This look at Game Boy games on the NES is sort of tangential sequel to another video I made recently breaking down the three libraries of the NES, so if you like this one check that guy out as well: th-cam.com/video/CmVFTubjRBs/w-d-xo.html
yeah, i just noticed that too, like "ohhh, so that's where it came from!". what doesn't make sense though, is i'm pretty sure AVGN never even reviewed cliffhanger. but then the avgn game has references to other games by that developer, like the Giant Claw boss comes from their other game, "Manos : The Hands of Death"
@@frankf684yes, the giant claw boss is from the movie the giant claw, but the game devs that made AVGN made an earlier game based on the movie manos the hand of edit : wrong word(death). . I meant Fate and they put that giant claw boss in it so the boss in this game is likely a reference to their earlier game
This is really fascinating. Kirby's Adventure was originally meant to be a colorized NES port of Kirby's Dream Land. Cooler heads (Sakurai and Iwata) prevailed, but it shows how prevalent this line of thinking was in the NES' twilight years.
Well, it was an easy money grab. There were still tons of NES users, but nobody really cared about it as a platform anymore, so you just got what you got... The last two new NES games I found in the wild (at K-Mart I want to say?? They used to have all kinds of seemingly outdated stuff. I got Eternal Champions on Sega CD way after its day extremely cheap) were Startropics 2 and Mega Man 6. That was probably after the Playstation was out even. It was after I had sold off my NES, then grown nostalgic for it and bought one second hand and tried to rebuild my collection... So some of the late stuff wasn't shovelware, but if you've already got the game developed and you can put it on a platform with millions of users pretty easily, and there's like zero risk of taking a reputation hit since all eyes are focused on the 16-bit consoles... seems like a good business move? As a gamer I don't like it, but it makes sense.
Honestly, it would be amazing to see the good NES version get some tlc and ported to other platforms, maybe even an optional or unlockable 16 bit version
Thanks for this video! I wrote the Game Boy version. I don't think I was the first to do digital audio playback on the Game Boy, but I did develop it independently. I found that by rapidly changing the pulse width on one of the sound chip's voices, I could play 4-bit digital samples. I had to turn off the screen during playback, otherwise it wouldn't work. Also, because of the long persistence of the LCD screen, I found that by "smearing" the screen in one-pixel motion, I could get an effective 14 levels of gray instead of just four. That is why those pictures are wiggling. The images were never meant for TH-cam on emulators!
It's amazing how few developers considered that in thirty years time their work would be played on completely unintended hardware and shown on a high definition digital video platform. I mean, what were you guys thinking back then?! :P
The especially surprising thing about this is that NES and Gameboy games were generally programmed in assembler, and the two systems had completely different CPUs in them and significant differences in how their PPUs worked, so they had to actually rewrite the code for the two systems. There were also enough differences between their sound capabilities that porting the music across would have taken some nontrivial amount of work as well.
@@BigOleWords But surely still cheaper and easier than developing a game from scratch. By the time these games came out, the market after new software were not going to be game connoisseurs, but probably just families with fairly small budgets (hence not upgrading) that wanted new games for their kids. It would have filled a gap and kept a steady flow of software to keep the dwindling market content.
Sure, work - but the sort of drudgery work almost any coder with experience of both systems can do. Some creativity is required of course, but having a "target experience" makes everything a lot easier - and level designs, animations etc could probably be reused. Some conversions/colorization had to be made (though I'm tempted to guess they made the color sprites first) but that's a technical challenge, not a creative one. In the case of Lion King, I think they even had actual Disney animators come in and do the original frames, so no wonder they wanted to reuse those assets…
Funny enough the Gameboy had a more advanced CPU, while the NES had a more advanced sound system that would be near directly compatible with the Gameboy. May have issues with the differences in PCM channel though.
There were bootleg demakes of Genesis Aladdin and The Lion King that are (believe it or not) more playable than the official ones. Especially The Lion King when the official port looks like a bootleg but the bootleg feels nearly legit.
To me one of the wildest things about these conversions is that the Game Boy and NES didn't have the same hardware. To port a game from one to the other you'd essentially have to start from scratch. You could keep level design, graphic design and music composition, but you'd be making the code, graphics and music from a design document. You wouldn't be able to copy and paste anything. Imagine going to all that effort to port a game that nobody wants to a system at the end of its life cycle?
I guess it comes down to what portion of the work was design work. Starting with your graphics and levels mapped out on graph paper probably saves a lot of time on development compared to starting from scratch. Even when you're adapting from a movie with all the visual reference material you could need, there's an iterative process in figuring out what you can safely reduce down to say a 16x32 pixel sprite and still keep recognisable. That would mean concept art, graphing out the graphics and figuring out the memory values and then displaying it all on test hardware, only to start again if it's an ugly mess. Adapting from Gameboy source materials will make something that doesn't look anywhere near as good as the NES contemporaries, but at least it's going to look fine, presumably.
Yeah, it would be understandable if NES had similar CPU to GB or there was some board akin to the Super Gameboy you could stuck in the NES cartridge case along with the original GB cartridge, but this is insane.
Which is why the games are all very similar platform-type games - they have a basic game engine for each machine that they reuse each time, and adding levels and graphics gets you 95% of the way to a "finished" title.
These were for sure the result of decisions made by higher up management thinking they could save a quick buck without understanding the technology. Typical.
I get the feeling with Cliffhanger, it went down like this. "Dude, uh, we gotta make this licensed game or they'll shut down our studio." "What's the license?" "Some movie called Cliffhanger." "Shit, man! I don't wanna do freaking Cliffhanger." "Ehhh... let's get drunk and crap this one out in a weekend. No one's gonna care anyway. It's Cliffhanger."
@@skylinefever The problem overall is that these games are considered merchandising first and I'm sure quality media on its own isn't even in the top 10. The studios don't care about a quality product, but rather something they can make money off selling the license to, adding to using said games as advertising for the film or TV show they're based off of. Not that there aren't some banger games out there, but when you have to rush something out to coincide with the film's release date and often from a rough draft of the film at best.
That Ubisoft Indiana Jones game is a port of the US Gold home computer version. It was also on the Mega Drive which makes me think US Gold didn’t have a Nintendo license at the time.
