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Thread: Game Boy Guru Project - updated 4-8-15

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    Cherry (Level 1) Custom rank graphic
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    Default Game Boy Guru Project - updated 4-8-15

    I know I'm not super-active here, but since many of you are collectors and fellow proponents of "electronic gaming antiquities" such as myself, I thought I'd do a bit of shameless self-promotion. I'm doing a project I call "Game Boy Guru". I'm sure some of you have heard about Nintendo Legend, Questicle, Sega Galactico, Sega Does, HuCard Heaven, etc. I'm taking on a similar project where I'm going to attempt to collect, play, and review, every North American Game Boy game release. I'll do imports if and when I acquire them, but my primary goal will be to focus on standard GB games that were released in the US and Canada. I have 2 reviews written already, as well as a short write-up about my own personal history with the Game Boy. I'm currently working on 3 other reviews to try and get on the site within the next week or so, and have some other stuff in the works. I currently own just shy of 70 original GB games, but am trying to grow my collection as I go along, to ensure that I don't run out of new games to play.

    In any event, I'd appreciate some feedback. My writing style is somewhat verbose, so my posts tend to be long-winded. If they're too long to hold interest, I'd be keen on knowing that, so I can maybe trim up a bit for future reviews. I'm also going to try and dig into the hardware of the unit, and explore a bit of the Gunpei Yokoi "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" philosophy. It's amazing to think that, while the Game Boy wasn't the first (or even second) handheld game system to use interchangeable cartridges, it was so wildly successful, in part because of the timing, and the market was primed for something like that at the time. Unfortunately, I've found very little in the way of transcribed interviews with Gunpei Yokoi, so I'm going to have to do more research to find out what I can about the hardware development. I might also try and find any articles I can about the Game Boy prior to its release, preview type of stuff, and share them on the site with some analysis.

    Switching gears slightly: there was a thread about 10 years ago where someone was asking about how many games were out for several systems, and several folks here directed the OP to the search feature in the DP Virtual Collector's Guide. As of this writing, that lists 521 entries for the original Game Boy. Other sources, such as Wikipedia, or Moby Games, list a fair bit more than that. Are there any other reputable sites/sources online that I couse use to corroborate the numbers here at DP? I like RF Generation's listings, but those are far more collector-focused, so there are often multiple versions or variants, based on multiple print runs, re-releases, etc. so the list is way longer, and shows over 1,000 Game Boy games, with some obvious duplicates. I'd like to find at least one other site that can help me determine a solid number of unique North American releases. I'm also looking strictly at original GB games, not GB/GBC (black cart) titles at this point, so I want to make sure the numbers are accurate on that.

    Another strange question: does anyone know if any of the early GB/GBC titles ALSO contain Super Game Boy compatibility, i.e., the game has a special background and/or coloring for the SGB, but does full coloring on the GBC? I've not heard of any, but haven't researched it enough to determine this definitively.

    ANYWAY, feel free to check out the blog and let me know what you think. I have companion Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Google+ accounts where I'll be posting updates, as well as interacting with people.

    http://gameboyguru.blogspot.com

    4-8-15 Added Super Mario Land review.
    Last edited by MetalFRO; 04-09-2015 at 10:29 AM.
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    Key (Level 9) Satoshi_Matrix's Avatar
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    I wouldn't go around saying it, bu I am one of the biggest GameBoy "gurus" around. I've written quite a bit about the GB/SGB/GBC library and know it quite well.

    To answer your question, any GBC game that has a black cartridge is also SGB compatible. This includes all GBC launch titles as well as titles released up to mid-1999. Those clear shell GBC games tend to almost always be GBC-only games, dropping support for the SGB entirely. There are a handful of exceptions though, like Dragon Quest/Warrior Monsters 2.

    Interestingly there are a couple games from around late 1997 that saw BOTH a SGB release and a GBC release. Wario Land 2 springs to mind. One cart is gray, one cart is black. Yet both carts will run the same SGB mode if put in a SGB1 or SGB2.
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    Apparently Pokemon Yellow was a standard GB game which was modified for its western release to use the SGB palettes when run on a GBC.

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    Cherry (Level 1) Custom rank graphic
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    Quote Originally Posted by Satoshi_Matrix View Post
    I wouldn't go around saying it, bu I am one of the biggest GameBoy "gurus" around. I've written quite a bit about the GB/SGB/GBC library and know it quite well.

    To answer your question, any GBC game that has a black cartridge is also SGB compatible. This includes all GBC launch titles as well as titles released up to mid-1999. Those clear shell GBC games tend to almost always be GBC-only games, dropping support for the SGB entirely. There are a handful of exceptions though, like Dragon Quest/Warrior Monsters 2.

    Interestingly there are a couple games from around late 1997 that saw BOTH a SGB release and a GBC release. Wario Land 2 springs to mind. One cart is gray, one cart is black. Yet both carts will run the same SGB mode if put in a SGB1 or SGB2.
    Yes, I subscribe to your YouTube channel, and have enjoyed watching many of your videos. The whole "guru" thing is more a title than anything, just to differentiate myself from others. And really, I'm not a guru by any stretch, but the hope would be, by the time I'm done slogging through the entire library, hardware accessories, etc. that I would truly be a font of useless knowledge regarding the Game Boy

    I was aware of the cutoff from the black casing to the clear, but thanks for confirming that for me. As to the question of SGB/GBC compatibility with the black cart games, do most of them have content specific to both SGB and GBC, or only a handful? I'm looking for games that specifically had SGB backgrounds or color enhancements, but then also have full-color enhancement that is markedly different on the GBC than on the SGB. Once I get to that point in the collection, that could make for an interesting article regarding the games that had functionality for both programmed in, and how that affected release dates/cycles, development time, etc.

