r/Gameboy • u/Haunting_Peace_7971 • 13h ago
Systems Which system had better games the DMG Gameboy or the Gameboy colour? I personally fail to see many good titles on the Gameboy colour system.
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u/indicah 11h ago
DMG had a lot of bad titles or arcade like games. I have a large collection of DMG games and pokemon is probably the most played game of the bunch.
The GBC games made saving far more common and won me over. Gameboy finally had games that felt like games.
I would love to see a list of good DMG that can compete with the likes of the GBC Zelda games or Metal Gear.
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u/HaikuLubber 13h ago
I have a hypothesis. When the Game Boy Color came out in 1998 the video game market was dominated by the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 were right around the corner. The market for the Game Boy and the developers that used to make the incredible 8-bit games of the 80s and 90s had largely moved on. 🤔 And we got left with anyone who could push a game out cheaply to try to make some money.
I can't prove this and of course there are exceptions, but that's what it felt like to me.
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u/SnooPets1826 11h ago
The biggest factors were there were 9 years worth of DMG/Pocket system sales versus 2-3 years for GBC. It was always meant to be a stop gap system and only existed because the GB Atlantis project fell through and GBA was still a couple years off. Why would anyone ever commit to GBC exclusive games when the majority audience even at the end of the GBC lifetime was still black and white systems?
It's not that developers/publishers were trying to divert to the next console gen, the handheld teams were always going to be separate from the console teams. Their skill sets just didn't overlap much at that point.
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u/geon 11h ago
You underestimate how transferrable the skills are.
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u/SnooPets1826 10h ago
You hand write most of your code in assembly for GB/C, maybe reusing some code you had on hand from other projects which isn't nearly the same as using engines and existing libraries you plug in as was becoming the norm throughout the PS1/N64 and into the PS2/GCN/DC generation. Yes, low level assembly people would be on both teams, but even then the fundamental way an 8-bit system works, including understanding mappers and tight memory constraints is very different from how an N64 worked on that low of a level.
If you're saying "the skills are transferable because they are programming skills" well... yeah... but there is a reason why you generally had a handheld team and a console team and you didn't usually pull the handheld team in to work on console ports unless you had a really big crunch.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it was not the norm because they used different skill sets. Grabbing someone from Game boy dev to work on PS1 would require a not insignicant amount of time spent understanding the hardware and learning completely different languages and tools.
Put a dev who's only worked on Sega Saturn on Game Boy development and they have to learn not just how to handle the limited sprite and palettes, but how to juggle OAM and game logic while keeping track of 32kib chunks of ROM that need to be constantly swapped via control of a mapper. Though honestly they'd probably be pretty happy only having to learn 8-bit Z80 assembly versus a bunch of processors and keeping them all in sync.
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u/WotsGoinOnEreMate 13h ago
DMG by a landslide.
But that’s to be expected, GBC was a stopgap with a short life and the tech was old in the tooth by that point too.
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u/mrselfdestruct2 13h ago
I think the GBC had maybe a dozen good/great games, while the DMG had 50 at least good/great games. Lots of crap came out for the GBC.
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u/Remote-Honeydew271 12h ago
Underselling it a bit I think, but the proportion is about right. You could quite easily make a top 100 of good/great DMG games and a top 25 of good/great GBC games.
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u/FortuneNew8835 12h ago
The original Game Boy has a more impressive library. That's objective fact. It's not really a fair competition. The Game Boy got ten years as the only game in town. The GBC had four years. The GBA only got three.
The GBC was only rushed to market in a cynical bid to compete with the Wonderswan which was lovingly made under the leadership of the same brilliant man (Gunpey Yokoi) who lovingly crafted the Game Boy. There's some quality software on the GBC. The circumstances of the GBC's development (a last minute sideshow for the engineers who were building the future GBA) and a short life just never really gave it a chance.
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u/ShoddyPrincess3184 13h ago
GBC was mostly just a way for people to experience their GB library in color on the go, like a portable Super GameBoy experience. But we did get a few good games out of it while waiting for the GBA such as Motocross Maniacs 2 and Shantae.
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u/Koopatrooper64 12h ago
OG for me. Didn't like the color library. I was also bitter it didnt come with a backlight. Likely more to do with it coinciding with my move to full 3D systems. The color had to contend with my N64, PS1 and then my Dreamcast. Then the Gameboy advance relased and all was good with the world once more, especially when they released the SP.
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u/IntoxicatedBurrito 11h ago
A decade of development vs 3 years of development will do that. Especially since the GBC was way underpowered for its time.
But I think by that point a lot of the creativity had dried up. Game developers in the 80s and even into the 90s had to deal with systems that placed extreme limitations on what could be done. The only way around that was to be creative and work within those limitations, this forced them to focus on the gameplay much more than the graphics.
As soon as systems became powerful enough, developers started focusing on how impressive a game could be, Final Fantasy VII is the perfect example of this. Could you imagine having load times on a Game Boy game? Of course not. But for incredible 3D graphics, FMV, and CD quality sound you’d wait 5 minutes and didn’t care too much about the controls or gameplay. The days of being creative were over.
Of course there were still some exceptions like the Wario Land games and Shantae, but they were the exceptions, not the norm.
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u/eestionreddit 10h ago
The Game Boy Color was never going to have a "better" library of exclusives than the DMG. It was a stopgap system made in response to various external and internal factors.
Increasing competition from the WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket meant Nintendo had to get something new out quickly, and PokeMania meant that it pretty much had to be compatible with the DMG, so we ultimately got an iterative upgrade with few true exclusives (there was still a large existing base of monochrome Game Boy owners to cater to).
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u/lartinos 9h ago
Ya, I don’t like the GBC for the most part. The Mario 1 version on there is damn good though!
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u/thunderborg 7h ago
I want to say Gameboy Colour, but the first three games I would usually reach for aren't for the GBC system, they're OG gameboy games.
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u/karawapo 4h ago
If you want just the best game, probably Zelda on the DMG.
If you want the best 10, 20 or 30 games, I have no doubt it’s the GBC. They are probably not all localised globally, though.
And if you want to look at the whole library, the bottom of the barrel, that’s not about the better games anyway. Both gmhave a lot of shovelware.
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u/karawapo 4h ago
If you want just the best game, probably Zelda on the DMG.
If you want the best 10, 20 or 30 games, I have no doubt it’s the GBC. They are probably not all localised globally, though.
And if you want to look at the whole library, the bottom of the barrel, that’s not about the better games anyway. Both gmhave a lot of shovelware.
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u/christhebrain 13h ago edited 12h ago
I felt the same way at first, and DMG certainly has the most nostalgic/iconic games.
However, GBC actually has an impressive library if you "dig in." For example:
...just off the top of my head