It's funny because Sega Master System had it's lifespan increased in Brazil because of the game gear, since they had basically the same hardware, and meant there were games for both systems for many years to come, but I didn't know NES had something similar going with GB.
The SMS had a really fascinating lifespan. That whole Brazil thing is so interesting. The NES had something kinda similar in the late 90s-early 20s in Asia and the eastern block. Lots of weird hacks and home brews before that became a common practice.
@@BigOleWords Yeah, they kept it as an "entry level" console for what it seems like forever here. The local distributor, Tectoy, put a lot of effort in it, porting and localizing Game Gear games, and they even developed games for it as late as 1996!
Try to listen Dracula in 50hz, like on Dendy. Much better. Also pirate versions of Lion King and Aladdin were better, but Aladdin was from snes version.
I don't consider it irony, but when I was a kid I had the choice of working all summer doing farm work to earn either a NES or a Gameboy. Of course I went with the NES! Now that I'm older, I have a RG351V which looks like a Gameboy on steroids. What do I do with it? Play the NES games on it to emulate the Gameboy I never got. I didn't get a Gameboy until I joined the ARMY, and the main games I played were Pokemon and Zelda. Nowadays it's nice to have the best of both worlds in one device!
So this is basically the equivalent of how a lot of master system and Game gear games are exactly the same with just the screen being cropped pretty much.
Opposite happened with Sonic Chaos, since that game was meant for the Game Gear but received a PAL Master System port. The port just happened to be released a month before the Game Gear version.
Interesting discovery! The only game I suspected they had done something like this was with Star Wars: Empire Strikes back, but didnt realize there was many more!
They are very similar, but the timeline and a few other hints tell us this is the other way around. This is a "de-make". Even though the GameBoy game releases at the same time as the NES Game, it's using the engine from Star Wars for the NES. The NES Star Wars hits a year before the GameBoy Star Wars. This would mean they had already done a de-make on the engine for the first game and any new game will already partly be a de-make. For this game, the GameBoy release was also the next year, as presumably the GameBoy team was finishing the first game before moving onto this. There are some elements which use the roughly the same sprites on both places, but the NES Game plays cleanly (even if it is impossible), which the GameBoy game chugs in normal gameplay. Many of the larger or more complex new features for this JVC Star Wars game, like the AT-ST, are significantly changed or reduced for this release even if the scenes play the same. All in all it's a fairly impressive de-make from a technical standpoint. You wish they would have chosen a difficulty level lower than "throw your controller at the TV".
It’s wild think that after nearly two decades of TH-camrs creating videos on retro games cats like yourself and Jeremy Parish are STILL finding new information to share.
Dude, I was watching some speed runner guy who does Super Mario Bros and that community is still finding new stuff in that game. The -1 world is old hat now. Mind boggling! Kosmic I think was his name.
The NES version of Aladdin isn’t related to the Gameboy version. It’s a bespoke version that was ported by a different team and likely worked from scratch
Last night, I saw a video of a popular streamer playing one of those bootleg multi-carts. When he got to Jungle Book, he made a comment about how it feels like a Gameboy game, and I'd never thought about that before. What a coincidence you uploaded this today, I didn't even know that game came out in the US! Earned my sub
I always wondered why Indiana Jones in particular had that weird outline on his sprite but now that makes sense since it was originally a GB title. This type of thing happened a lot between the Game Gear and Master System with less of an impact since they both use nearly identical hardware. But ironically the ports happened in reverse order where Game Gear games were sort of "demaked" to Master System with washed out colors since the Game Gear had a larger color palette. That's also probably why Sega didn't make a Game Gear Player type of Add-On for the Master System due to the color incompatibility. 😊
@@BigOleWords Me too and I'm someone who grew up with the Master System before any other console here in the US. I didn't find out until the late 90's via emulators like Massage for MSDOS and geocities rom sites that there were all these European releases. I had the same realization with the Turbo Grafx 16 in the same time period with the Magic Engine emulator for DOS. It's such a tragedy and travesty that system couldn't get off the ground either when in some instances it was better than Genesis or Super Nintendo. Can you imagine if Desert Strike came out on the TG16? Aww man lol
It's funny that Last Crusade thought to add the outline here, but "Castlevania: Circle of the Moon" didn't put it on the GBA in 2001. The later GBA Castlevanias overcompensate so that when they are played on a TV they look as oddly outlined as this game (though not nearly as bad). The outline on Last Crusade reminds me of what many of the ZX Spectrum games look like. As a gamer on an IBM PC in the 1980's we had some bad games, but nothing as ugly as the ZX games I see UK people talk about. As for the Master System, while the European releases are interesting, it's the Brazilian TecToy Master System world that I believe is the most fascinating.
@@kyleolson8977 Yeah sorry to my UK folks but man...the first time I saw the ZX Spectrum was when I purhcased that Rare Replay compilation on Xbox One. I had heard about Jet Pack but never saw the original game right? When I loaded it and there was no music, blips for sound effects, and just the whole package I literally blurted out, "WTF happen? What is this ish? Huh?" I'm glad I wasn't live streaming the first time I played it but then again it would have made for a hell of a clip. I thought the MSX was rough but that ZX makes some Atari 2600 seem hidef lol 🤣
@@kyleolson8977 Most Speccy games look (and play) a heck of a lot better than RGB CGA IBM PC games. Admittedly, those that take advantage of composite artifacting can look quite good on a composite monitor, though.
I just stumbled upon the greatest youtube opening ever. Also, great video. To think that one series with Dracula has some of the best music, and another game with Dracula in it made my ears ooze blood.
The weirdest thing about this to me is that the NES and Game Boy had very different CPUs, and since games were coded in assembly for these machines, they'd have to convert all the code by hand. Still, all they had to do to the graphics is add color, and the graphics and sound hardware were similar enough.
This is not correct information. The Indiana Jones game came out on UK microcomputers first, then was ported to Game Gear and Master System. Then ported to NES and GB. Pretty sure the rest of the games started as NES games first, then ported down to Gameboy.