    Also, thanks for the heads-up on the SGB2, I was not aware of it! I've only just acquired the SGB in the last few weeks, and have been playing around with it a bit. I don't own a Super Famicom, so that may be a down the road kind of thing, but it would be neat to play around with the SGB2 and Link Cable for fun.

    EDIT: Since you mentioned Wario Land II, I just picked up the gray cart version, and was unaware of a GBC-specific black cart version, so I'll have to be on the lookout for that as well.
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    Key (Level 9) Satoshi_Matrix's Avatar
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    ALL black GameBoy Color games have SGB support, with most also offering a custom border. All of them have some form of custom pallet, but don't get your hopes up: because of the way the GB games were originally made, unique custom pallets can really only be applied to static images - usually title screens. The rest of the game uses only the four shades you'd get with non SGB enhanced games. In fact, a lot of later games by Konami just didnt bother at all really and give a gray pallet.

    Really, with SGB Enhanced games, the best of the bunch were Donkey Kong '94, Pokemon and Megaman V. Outside of those, very few games made much use of SGB custom pallets at all.

    Super GameBoy 2 isn't really all that remarkable. People mistakenly think it plays GBC games, which it doesn't. It's basically Super GameBoy version 1.1.

    What's different:
    -The device itself is in a transparent blue plastic, allowing you to see the motherboard. It's also got an LED to show its on.
    -The SGB2 has a Link Cable port, allowing you to to have multiplayer GameBoy games of say, Tetris or Pokemon against someone with another GameBoy, or in theory, another SGB2 and SNES.
    -The original SGB actually overclocked the Z-80 to about 101-102% of the normal GB speed. This means games played are slightly faster on SGB than they are on a real GB. The SGB2 corrected that.
    -All of the preset, generic boarders are replaced with nicer looking ones.

    Other than these small changes, the SGB2 is exactly the same.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Satoshi_Matrix View Post
    ALL black GameBoy Color games have SGB support, with most also offering a custom border. All of them have some form of custom pallet, but don't get your hopes up: because of the way the GB games were originally made, unique custom pallets can really only be applied to static images - usually title screens. The rest of the game uses only the four shades you'd get with non SGB enhanced games. In fact, a lot of later games by Konami just didnt bother at all really and give a gray pallet.
    I was wondering about this. I noticed that when playing Bomberman GB, that only the in-between screens, title screen, map screens, etc. have the enhancements, but the core gameplay retained the standard 4-shades. If you think about it, it seems silly that Nintendo didn't capitalize on that by not giving users the ability to choose various palette swaps they could choose from. I'd consider that a wasted opportunity on Nintendo's part. Games that were able to use the hardware could have been enhanced in interesting and unique ways. I liken it to CGA graphics: you have 2 basic 4-color palette's to choose from, and neither are very good, but with the color combinations of the SNES, it could have been done to great effect.
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    Well, that is quite an ambitious project, given the huge number of games. GB/GBC certainly could use it. I really like sites like Game-Rave (PS1/Saturn) which do the same. Often the work is just too great, and then have to slow down or stop. I checked your site out, and the reviews are great, including screenshots. Would be cool to have box/game scans as well. I would also consider a more modern web layout, not a blog site. It's very difficult to find anything on blog sites. At least a centralized table of contents.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
    Well, that is quite an ambitious project, given the huge number of games. GB/GBC certainly could use it. I really like sites like Game-Rave (PS1/Saturn) which do the same. Often the work is just too great, and then have to slow down or stop. I checked your site out, and the reviews are great, including screenshots. Would be cool to have box/game scans as well. I would also consider a more modern web layout, not a blog site. It's very difficult to find anything on blog sites. At least a centralized table of contents.
    Cough... Game Boy World... cough... http://www.gameboyworld.com/...

    Just saying. Do it because it's fun, but don't do it if you want to be the first!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
    Well, that is quite an ambitious project, given the huge number of games. GB/GBC certainly could use it. I really like sites like Game-Rave (PS1/Saturn) which do the same. Often the work is just too great, and then have to slow down or stop. I checked your site out, and the reviews are great, including screenshots. Would be cool to have box/game scans as well. I would also consider a more modern web layout, not a blog site. It's very difficult to find anything on blog sites. At least a centralized table of contents.
    The problem with box and game scans is that I'm picking up mostly loose carts. Collecting CIB for any system is a daunting task, but for early stuff like NES, Game Boy, etc. where the boxes were cardboard, it's nigh impossible to get some of that stuff, so for me to grab those kinds of scans, I'd be hot-linking or stealing those images, which I don't want to do. I'm already doing the "Image shamelessly linked from <site name here>", which works for box art, because it's just one image per post, with the exception of the introductory post. In any event, unless I can find folks who would be willing to do scans or take photos and send them to me with only the expectation of getting credit (but not getting paid).

    As for the site layout, what would you suggest? Because I'm investing money to acquire games, I'm trying to focus on that and not pay out anything for the site, with the exception of a domain name - I plan on doing that.

    I do appreciate the kind words about the reviews

    Quote Originally Posted by nusilver View Post
    Cough... Game Boy World... cough... http://www.gameboyworld.com/...

    Just saying. Do it because it's fun, but don't do it if you want to be the first!
    I know I'm not the first. I'd heard of Game Boy World, and that's a good site with some good content. I've also been checking the GameBoyle YouTube channel, which is another excellent resource. I have no illusions that I'm the first and/or best, so yeah, I'm doing it for the fun and for the experience
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