Looking for more games. Only requirements are following:
English
On GB/GBC/GBA
Mario Tennis and Mario Golf are awesome
Pokémon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire; unironically more addictive than the mainline Pokémon games.
Played that before, definetly a pinball game I like :3
On GBC, Shantae is a lovely game.
Lots of good suggestions already, but what first came to my mind is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I’m not even into Final Fantasy and have only played a few tactical RPGs, but I fell into FFTA hard when it came out. The battle system was fun, with a little twist that there’s random laws you have to follow each fight (e.g. no attacking with staves) that can get a character arrested and taken out of the action after a warning. Nice music, cute art style, and a pretty good story as I recall.
Was my answer too. Absolutely phenomenal game. Don’t really have anything else to add to your points other than to encourage people to play it if they haven’t already. Great story, great gameplay, just an absolute classic.
Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap for GBA is my all time favorite from the series. It was made late in the gameboy development cycle, and feels miles ahead of other gba titles. Imo it’s the pinnacle of 2d Zelda.
Another great title is Fire Emblem. It’s not the first one, but a lot of them can be played out of order, and it’s tons of fun if you like turn based strategy.
Other mentions: Pokemon FireRed/LeafGreen, Pokemon Yellow/Blue, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons/Ages, Link’s Awakening, Fire Emblem Sacred Stones, Final Fight One, and the Elden Ring demake
Where do j get the elden ring demakes? I like demakes as a concept
It’s unofficial, but you can play it via browser at shin.itch.io/elden-ring-gb, or download it and play via emulator
GBC:
- Game & Watch Gallery 2: Holds a special place in my heart as the first game I ever owned. Has the best lineup out of all the collections, with 3 and 4 you can kinda tell they had used up all the heavy hitters.
- Mario Tennis: An incredible tennis RPG. And Mario doesn’t even show up until the postgame as a bonus boss, which I find hilarious. Has connectivity with the N64 version if you can get that running, lets you transfer your RPG mode character and unlock more content on both titles.
- Panel de Pon GBC: Better known under a name of a different IP it got reskinned with, but I’m a stubborn snob who will only ever call it by the original title. It’s a bit different from the console versions in order to compensate for the small screen, board is shrunk from 6x12 to 6x10, and the 1P Arcade mode is fake versus that gives opponents a health bar rather than their own board. I actually have a soft spot for this version, it’s different enough to stand out and be worth enjoying on its own, even if Gamecube is still the GOAT.
GBA:
- Boktai trilogy: Hideo Kojima’s greatest masterpiece. First game’s alright, second game is where it comes into its own. Note that you want the Solar Sensor hardware for the full experience, but emulating them is worth it over not playing them at all. And for the third game, you’d have to pick between original hardware or the translation patch anyway.
- Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: It’s Castlevania. It’s good. Also check out Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, but AoS was by far the best of the GBA entries.
- Golden Sun 1/2: These games were way ahead of their time for how they designed a combat system that encourages you to use all of your tools and not just click basic Attack as if you gotta hoard your MP for a rainy day. Fantastic puzzles too.
- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: If you’ve played any of the other Mario RPGs, this one’s great too. Has a 3DS remake but I haven’t played that version so I can’t tell you how it compares.
- Metroid: Zero Mission: The original Metroid has aged rather poorly if you ask me, but this remake does a perfect job modernizing it into one of the best games in the series. Fusion is good too, but some fans have opinions on that one.
- Mother 3: Surely you have already heard of this game and do not need me to tell you to go play it. Have you not played it by now? Why not? Well, okay, if you haven’t played Earthbound first, go do so, then play this.
- Rhythm Tengoku: A wonderful game about pressing the A button. Sometimes you press the d-pad too. Translation patch.
- Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1/2: If you’ve ever played the classic 2D Tales games, these are excellent spiritual successors to those. There’s a third game that’s JP-only, translation patch is being worked on but it’s been stuck in development hell for years…
Just beat AOS, still holds up
It’s a bit short, but it’s among the great IGAvanias IMO. There with the 3 DS games, including its direct sequel Dawn of Sorrow of course.