I mean that’s not really the point I’m making here but yes it did appear on other systems like the Atari ST and whatnot. All the ports bear some resemblance to each other, but the Game Boy and NES ports look exactly the same. It’s pretty clear they were programmed at the same time. Which one came first I have no idea but if they intended it primarily as an NES game they failed miserably.
It's not a surprise that 90% of these are movie licenses. They have extremely short deadlines (gotta release when the movie is in cinemas!) and trading off the movie means they don't care as much about game quality. By this point the developers would have prebuilt engines for each platform and just sticking the levels and sprites in with a small bit of polish would be extremely fast and cheap.
2:35 From what I've seen, TY the Tasmanian Tiger also has a moment in which you can ride the boss after you beat it. And in Crash Twinsanity, at two points Crash rides Cortex like a snowboard.
You left out a huge one that actually was done super good, but it also was Famicom not NES. Hello Kitty World is a Sanrio re-skin of Balloon Kid from Gameboy. The game is identical, they even filled in the added FC resolution space over Gameboy with just graphical tiles as to not screw up the gameplay balance of the stages. I used to own it, cuteness aside it's amazing. Great visuals, great audio, plays as perfect as the GB one.
To be fair, this also happened with the Master System especially here in Brazil, Sonic Blast from 1997 is a port of the Game Gear version and they didn't even adjust the screen size in some parts. Anyway, I find it pretty funny how the bootleg versions of Aladdin and Lion King fare so much better than the official NES version.
This is a phenomenon I never encountered due to my dad's better taste in games. He kept supporting NES when good stuff came out long past SNES release, but the key word there is "good." We have some rare titles thanks to that, like Bubble Bobble Part 2 and Zoda's Revenge.
I've never thought twice about this before, but once you laid everything out I was like "DUH" lol. On a side note, I have such a vivid memory of my first GameBoy. My dad took me to Toys R Us to get one soon after it was released. I remember sitting in the parking lot, putting the headphones in and booting up Tetris for the first time. This is going to sound SO remedial but I seriously remember thinking "WHOAAAA" when I head the stereo sound of the GameBoy boot up.
Funny how Kirby's Adventure appears at the beginning, since Sakurai revealed in a famitsu interview, in 2017 I think? That when approached by Nintendo to release a Kirby title to the NES, the original project was gonna be a colored port of Kirby's Dream Land, but they went with a more complex game later on. You can tell this in the final product as a good amount of level sprites and tiles are lifted from the GB game, as well as the very tiny sprite sizes for the characters in it.
I was kind of expecting a situation where they literally put a gameboy game board inside of an NES cart with an adapter like they did with some famicom games. Of course, thinking about that now, it would basically be impossible, but that still would have been kind of cool.
I played the Dracula game to full completion back in the day (it's one of those "you won't see everything if you don't play on higher difficulties" games) and it didn't really feel much different from other games available to me at the time in terms of quality? It lets you look up and down before leaping so if you take your time and keep your peepers peeled, you will fare just fine. Also, the music by Jeroen Tel may be a bit odd, because of his love for crazy inatrumentation, but some of the tracks in it were straight up bangers, and I won't stand for dissing it like that. For a game to waltz into Castlevania's subject material and put out a gameplay loop that at no point reminds you of it is no small feat, you know!
They probably didn't bother finishing the NES Lion King because they didn't think anybody playing it would finish it, either. The SNES version is insanely hard, to the point it's common fodder for drunk rage-game streaming, and it only gets worse in the adult Simba phase. I can only assume the Gameboy version is just as hard, and the NES version harder with worse collision detection or something.
They probably didn't finish the NES Lion King because they didn't have the time. Nintendo had announced that support for the NES would be discontinued globally in '95, and as it is they could only get away with releasing it in PAL-A and PAL-B territories at the VERY end of the NES' (official) lifespan.
I really appreciate that you don't mix aspect ratios. It's nice to see someone producing videos with old footage actually matching the aspect ratio for consistency. Maybe there are plenty of creators out there that do that, but I don't think I come across it much these days.
Paperbiy 2 on the SNES is actually an incredibly fun game. I spent countless hours with it back in the mid nineties. The soundtrack absolutely slaps as well.
I even saw bootleggers port the GameBoy Tiny Toons game to the NES, and a port of Donkey Kong Land which only had 5 stages. The ports were solid for bootlegs.
I had Sega Genesis and in the 90s I borrowed "Addams Family" from the video store. When I popped it into Sega I realized that it was a Game Boy game so I quickly returned it and took some other game free of charge.
@@BigOleWords On both - it was a British game (despite the American licence) released on all the popular home computers in the UK - ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga. And it was also on the Master System (again, popular in the UK). But it came out earlier on those (except for the Master System maybe), in 1989 in time for the movie release (I think).
This is interesting, as I was under the impression the Game Boy had a few features the NES lacked. I could see designing both an NES and GB version at the same time, and targeting the lowest common denominator. But it really does seem like at least some of these were ports of the Game Boy version.
I can't think of any "NES games that were Game Boy games", but if you ever wanted another topic, "Game Boy ports of NES games" might be interesting. DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, The Little Mermaid, and Felix the Cat come to mind. Those games were rebuilt for the Game Boy's smaller screen, and DuckTale's controls were improved. There's also oddities like Adventure Island 1 on Game Boy being a port of Adventure Island 2 on the NES. And Battletoads on Game Boy is NOT a port of Battletoads on NES; Battletoads in Ragnarok's World is.
Fun fact: Hummer Team, a Taiwanese game company known for their bootleg games of varying quality, actually made an NES port of the SNES version of Aladdin and it's actually really well made.
I used to have the Gameboy of Krustys Fun House. I was at a cousin's house where they had the NES version. The first few levels were, to my knowledge, exactly the same.
whats crazy is as someone who played a lot of Genesis Lion King the monkeys from Jungle Book had their sprite work cleaned up but are the same hangng from trees animation as in he lion king
Congrats on an original idea for retro topics. This might sound sarcastic. It isn’t. I have a channel in a niche that is challenging to make unique content for. I can relate.
Haha thanks! And believe I know. I’m not sure this is something that’s been discussed before, but pretty much everything I’ve wanted to talk about has been covered, sometimes extensively!
