Game Boy Color: Nintendo's Most "Extra" Console

I adore the Game Boy line of handhelds, with the GBA in particular being one of my favorite consoles of all time. I just love their design philosophy, simple but recognizable handhelds with games and features that could be far more experimental than the type of mainline stuff you'd find on consoles like the SNES or N64. However, I feel like the Game Boy Color is often considered to be the awkward middle child between the iconic Game Boy and the beloved Game Boy Advance, usually chalked down as "just the Game Boy, but it's colored now", and I think that does the console an extreme disservice. Sure it's not a massive jump over the original Game Boy in terms of power, and it may not have lasted very long, but the Game Boy Color is easily one of my favorite Nintendo handhelds for the sheer amount of ambition that was put into it. From the ridiculous amount of accessories, to the ports of games from way more advanced consoles, to the abundance of content much of its games have, the Game Boy Color is easily one of the most "extra" consoles I've ever seen.

Not Just Colored

First, I wanted to clear something up about the Game Boy Color. I feel like a lot of people think that it's just as powerful as the original Game Boy, but the pixels are colored now. That's actually not entirely accurate, because believe it or not, the Game Boy Color is just a bit more powerful than its predecessor. Its processor is twice as fast as that of the Game Boy, and it has three times as much memory. This is especially apparent in sequels to and remakes of games that released on the Game Boy. As showed in the picture above, Game & Watch Gallery 2 has entirely different backgrounds on the Game Boy Color. Pokemon GSC also looks a bit more detailed than Pokemon RBY, and Wario has a few more frames of animation in Wario Land 3 compared to the previous two entries in the series. Don't get me wrong, none of this is anything groundbreaking, but on a hardware level, the Game Boy Color is actually a bit more advanced and powerful than the original Game Boy, more than people usually claim. 

True All-Timers

The Game Boy Color has a whole slew of fantastic games, particularly the sequels to Game Boy titles. Almost every sequel made for the Game Boy Color is a pretty big improvement over its predecessor. Pokemon Red and Blue is a solid start to the series, but Pokemon Gold, Silver, And Crystal fix almost all of its issues and blow the original out of the water completely. Wario Land is fun, if a bit unmemorable, but Wario Lands 2 and especially 3 are where the series really starts to shine. I adore the original Game & Watch Gallery, but Game & Watch Gallery 2 is genuinely one of my favorite handheld games ever made. Not to say there isn't plenty of fantastic original titles either, like the great Mario Tennis & Golf games, the incredibly ambitious and visually-stunning Shantae, and the impeccably designed Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Seasons/Ages. Though not super long-lasting, the quality on show for the Game Boy Color is absolutely fantastic, but that's just the start of it.

Nintendo's Ports

Nintendo went really hard with their ports on the Game Boy Color. Almost every port they made was with purpose, and improved already great games. Link's Awakening DX is the most obvious one, of course. The original is already one of my favorite games of all time, but the DX version further perfects it by giving it a fresh coat of paint and a bunch of new content. Super Mario Bros Deluxe and Tetris DX are also ridiculously underrated ports, even if they both have their concessions made compared to the originals (screen crunch for the former, different music for the latter). Super Mario Bros Deluxe adds so much extra content, from a very fun Challenge Mode, to a Boo race mode with original levels, to achievements, to banners and pictures you can print out with the Game Boy Printer. Tetris DX adds in a bunch of new modes and fleshes out its multiplayer functionality immensely (which I'll touch on more later). Nintendo and Rare also ported the original Donkey Kong Country for SNES to the console, and it actually worked pretty damn well. Granted, I'd never play it over the original, but at the time, getting to play an SNES game on the go must have been really cool.

Overly Ambitious Ports

It's not just Nintendo that went all out for the ports, though. If anything, it's the third-party companies that were especially ambitious, albeit maybe to a fault at times. The Game Boy Color received plenty of ports and sequels to games that were released for 3D consoles like the N64 and Playstation, and some of them were actually really good! Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel is the most noteworthy one, a full-fledged Metal Gear Solid campaign that pretty much perfectly replicated the original game's gameplay while also porting almost all of its VR Missions. Similarly, Rare made a Perfect Dark game that, while not as polished, was still really impressive. On the other hand, we also got stuff like the Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare port. That's right, I said port. This 3D Playstation game got ported to the Game Boy Color, and as you can see in the picture on the right, it doesn't look the best. I definitely admire the ambition here, but let's just say there's a reason Capcom cancelled their similarly-intentioned port of Resident Evil.

