Like Slayers or Sorcerer Hunters. Because clearly I know what "serious" means.
Duke on the Game Boy? Whhhaaat? 😮
Ahh never mind then. Not fussed I didn't ever play it after your review. 🤣
Praying Hands, Castlevania II GB.
Did you know that now it's easy to make GBC games thanks to GB Studio?
Yes... but GB Studio is also a bit of a shortcut in that it kinda restricts what you can do at all. A good analogy is that GB Studio is the Game Boy equivalent of ZZT and MegaZeux. That doesn't make it "bad", just limiting and best suited for people who aren't trying to do serious Game Boy development. :B
@@Pixelmusement It's getting better though. Current version has much fewer limitations than, say, 1.2 had, and you can even use assembly plug-ins or even directly edit the engine code to do stuff that isn't normally possible with GBS or is unfeasible to do.
Next game could be Cyberia. ;)
Haha I like the subject of the video
Next week's game sounds a lot like Cyberia to me.
Playing Duke Nukem on Game Boy Colour through emulation was an unpleasant experience. The bad quality audio gave me a headache!
As for Commander Keen, I never play it back in the day, even though I saw it advertised in a magazine. And when I bought a Game Boy Advance SP, I wasn't aware that it was backwards compatible with Game Boy Colour, because I was only new to consoles and handhelds at the time. Thankfully I wasn't missing out, because everyone agrees that game sucks.
By the way, do you think you could do an ADG Filler on DOS Games on Game Boy Advance, since it has both re-imaginings and ports?
Possibly, but the only such game I own is Duke Nukem Advance and I have literally no experience with any of the other conversions/ports, so it would be trickier for me to make such a video. :P
@@Pixelmusement That's okay. There's already heaps of people on RUclips that can and probably have covered such a thing in a video.
What about Jazz Jackrabbit on Game Boy… oh wait, that one is on Game Boy Advance.
Duke Nukem for the GBC is a decently good game. It's a solid approximation of Duke 2 on GBC, and has nice visuals and gameplay. It's easy but fun while it lasts. I like it. Commander Keen GBC, however, is an utter disaster. I'm a huge, huge fan of the DOS Keen games -- I'd call them A to A+ titles which are some of the best platformers ever made -- and that's probably why I hate the GBC game so much, as I do. If it was just some generic thing and not a Keen game it'd probably be something I'd call forgettably average, but it's supposedly a Keen game, and it's not, AT ALL. Everything about the game is so wrong, from controls to level designs to gameplay. Other than having the pogo stick nothing about the game is Keen-like, and nothing is anything other than below average to terrible either. it's got generic graphics that don't look like Keen visuals, awful level designs with no relation to the kinds of levels in a Keen game, mediocre controls, poor game design, etc, etc. What a disaster of a game, it's kind of a shame it was ever made at all. It's a failure of a game and is significantly worse than Duke Nukem in every possible way.
As for Tyrian, it's a real shame the game wasn't published, the game looks good. It probably would have been one of the best shmups on the GBC.
Well, these are console games. Who in their right mind plays a console game without save states? Honestly, sometimes it feels like they are balanced with a save state in mind, as otherwise they would be so annoying I genuinely do not understand who can enjoy them?
Unfortunately difficulty used to be a cheap way for developers to extend the play hours of a video game. A lot of people don't actually like spending full price for a game then beating it in a couple hours if there's no reason to play it again. If done correctly this method can actually work, but I think it fails a lot of the time. Especially if the dev didn't have a lot of time for balancing.
One of the WRONG lessons you were typically taught when learning to make games up until the start of the 2010s is the concept that "Longer Playtime = Better", but no, this is a falsehood. The best trick is to find the right length of playtime, fit your main gameplay within that, then provide ways to extend that for people who want more. It's very tricky to find that sweet spot in terms of not too short but not too long. :P
wow these games have terrible motion blur!
The funny thing is that it's baked into the recording, which makes me think my emulator might be doing it to emulate the response time of an old GB/GBC LCD screen... :|