Great video Sir!!! I think the Rocky & Bullwinkle, Hook and Robocop 2 were like this too. But was the Gameboy/NES close hardware wise? Did it have the same thing going on like the Game Gear/Master System? Also, unrelated, if you like really kickin' Gameboy music, check out the title screen music to Spot. Darn funker than it has any reason to! :D
Yo! I think Rocky & Bullwinkle for GB is it’s own game (and somehow looks way better than the NES version). Hook I think you are right, neat! Don’t think Robocop 2 is either but I haven’t really played the Robocop games too much sooo maybe? Thanks for those!
No. Proof of it lies in the Super Gameboy. The Super Gameboy if you didn't know, has all the hardware and rom necessary to run gameboy games.. minus the buttons, d=pad, and screen. This means that the SNES in no way natively could play gameboy games.. OH. We're talking the NES , not the SNES... still a no, honestly. But I presume in a different way.
There are however originally Gameboy games that I wish have its NES conversion port. Zelda Link's awakening, Final Fantasy Legend 2 & 3. But we have settles using the Super Gameboy adapter for the SNES instead.
I have a hunch Bram Stoker's Dracula was actually an NES to GB port, or at least the music was - the source code for both version's music is out there and it seems to suggest the music was written for the NES and then ported to the GB - the NES music source code is last dated November 1992 and the GB music is dated march 1993. The Gameboy source also has a comment from the composer saying "THE AUDIO-NUMBERS ARE IDENTICAL TO THE 'DRACULA' 'SEGA MASTERSYSTEM' AND 'NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM' AUDIO-NUMBERS", Implying those were the original versions and the GB was a port
Not really a fan of the Game boy I would like to see conversions of game boy games to the NES such as Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly(yet to play this game)
Great list, a little surprised Monopoly for the NES wasn't on here tho. The Gameboy version is nearly identical, same graphics and music, except some sounds are missing and the main track throughout the game is shorter. Strangely enough a GBC version was later reason and again it was identical to the GB version, only in color
Hey, maybe these GameBoy to NES conversions are just the old school style of shovelware. When I was a kid I had NES and Game Gear. Still 2 of my favorites to collect for. But my reasoning for asking for Game Gear over GameBoy was that I wanted a portable NES. GG has games like Mega Man that are basically NES games. Fantastic Dizzy is another example. If I could find a better way to record the footage I could do a TH-cam channel featuring GG as it is the largest part of my game collection, next to the completely uninteresting Xbox 360! Seriously, how did I end up with 500 Xbox 360 games? They're hardly worth selling.
I’m sure you’ve seen or maybe mentioned and I overlooked, but I believe the Animaniacs gameboy game is the Genesis fits this similar category! They’re pretty 1-1 if I recall, while the SNES game is totally original! Great video! Had no idea these ports were so close to each other, really wonder how they did that sometimes.
Surprised this wasn’t talked about here, but Hello Kitty World was literally just an NES port of Balloon Kid with Hello Kitty as the main character. The music, being by Hip Tanaka, was also clearly ported the same as Dr Mario’s was because it uses the same percussion templates and other stuff between versions. Lastly, the one song brought over from Balloon Fight was replaced with the title song from the Nintendo World Champion cartridge loll. This game’s whole existence is so bizarre.
Bram Stokers Dracula also was released on Sega CD. That version is a slow paced side scroller with seemless FMV bits when you complete a stage. It looks amazing but it's not that fun. The only reason I kept playing it back in the 90's is the graphics were so good I wanted to see the entire game.
Megaman was not a direct NES Port. Alle the Gameboy Megaman games have always been some kind of mash-ups of different NES games. Like First GB title was a mashup of 1 and 2 of the NES, the second like 2 and 3 of the NES and so on...
5:30 As soon as you said "jammin' soundtrack", I instantly realized that this was a Software Creations game; kind of meh graphics, weak gameplay, but Tim and Geoff Follin making the most out of the NES's soundchip.
I love this topic for a video. I legit will never get sick of “push console x to it’s graphical limitz” vids all over TH-cam, but it was nice to see something new
You can add hello kitty world to the list. It’s legit a colorized reskin of balloon kid. All the levels, music and everything are pretty much the same. The lead characters were reskinned with a few scenes in between levels redone with the hello kitty character
Wayne’s World, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and The Terminator we’re all developed by Radical Software. The same blocky graphics and short repetitive music plague all 3 games. The heads up display and status bars are identical just different colors.
The main reason why The Jungle book on Game boy is better then on the NES is that when you lower the difficuly, you only have to find 7 diamonds per stage instead of all 10 of them. I would never have been able to beat the game otherwise.
This look at Game Boy games on the NES is sort of tangential sequel to another video I made recently breaking down the three libraries of the NES, so if you like this one check that guy out as well: th-cam.com/video/CmVFTubjRBs/w-d-xo.html
Even cliffhanger is a nice example of what any game boy game would look like on NES
A
Nintendo has always been guilty of robbing consumers, price gouging and bait & switch, pun intended, its not a console or a handheld
have you checked out Hudson Hawk on both the NES and gameboy?
@@frankduxvandamme2 Woof I think you're right!
Wow, now that part in the AVGN game where you kill Santa and ride his corpse like a sled makes a lot more sense.
Haha no way, that rules!
yeah, i just noticed that too, like "ohhh, so that's where it came from!". what doesn't make sense though, is i'm pretty sure AVGN never even reviewed cliffhanger. but then the avgn game has references to other games by that developer, like the Giant Claw boss comes from their other game, "Manos : The Hands of Death"
AVGN is corny. He drink ROLLING ROCK!!!
HE wants to ad JAZZ to the games and have a difference between 2 to 4 brews, get some STEEL RESERVES!!!
@@Femaiden the claw boss is from the movie the giant claw,or am I missing a joke ?
@@frankf684yes, the giant claw boss is from the movie the giant claw, but the game devs that made AVGN made an earlier game based on the movie manos the hand of edit : wrong word(death). . I meant Fate and they put that giant claw boss in it so the boss in this game is likely a reference to their earlier game
This is really fascinating.