Advance Wars and its sequel, by a country mile. Someone recommended it to me about 20 years ago. Since I didn’t have a GBA, I downloaded a relatively early emulator that barely ran on my PC at the time. It had some sound glitches and performance issues, but otherwise, it worked just fine. I was initially put off by the anime presentation (since I associated it with kids shows back then, I had no love for anime - be kind, I hadn’t seen a single Studio Ghibli film yet) and it didn’t look particularly great blown up on a 17" CRT either, but the outstanding gameplay and fun campaign quickly pulled me in. Who knew war could be this lighthearted and at the same time so devilishly hard? Within ten minutes, I was hooked and it quickly became one of my favorite strategy games of all times, right up there with the likes of Age of Empires II (and the incredibly obscure Blue Empire II - I doubt there’s anyone here who has even heard of it).
Since then I have revisited AW every few years. It was one of my most-played games on my first Android smartphone (2010) and once again, the emulator barely ran on the device. Oh, and that phone didn’t have multitouch yet, which however wasn’t an issue with a turn-based game. A couple of years later, I bought a PSP, relatively late into its lifecycle - and instead of using it for PSP games, it became an emulation machine, by which I mean that I primarily played two games on it: Advance Wars and, for some reason, Activision Tennis for the Atari 2600/VCS from the lovingly made Activision Hits collection. One of the best tennis games of all time, even though it’s what feels like two dozen pixels in total, including animations.
Soon after, I discovered Advance Wars By Web, which is an unauthorized browser-based online multiplayer clone of the entire Advance Wars series that is still around. I have no idea how they have managed to survive Nintendo’s wrath. There are no animations nor sounds, which did put me off though. My old account is still alive, so I might get back to it though.
I finally bought something resembling an actual GBA as my Xmas present to myself, the rather nice Anbernic RG35XXSP emulation console, which is an affordable and completely open copy of the Advance SP - based on an ARM CPU and running Linux. If anyone else is looking for a decent replacement/supplement to their original GBA SP or just a neat little emulation system that fits into a (men’s) pants pocket, one can do much worse, especially given how remarkably good IPS screen, buttons and battery life are. Guess which game I’ve been playing on this device the most? Good guess, but no, it’s a port of 2048, which feels awesome with physical buttons, but Advance Wars will probably take its rightful crown back soon. The one downside of this system I’ve discovered so far is that annoyingly, ROM hacks rarely work, no matter the emulator.
After this needlessly long text on my boring emulation journey with AW, you might be wondering what other Game Boy games managed to pull me in? Barely anything. I’ve tried a few, but none of them got me hooked, with the sole exception of what only called the official demake of Max Payne for the GBA, which is shockingly competent. Who knew that the iconic third person shooter actually works as an isometric title on the GBA of all systems? It’s not some cheap knock-off that has the same title as the big PC and console title, like so many other mobile games over the years, but a truly faithful replica of the PC classic that actually feels like Max Payne, down to the most minute details. Even level design and comic book cutscenes are mostly preserved - with voice acting! The isometric presentation does sometimes result in invisible enemies shooting at you, but that’s pretty much the worst I can say about this title. Here’s a video of it in action.
As for the rest, I was excited for Golden Sun after all of the praise it’s been getting over the years, but so far, the annoying to navigate introduction managed to scare me away every single time - and it’s close to doing the same this time again. Someone please tell me to hang on. I think I tried Metroid: Zero Mission ages ago, but it didn’t click, just like every other Metroid and every other metroidvania, with the sole exception of VVVVVV (PC, but open source), which remains the best metroidvania in my humble opinion, in large part because instead of collecting items that unlock previously inaccessible areas, it’s the player getting better at playing the title that achieves the same thing. I’ve never seen any other game doing it this well. Not a Game Boy title though, so I’ll stop gushing about it.
I randomly tried out Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy yesterday, primarily to toy around with shaders that simulate the handheld’s terrible screen - and surprisingly, I really enjoyed it for a few levels. This is an excellent 2D Mario that feels absolutely perfect to play, despite the limited hardware it was originally developed for. What’s weird is that I don’t actually like 2D Mario games, but this one has somehow managed to endear itself to me. I’ve also played a few minutes of a ROM hack that colorizes Pokémon Red, which is neat, and randomly tried out Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance for the GBA. This probably forgotten RPG (I’ve only ever heard people talk about the totally different PS2 version, which was a technical marvel) oozes atmosphere, but I can’t tell for how long I’ll play it yet.