A Mini Super Game Boy

The Game Boy Color had some of the cooler backwards functionality of any video game console, since inputting a certain button combination would allow you to set the color palette of any Game Boy game you decide to play on it. This functionality would end up carrying over to the GBA, but I still think it's pretty cool that the Game Boy Color would basically function as a portable, though not as feature-rich, version of the SNES's Super Game Boy. On the topic of backwards compatibility, I also wanted to bring up how cool it is that some of the later Game Boy games like Oracle Of Seasons/Ages and Shantae had bonuses that you can only unlock by playing the game with a GBA. I don't think any other console had backwards compatibility bonuses quite like this.

Day And Night

I have no idea why Day/Night Cycles were so big at the time, but plenty of Game Boy Color games ended up including one. Wario Land 3's version was easily the simplest, every time you beat a level the time of day would switch. However, even that required Nintendo to make different versions of every single one of the game's levels. Shantae was even more ambitious, having the time of day change every couple of minutes in the game world. But nothing topped Pokemon GSC, which straight-up had an in-game clock that didn't just track the time of day, but the day of the week too. There were special events that would only happen on certain days, and the game would have some drastic changes whether it's day or night. Obviously, this kind of stuff is pretty common place now, especially since most Pokemon games would use a similar mechanic, but for a Game Boy Color game, this is incredibly impressive.

Extra Content, Just Because

It's kind of insane how jam-packed so many Game Boy Color games are in terms of content, especially in terms of how cool that extra content usually is. Obviously, the highlight here is, once again, Pokemon GSC, which included the entirety of the Kanto region as a post-game, basically make it two games in one! Pokemon Puzzle Challenge was also really cool, since as a cheat code, it included a beta version of the unreleased Panel De Pon GB. Let me repeat that, Nintendo willingly included a beta in one of their games as an easter egg. When does this ever happen?! There are so many more instances of Game Boy Color games being shamelessly stuffed with extra content. Wario Land 2 has multiple routes and finding all of them practically doubles the content, Super Mario Bros Deluxe included a wide range of modes spanning from an in-depth Challenge Mode to a goddamn Fortune Teller, Metal Gear Solid included 180 VR Missions, and the Game & Watch Gallery games included loads of unlockable minigames. Game & Watch Gallery 3 was especially cool, since you could unlock a secret that revealed that the Game & Watch game Fire was accidentally manufactured backwards. Upon getting enough stars, you could even play that mirrored version of Fire, which is so cool!

Linked Game Secret

I think most people know how you can link Oracle Of Seasons and Oracle Of Ages together to unlock a bonus final boss and ending, but I don't think most people are truly aware of how much the Linked Game actually affects those games. To sum it up, you start by playing Oracle Of Seasons or Ages, and once you beat it, you can type in a few passwords into the game you haven't played yet to play a modified campaign that follows the one of that first game you played. Certain items like your Rings and Shield can be carried over, characters will reference the events of the previous game, and as mentioned above, beating both games in a linked session will unlock a final battle with Ganon. But in my opinion, the coolest element of the Linked Game are the secrets. In your second game, you can talk to NPCs and learn secrets that you can unlock by going back into the first game you played, solving a puzzle or completing a challenge, and then bringing a code back into that second game to get a special item or upgrade. This sort of interaction between the two games is still really unheard of, even in dual releases like Pokemon, and it makes for a much more memorable and unique experience in these Oracle games.