Kirby's Adventure was originally meant to be a colorized NES port of Kirby's Dream Land. Cooler heads (Sakurai and Iwata) prevailed, but it shows how prevalent this line of thinking was in the NES' twilight years.
Thank God they didn’t go that route!
Kirby's Adventure did recycle some of the graphics from Kirby's Dreamland.
Well, it was an easy money grab. There were still tons of NES users, but nobody really cared about it as a platform anymore, so you just got what you got...
The last two new NES games I found in the wild (at K-Mart I want to say?? They used to have all kinds of seemingly outdated stuff. I got Eternal Champions on Sega CD way after its day extremely cheap) were Startropics 2 and Mega Man 6. That was probably after the Playstation was out even. It was after I had sold off my NES, then grown nostalgic for it and bought one second hand and tried to rebuild my collection...
So some of the late stuff wasn't shovelware, but if you've already got the game developed and you can put it on a platform with millions of users pretty easily, and there's like zero risk of taking a reputation hit since all eyes are focused on the 16-bit consoles... seems like a good business move? As a gamer I don't like it, but it makes sense.
The reason Indiana Jones has such a great soundtrack is because Tim Follin worked on it. A literal legend in the 8-bit music scene.
Yep! I talk about ol Tim in the review of that game: th-cam.com/video/Iwkpm1q0bQ0/w-d-xo.html
Honestly, it would be amazing to see the good NES version get some tlc and ported to other platforms, maybe even an optional or unlockable 16 bit version
@@BigOleWordsI first heard Tim Follin in the Roblox game Speed Run 4
Thanks for this video! I wrote the Game Boy version. I don't think I was the first to do digital audio playback on the Game Boy, but I did develop it independently. I found that by rapidly changing the pulse width on one of the sound chip's voices, I could play 4-bit digital samples. I had to turn off the screen during playback, otherwise it wouldn't work.
Also, because of the long persistence of the LCD screen, I found that by "smearing" the screen in one-pixel motion, I could get an effective 14 levels of gray instead of just four. That is why those pictures are wiggling. The images were never meant for TH-cam on emulators!
Hi! That’s awesome! Which game was it you worked on?!
@@BigOleWords Wayne's World
It's amazing how few developers considered that in thirty years time their work would be played on completely unintended hardware and shown on a high definition digital video platform. I mean, what were you guys thinking back then?! :P
Hidden Developers Pictures in Wayne's World (GameBoy) th-cam.com/video/YrvdnpVzAS4/w-d-xo.html
You wrote the Gameboy version of . .
. what? You never told us.
The especially surprising thing about this is that NES and Gameboy games were generally programmed in assembler, and the two systems had completely different CPUs in them and significant differences in how their PPUs worked, so they had to actually rewrite the code for the two systems. There were also enough differences between their sound capabilities that porting the music across would have taken some nontrivial amount of work as well.
Yeah it sounds like a lot of effort for not much return!
@@BigOleWords But surely still cheaper and easier than developing a game from scratch. By the time these games came out, the market after new software were not going to be game connoisseurs, but probably just families with fairly small budgets (hence not upgrading) that wanted new games for their kids. It would have filled a gap and kept a steady flow of software to keep the dwindling market content.
Sure, work - but the sort of drudgery work almost any coder with experience of both systems can do. Some creativity is required of course, but having a "target experience" makes everything a lot easier - and level designs, animations etc could probably be reused. Some conversions/colorization had to be made (though I'm tempted to guess they made the color sprites first) but that's a technical challenge, not a creative one. In the case of Lion King, I think they even had actual Disney animators come in and do the original frames, so no wonder they wanted to reuse those assets…
Funny enough the Gameboy had a more advanced CPU, while the NES had a more advanced sound system that would be near directly compatible with the Gameboy. May have issues with the differences in PCM channel though.
I watched this hoping you had found carts with a embedded Ricoh processor, but no these are just lazy ports.
There were bootleg demakes of Genesis Aladdin and The Lion King that are (believe it or not) more playable than the official ones. Especially The Lion King when the official port looks like a bootleg but the bootleg feels nearly legit.
Yeah those are really interesting!
You mean "KONIG der LOWEN"
I bet ya the bootlegger was more pissed off by the port and made their own
I noticed Jurassic Park for NES is also a GBOY reclone with added color, but it was a fun game
Oh man I think you’re right! The list is growing!
Wow, never realized this. As a kid I always thought JP was pretty advanced looking on the NES!
To me one of the wildest things about these conversions is that the Game Boy and NES didn't have the same hardware. To port a game from one to the other you'd essentially have to start from scratch. You could keep level design, graphic design and music composition, but you'd be making the code, graphics and music from a design document. You wouldn't be able to copy and paste anything. Imagine going to all that effort to port a game that nobody wants to a system at the end of its life cycle?
Yeah for sure. It wasn’t just like a crop tool, they had to rework the whole thing!
I guess it comes down to what portion of the work was design work. Starting with your graphics and levels mapped out on graph paper probably saves a lot of time on development compared to starting from scratch. Even when you're adapting from a movie with all the visual reference material you could need, there's an iterative process in figuring out what you can safely reduce down to say a 16x32 pixel sprite and still keep recognisable. That would mean concept art, graphing out the graphics and figuring out the memory values and then displaying it all on test hardware, only to start again if it's an ugly mess. Adapting from Gameboy source materials will make something that doesn't look anywhere near as good as the NES contemporaries, but at least it's going to look fine, presumably.
Yeah, it would be understandable if NES had similar CPU to GB or there was some board akin to the Super Gameboy you could stuck in the NES cartridge case along with the original GB cartridge, but this is insane.
Which is why the games are all very similar platform-type games - they have a basic game engine for each machine that they reuse each time, and adding levels and graphics gets you 95% of the way to a "finished" title.
These were for sure the result of decisions made by higher up management thinking they could save a quick buck without understanding the technology. Typical.
I get the feeling with Cliffhanger, it went down like this.
"Dude, uh, we gotta make this licensed game or they'll shut down our studio."
"What's the license?"
"Some movie called Cliffhanger."
"Shit, man! I don't wanna do freaking Cliffhanger."
