Let's Play Every GameBoy Color Game, Part 1
Updated: Feb 22, 2021
There were several parts before this on Discord that I might eventually upload with screenshots. Until then, anyone who found this here first will just have to trust that I didn't decide to play every GBC game starting with Black Bass - Lure Fishing. I wouldn't recommend anyone do that, because it sucks.
This post is mostly an experiment to see what this series would look like on the new blogs. I played all of these a while ago, so the screenshots are all quick pics of the title screens rather than of real gameplay. The next one of these will have actual pictures.
Black Bass - Lure Fishing (Majesco/Hot-B, 1999)
Another game where you throw a lure at a lake and wait. It's incredibly boring, and with the fidelity of GBC graphics you really don't get any of the relaxation of looking at a real lake.
The Black Onyx (Taito/Atelier Double, 2001)
Apparently this game was originally developed by Bullet-Proof in 1984 and basically founded the RPG genre in Japan. It's an extremely basic first-person dungeon crawler that didn't even get a magic system until the re-release and only had one party member who could only attack in the bits I played, but it looks surprisingly good and it's impressive that they got a 3D game running on GBC. A neat piece of history.
Blade (Activision/HAL Labs, 2000)
This dude with a sword is a superhero, I guess, but he sucks at fighting. This is a brawler where your very boring dude with a sword fights lizard guys who are much more interesting. There's not much depth to it at all, and it's also yet another GBC entry where you have truckloads of health for no reason.
Blaster Master: Enemy Below (Sunsoft, 2000)
This is not the Switch game, but it looks and plays surprisingly close to it and is probably worth checking out for anyone who liked the more recent title. My only issue was that the GBC's 4 input directions don't allow for very precise aiming, so it was a pain to shoot anything that wasn't right on the axis from my gun.
Blue's Clues: Blue's Alphabet Book (Mattel/Vicarious Visions, 2001)
This is meant to help kids learn to read, but I'm not convinced that showing them a picture of a letter or a piece of fruit and then asking them to pick the same image from a set of three actually teaches anything. Pushing a ball through a completely linear maze seems somehow even less educational. Still, it's cool that they managed to get voiceovers into this.
Boarder Zone (Infogrames/Software Creations, 1999)
Ostensibly a slalom race down a snowy mountain. The snow looks like sand because white screens didn't look great on GBC, and it's not much of a race when your opponent sort of just glides through everything instead of following the slalom flags.
Bob the Builder: Fix it Fun! (THQ/Tiertex, 2000)
This game freezes on the Tiertex splash screen. I'm not actually very upset about that.