The Transfer Pak

Okay, to be perfectly honest, I don't love the Transfer Pak. I adore most of the Game Boy Color's weird accessories and gimmicks, but as cool as the Transfer Pak is in theory, it has a pretty big oversights. The point of the Transfer Pak is that you can transfer content from an N64 game to a Game Boy game and vice versa. It's primarily known for being used in the Mario Tennis & Golf games, as well as the Pokemon Stadium games. I actually really like its usage in Pokemon Stadium, since lets you transfer your Pokemon from the Game Boy games to fight in full 3D. That's a really cool idea and a great usage of the software. Mario Tennis & Golf, on the other hand, let you unlock characters, courts, and minigames in the N64 and Game Boy Color games, which is an interesting idea at first. However, it means that if the game is emulated like in Nintendo's Virtual Console, those characters are permanently locked away, which is something I'm not a massive fan of. And it doesn't help that unlike some of the other weird Game Boy Color functions I'll talk about in a bit, there's no way to unlock this stuff unless you have a Transfer Pak or have access to someone else's save file. Still, the concept of console-handheld interactivity is really cool, and it's something that Nintendo would continue to experiment with in games like Four Swords Adventure, WarioWare DIY Showcase, and Mario & Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars.

Tilting And Tumbling

Kirby Tilt N Tumble is the first time Nintendo would start to play around with motion controls, a fascination that would continue over the years before culminating in the Wii. I won't linger on this one since most people already know how it works, but I couldn't talk about the GBC's ambition without talking about one of its most well-known experiments. The Tilt N Tumble cartridge has an accelerometer built inside, which would let you tilt Kirby around in the game as well as play certain minigames built around motion controls. While the cartridge itself is pretty rare, there are still a decent amount of ways to play the game, most of which are probably even more effective than dealing with the Game Boy Color's lack of a backlight. Some emulators allow for Wii Remote support for the game's motion controls, there's a mod that adds in normal D-Pad controls, and you can even play the game by holding a Gamecube in your hands and tilting it around. Take a wild guess which method speedrunners like to use?

Competitive Play

While many Game Boy games supported multiplayer through the Link Cable, there are a decent amount of Game Boy Color games that took things a bit further by implementing stuff like experience points. Tetris DX is one of my personal favorite versions of this. The more rounds you play (and win), the more your power increases, acting a lot like a ranking system in an online game like Mario Kart 8 or Splatoon. What's especially cool is that you can play against a CPU version of yourself, and how difficult they are depends on how much power you have. It's like an early version of the Amiibo concept in Super Smash Bros 4. The Mario Sports games also have XP systems with certain characters that can leveled up and customized, but Mobile Golf is especially impressive since you can level up everyone, including the unlockable Mario characters. But when it comes to multiplayer on the Game Boy Color, things only get crazier...

Online Support? And DLC?!

That's right. On top of everything else, the Game Boy Color actually had online support... kind of. There's this accessory that was only released in Japan called the Mobile Game Boy Adaptor, which you could use to connect the Game Boy to a mobile phone and use it to access an online service. The most well-known usage of it was for the Japanese version of Pokemon Crystal, which would let you create a friend list, battle and trade over the internet, and lets you use the Battle Tower (that's right, the JP version of the Battle Tower was online-exclusive). My personal favorite usage of the Adaptor, though, is in Mobile Golf. The game let you play golf matches online, but what's especially cool is the fact that there are courses, minigames, and characters from the Mario series that you could get through the service as DLC, just before the original Xbox would popularize the concept. Thankfully, none of this extra content is lost to time, since there's actually a ROM hack that allows you to unlock all the DLC through normal means. The GBA also used the Adaptor for games like Mario Kart: Super Circuit, but Nintendo dropped it pretty early on in that console's lifetime.

The reputation of the Game Boy Color nowadays is so strange. It did incredibly well and sold a lot, but it only lasted for three years before the (admittedly fantastic) GBA came out to replace it, and it's not really talked about nearly as much as its predecessor or successor. I think that's a shame, because the Game Boy Color is easily one of the most deceptively ambitious consoles Nintendo has ever put out. Constantly punching above its weight (I didn't even mention the IR sensor or the fact that it could work as a TV remote!), the GBC earned its place as one of my favorite video game consoles by repeatedly surprising and impressing me with pretty much every game I played. For me, this console will always be associated with pure, raw ambition.