"Ehhh... let's get drunk and crap this one out in a weekend. No one's gonna care anyway. It's Cliffhanger."
Except let’s be honest, everyone wanted to make Cliffhanger. Stallone rules!
@@BigOleWords Someone with talent and passion, probably. Not the guys they went with.
I think Cliffhanger was my first R rated movie I saw as a kid.
I like how the AVGN said "Want a recipe for shit? License a movie for an NES game!" The he takes it further in Jaws for NES.
@@skylinefever The problem overall is that these games are considered merchandising first and I'm sure quality media on its own isn't even in the top 10. The studios don't care about a quality product, but rather something they can make money off selling the license to, adding to using said games as advertising for the film or TV show they're based off of. Not that there aren't some banger games out there, but when you have to rush something out to coincide with the film's release date and often from a rough draft of the film at best.
That Ubisoft Indiana Jones game is a port of the US Gold home computer version. It was also on the Mega Drive which makes me think US Gold didn’t have a Nintendo license at the time.
Nice!
It's funny because Sega Master System had it's lifespan increased in Brazil because of the game gear, since they had basically the same hardware, and meant there were games for both systems for many years to come, but I didn't know NES had something similar going with GB.
The SMS had a really fascinating lifespan. That whole Brazil thing is so interesting. The NES had something kinda similar in the late 90s-early 20s in Asia and the eastern block. Lots of weird hacks and home brews before that became a common practice.
@@BigOleWords Yeah, they kept it as an "entry level" console for what it seems like forever here. The local distributor, Tectoy, put a lot of effort in it, porting and localizing Game Gear games, and they even developed games for it as late as 1996!
You can add Star Trek: The Next Generation by Absolute Entertainment to your list.
That's the first game that made me notice this phenomenon.
Came here to say this!
Added to the list, thanks!
Theres a TNG game on THE GAMEBOY???!!!
@@pengwin_ Yeah. Unfortunately, it's really bad.
I guess the NES going by the wayside is why the Game Gear version looks way better than the NES version.
Try to listen Dracula in 50hz, like on Dendy. Much better.
Also pirate versions of Lion King and Aladdin were better, but Aladdin was from snes version.
I’ll give it a shot!
The cheese grater is called "arpeggiation", which was used to play choords when the channels for doing so were not numerous enough.
Either way it's shredding!
I don't consider it irony, but when I was a kid I had the choice of working all summer doing farm work to earn either a NES or a Gameboy. Of course I went with the NES! Now that I'm older, I have a RG351V which looks like a Gameboy on steroids. What do I do with it? Play the NES games on it to emulate the Gameboy I never got. I didn't get a Gameboy until I joined the ARMY, and the main games I played were Pokemon and Zelda.
Nowadays it's nice to have the best of both worlds in one device!
Haha that’s amazing! And you made the right choice :)
So this is basically the equivalent of how a lot of master system and Game gear games are exactly the same with just the screen being cropped pretty much.
Yeah for sure, just way less common with Nintendo. Or was it? ;)
Opposite happened with Sonic Chaos, since that game was meant for the Game Gear but received a PAL Master System port. The port just happened to be released a month before the Game Gear version.
Jurassic Park also did this.
I got the GB version in 1992 and only saw the NES version a few years ago.
I was surprised to see it was the same game.
I think you are right!
Interesting discovery! The only game I suspected they had done something like this was with Star Wars: Empire Strikes back, but didnt realize there was many more!
Snap! I think you may be right!
I've got that one on GameBoy, but I want it on NES.
Empire Strikes Back definitely is a GameBoy port!
They are very similar, but the timeline and a few other hints tell us this is the other way around. This is a "de-make".
Even though the GameBoy game releases at the same time as the NES Game, it's using the engine from Star Wars for the NES. The NES Star Wars hits a year before the GameBoy Star Wars. This would mean they had already done a de-make on the engine for the first game and any new game will already partly be a de-make.
For this game, the GameBoy release was also the next year, as presumably the GameBoy team was finishing the first game before moving onto this.
There are some elements which use the roughly the same sprites on both places, but the NES Game plays cleanly (even if it is impossible), which the GameBoy game chugs in normal gameplay. Many of the larger or more complex new features for this JVC Star Wars game, like the AT-ST, are significantly changed or reduced for this release even if the scenes play the same.
All in all it's a fairly impressive de-make from a technical standpoint. You wish they would have chosen a difficulty level lower than "throw your controller at the TV".
WWF King Of The Ring is definitely one, released on Gameboy Sept 1993 then the NES Nov 1993.
Whoa you’re right! I actually thought the NES version looked pretty good too!
It’s wild think that after nearly two decades of TH-camrs creating videos on retro games cats like yourself and Jeremy Parish are STILL finding new information to share.
Hey thanks! That dude is much more of a historian whereas I just spend too much time staring at my NES collection ;)
Dude, I was watching some speed runner guy who does Super Mario Bros and that community is still finding new stuff in that game. The -1 world is old hat now. Mind boggling!
Kosmic I think was his name.
And still some people still think mario 2 being doki doki panic is something new lol
This is the reason I've just subscribed.
Jeremy rocks.
The NES version of Aladdin isn’t related to the Gameboy version. It’s a bespoke version that was ported by a different team and likely worked from scratch
If you want something interesting try the space invaders gameboy cart as it has a Super Nintendo game hiding in it only accessible thru Super Gameboy
Whoa that’s awesome!
There aren’t many Nintendo topics I haven’t seen covered on TH-cam, this was so interesting and fresh to see! Great work!
Hey thanks! I’m digging as deep as I can!
Last night, I saw a video of a popular streamer playing one of those bootleg multi-carts. When he got to Jungle Book, he made a comment about how it feels like a Gameboy game, and I'd never thought about that before. What a coincidence you uploaded this today, I didn't even know that game came out in the US! Earned my sub
That’s awesome, he was on there trail and didn’t realize it!
I always wondered why Indiana Jones in particular had that weird outline on his sprite but now that makes sense since it was originally a GB title. This type of thing happened a lot between the Game Gear and Master System with less of an impact since they both use nearly identical hardware. But ironically the ports happened in reverse order where Game Gear games were sort of "demaked" to Master System with washed out colors since the Game Gear had a larger color palette. That's also probably why Sega didn't make a Game Gear Player type of Add-On for the Master System due to the color incompatibility. 😊
Yeah that whole late era Master System period is really fascinating. I was surprised to learn how long that console got games developed for it.