(and the incredibly obscure Blue Empire II - I doubt there’s anyone here who has even heard of it).
Google only shows Age of Empires 2, trying
"blue empire" gamegives unrelated results. Couldn’t find anything on Mobygames either. Was that a mod?Not a bad guess, but this is actually a freeware turn-based strategy game from ~2004 (at least version 1.1 is from that year, according to file dates).
Essentially a slightly enhanced computer version of Risk, set in Europe and played against three other human or AI players, the former either in local hot seat or e-mail multiplayer. You conquer countries with your troops (there’s only one type of unit). Larger countries provide more funds per round, which are needed to maintain your existing troops (a large army can quickly drain your coffers), train new ones and build factories in countries so that you can troops closer to the front lines. The unique mechanic is that the success of your troops in battle is determined not just by numerical superiority, but also by how much support they are enjoying in the country where the fighting is happening. You start out with 100% support in your starting alliance of countries, but every other country will have 0% support for your noble cause at first, which means your troops will suffer high losses against the entrenched neutral (don’t attack, don’t replenish their troops) and AI players. Only after you have conquered a country (by reducing its defenders to 0), you can slowly increase your popularity through occupation - the more troops there are in the country, the quicker your population will grow. Hearts and minds and all that. What you end up doing is forming chains of troops marching from one country to the next each round (visible as arrows in the screenshots below), because factories are expensive and also because you want to maintain a large number of troops in countries close to the front lines. You’ll primarily produce in your starting factories in the beginning and then send them from e.g. France to Germany, Germany to Poland, Poland to then maybe a few other European countries you’re defending or attacking.
It’s simple, yet addictive. The AI is just competent enough at the highest difficulty to not be a complete pushover. If you’re anything like me or my friends back in the day, you’ll want to play “just one more round” a few times in a row. Blue Empire II was developed by a young brother-sister team. It was only ever available in German (hardly an issue, given how self-explanatory the game is) and primarily distributed as a free bonus on gaming magazine discs - at least that’s how I got it.
Here are two playthroughs, a single- and a multiplayer game, documented on a German Civilization forum (with screenshots):
https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?69914-Blue-Empire
https://www.civforum.de/showthread.php?66664-Blue-Empire-II
I have seen it offered on freeware games sites in its heyday, where it used to occupy top spots with tens of thousands of downloads (the Internet was small back then), but those appear to be all down at this point. Since there are literally no downloads of it available anywhere anymore (the above two playthroughs are the only mention of the game I could find - and not even with all search engines), I’ve decided to uploaded it to the Internet Archive for preservation:
https://archive.org/details/blue-empire-2
In order for it to run on operating systems newer than Windows XP, enable compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2. Don’t be alerted by your task bar briefly flickering on startup - that’s “normal”. It should work on Linux through Wine, although I haven’t tested it. Inside the zip file, there’s a “spielregeln.htm” file that explains the rules and provides helpful hints. Use a translation service of your choice, if necessary.
- Avenging Spirit*
- Dragon Quest Monsters 2
- Burgertime Deluxe
- Donkey Kong (an expanded version of the arcade game)
- Legend of the River King
- Heroes of Might and Magic
edit: Many people find Avenging Spirit ethically complicated due to its terrifying premise, just be advised it is roughly as dark as The Darkness II or a modern occult crime horror thriller
Note on Donkey Kong game boy, it starts with the 4 arcade levels then adds about a hundred more levels taking advantage of new moves and turning into more of a platform/puzzle kind of game.
This is really the starting point of what became Mario Vs Donkey Kong (which is another good GBA game to recommend, actually).
- on the original D.K. game. It was fun as a kid and it’s fun to see the origins of the characters
The original Donkey Kong is the arcade game. The NES port came later and was missing one of the four levels the arcade game had.
Strangely enough some licenced ports for the era’s computers were complete arcade ports unlike the in-house NES one.
On the Wii they released a “special edition” of NES Donkey Kong restoring the missing level.
The ‘restored’ version is an official ROM hack of the NES version, so it can be played on the NES itself too via a flashcart.
Yeah, I don’t have a NES anymore but I got that ROM on a hacked NES classic, and it works using the built-in emulator.
Donkey Kong was already in the NES classic, but of course it was the original NES version.