@@BigOleWords Me too and I'm someone who grew up with the Master System before any other console here in the US. I didn't find out until the late 90's via emulators like Massage for MSDOS and geocities rom sites that there were all these European releases. I had the same realization with the Turbo Grafx 16 in the same time period with the Magic Engine emulator for DOS. It's such a tragedy and travesty that system couldn't get off the ground either when in some instances it was better than Genesis or Super Nintendo. Can you imagine if Desert Strike came out on the TG16? Aww man lol
It's funny that Last Crusade thought to add the outline here, but "Castlevania: Circle of the Moon" didn't put it on the GBA in 2001. The later GBA Castlevanias overcompensate so that when they are played on a TV they look as oddly outlined as this game (though not nearly as bad).
The outline on Last Crusade reminds me of what many of the ZX Spectrum games look like. As a gamer on an IBM PC in the 1980's we had some bad games, but nothing as ugly as the ZX games I see UK people talk about.
As for the Master System, while the European releases are interesting, it's the Brazilian TecToy Master System world that I believe is the most fascinating.
@@kyleolson8977 Yeah sorry to my UK folks but man...the first time I saw the ZX Spectrum was when I purhcased that Rare Replay compilation on Xbox One. I had heard about Jet Pack but never saw the original game right? When I loaded it and there was no music, blips for sound effects, and just the whole package I literally blurted out, "WTF happen? What is this ish? Huh?" I'm glad I wasn't live streaming the first time I played it but then again it would have made for a hell of a clip. I thought the MSX was rough but that ZX makes some Atari 2600 seem hidef lol 🤣
@@kyleolson8977 Most Speccy games look (and play) a heck of a lot better than RGB CGA IBM PC games. Admittedly, those that take advantage of composite artifacting can look quite good on a composite monitor, though.
I loved Paperboy 2 on the SNES growing up, I didn't realize there was Game Boy version. Cool video, thanks.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade looks like a Spectrum ZX game
I think there was a Spectrum version of it!
What interesting is that playing GameBoy Indiana Jones on a GBC, the default color palette is nearly identical to the NES version
That makes perfect sense!
That was likely unintentional on Tiertex's part.
Awesome!! I learned something new today great video! 😎🤟, I might have to give cliffhanger a try I wanna surf the corpse lol
You haven’t lived til you’ve ridden a corpse off a mountain!
I just stumbled upon the greatest youtube opening ever.
Also, great video. To think that one series with Dracula has some of the best music, and another game with Dracula in it made my ears ooze blood.
Haha glad you like the intro, it tends to be a bit divisive.
The weirdest thing about this to me is that the NES and Game Boy had very different CPUs, and since games were coded in assembly for these machines, they'd have to convert all the code by hand. Still, all they had to do to the graphics is add color, and the graphics and sound hardware were similar enough.
Some real crimes committed here. I didn't know Dracula and Paper Boy were based on Game Boy games.
Yeah me either, those were the most recent discoveries for me.
That Cliffhanger boss was hilarious
It never gets old!
The soundtrack for Dracula on the nes, SHREDS. But I'm a fan of the band HELLA so I would say that.
Haha so am I!
This is not correct information. The Indiana Jones game came out on UK microcomputers first, then was ported to Game Gear and Master System. Then ported to NES and GB.
Pretty sure the rest of the games started as NES games first, then ported down to Gameboy.
You mean made for a potato then ported to the NES then GB
I mean that’s not really the point I’m making here but yes it did appear on other systems like the Atari ST and whatnot. All the ports bear some resemblance to each other, but the Game Boy and NES ports look exactly the same. It’s pretty clear they were programmed at the same time. Which one came first I have no idea but if they intended it primarily as an NES game they failed miserably.
Cliffhanger blew my mind back in the day, I couldn’t get over how small Stallone was in the game. Makes sense with the game boy remake/connection
I immediately knoew something was wrong there. Like how, how was this made to look like this?!?
It's not a surprise that 90% of these are movie licenses. They have extremely short deadlines (gotta release when the movie is in cinemas!) and trading off the movie means they don't care as much about game quality. By this point the developers would have prebuilt engines for each platform and just sticking the levels and sprites in with a small bit of polish would be extremely fast and cheap.
Yeah that makes sense why they exist at all.
2:35
From what I've seen, TY the Tasmanian Tiger also has a moment in which you can ride the boss after you beat it.
And in Crash Twinsanity, at two points Crash rides Cortex like a snowboard.
Those are some facts I never thought I’d learn!
You left out a huge one that actually was done super good, but it also was Famicom not NES. Hello Kitty World is a Sanrio re-skin of Balloon Kid from Gameboy. The game is identical, they even filled in the added FC resolution space over Gameboy with just graphical tiles as to not screw up the gameplay balance of the stages. I used to own it, cuteness aside it's amazing. Great visuals, great audio, plays as perfect as the GB one.
Yeah I didn't include the Famicom, but maybe I'll come back to Hello Kitty World with part 2 :)
3:50: "replaced with the duo that actually moved, no way!"
Wayne's world: "Yes way!"
It’s funny because that was unintentional when I wrote it, but I realized it when I was recording ;)
To be fair, this also happened with the Master System especially here in Brazil, Sonic Blast from 1997 is a port of the Game Gear version and they didn't even adjust the screen size in some parts.
Anyway, I find it pretty funny how the bootleg versions of Aladdin and Lion King fare so much better than the official NES version.
This is a phenomenon I never encountered due to my dad's better taste in games. He kept supporting NES when good stuff came out long past SNES release, but the key word there is "good." We have some rare titles thanks to that, like Bubble Bobble Part 2 and Zoda's Revenge.
That's awesome. Truly what all of us wish we had done, making sure Little Samson sold out ;)
Maybe you could do q video of “NES games on Gameboy” Felix the Cat would fit into that category since it’s more of a nes to gameboy port.
Yeah that would be a cool compliment to this video.
I've never thought twice about this before, but once you laid everything out I was like "DUH" lol. On a side note, I have such a vivid memory of my first GameBoy. My dad took me to Toys R Us to get one soon after it was released. I remember sitting in the parking lot, putting the headphones in and booting up Tetris for the first time. This is going to sound SO remedial but I seriously remember thinking "WHOAAAA" when I head the stereo sound of the GameBoy boot up.
That's awesome, and yeah that sound was incredible at the time!
Funny how Kirby's Adventure appears at the beginning, since Sakurai revealed in a famitsu interview, in 2017 I think? That when approached by Nintendo to release a Kirby title to the NES, the original project was gonna be a colored port of Kirby's Dream Land, but they went with a more complex game later on. You can tell this in the final product as a good amount of level sprites and tiles are lifted from the GB game, as well as the very tiny sprite sizes for the characters in it.
Even as a kid I remember being impressed with Kirby and especially the black and white level GB shout out stage. So good.
I was kind of expecting a situation where they literally put a gameboy game board inside of an NES cart with an adapter like they did with some famicom games. Of course, thinking about that now, it would basically be impossible, but that still would have been kind of cool.
That would've been amazing. I'm sure some wizard can figure it out ;)
I played the Dracula game to full completion back in the day (it's one of those "you won't see everything if you don't play on higher difficulties" games) and it didn't really feel much different from other games available to me at the time in terms of quality? It lets you look up and down before leaping so if you take your time and keep your peepers peeled, you will fare just fine.
Also, the music by Jeroen Tel may be a bit odd, because of his love for crazy inatrumentation, but some of the tracks in it were straight up bangers, and I won't stand for dissing it like that.
For a game to waltz into Castlevania's subject material and put out a gameplay loop that at no point reminds you of it is no small feat, you know!
Haha ok ok. Truthfully it's only that one track that really gets me, but in general the more European 8-bit sound is not my favorite.
Amen - that soundtrack rocks!
They probably didn't bother finishing the NES Lion King because they didn't think anybody playing it would finish it, either. The SNES version is insanely hard, to the point it's common fodder for drunk rage-game streaming, and it only gets worse in the adult Simba phase. I can only assume the Gameboy version is just as hard, and the NES version harder with worse collision detection or something.
The controls in the NES / Game Boy version are beyond broken, just as stiff and awkward as it gets.
They probably didn't finish the NES Lion King because they didn't have the time. Nintendo had announced that support for the NES would be discontinued globally in '95, and as it is they could only get away with releasing it in PAL-A and PAL-B territories at the VERY end of the NES' (official) lifespan.
I love that the aspect ratio is 4:3 its very unique and I don't see it often
It's growing on me. I think it just works better with NES footage :)
I really appreciate that you don't mix aspect ratios. It's nice to see someone producing videos with old footage actually matching the aspect ratio for consistency. Maybe there are plenty of creators out there that do that, but I don't think I come across it much these days.
I was doing regular ratio just with extra large black areas on the side. I do prefer the way the NES looks in 4:3 for sure.
Paperbiy 2 on the SNES is actually an incredibly fun game. I spent countless hours with it back in the mid nineties. The soundtrack absolutely slaps as well.
I even saw bootleggers port the GameBoy Tiny Toons game to the NES, and a port of Donkey Kong Land which only had 5 stages. The ports were solid for bootlegs.
That’s awesome!
Miss all that old retro music, love it whenever I hear it
I had Sega Genesis and in the 90s I borrowed "Addams Family" from the video store. When I popped it into Sega I realized that it was a Game Boy game so I quickly returned it and took some other game free of charge.
Huh, I had no idea!
The sprite design and white outlines in Indy makes the game look like a Spectrum or Amstrad game.
Yeah I can see it! I think that game appeared on one or both of those.
@@BigOleWords On both - it was a British game (despite the American licence) released on all the popular home computers in the UK - ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga. And it was also on the Master System (again, popular in the UK). But it came out earlier on those (except for the Master System maybe), in 1989 in time for the movie release (I think).
This is interesting, as I was under the impression the Game Boy had a few features the NES lacked. I could see designing both an NES and GB version at the same time, and targeting the lowest common denominator. But it really does seem like at least some of these were ports of the Game Boy version.
The Indiana Jones game was actually relased for a lot of consoles. I also played it on the Sega Master System.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a 1080p video in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Well played, sir 👍
Thanks! Something I’ve been trying this year :)
You're right about Jungle Book on NES and Gameboy being identical. I played and beat them.
That’s crazy I had no idea for so long!
Oh my god Jeepers Creepers in the intro! Mr Show props. I love how the music under that part is basically E1M1 from Doom
Ay a fellow man of taste! And haha you’re absolutely right about that sounding like Doom, I never made that connection!
That shadow boss in that Dracula game probably woulda scared the shit outta me as a kid. XD
Yeah dude it's creepy!
I can't think of any "NES games that were Game Boy games", but if you ever wanted another topic, "Game Boy ports of NES games" might be interesting. DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, The Little Mermaid, and Felix the Cat come to mind. Those games were rebuilt for the Game Boy's smaller screen, and DuckTale's controls were improved.
There's also oddities like Adventure Island 1 on Game Boy being a port of Adventure Island 2 on the NES. And Battletoads on Game Boy is NOT a port of Battletoads on NES; Battletoads in Ragnarok's World is.
Yeah that's a whole other world to dive into for sure!
Fun fact: Hummer Team, a Taiwanese game company known for their bootleg games of varying quality, actually made an NES port of the SNES version of Aladdin and it's actually really well made.
Yep! Hummer Team was amazing!
Was half expecting you to say "And Bram Stoker's Dracula pinball machine!" to finish off the list of Bram Stokers Dracula games lol.
Haha not quite that far!
I used to have the Gameboy of Krustys Fun House. I was at a cousin's house where they had the NES version. The first few levels were, to my knowledge, exactly the same.
I think you may be right!
whats crazy is as someone who played a lot of Genesis Lion King the monkeys from Jungle Book had their sprite work cleaned up but are the same hangng from trees animation as in he lion king
Haha that's awesome!
Congrats on an original idea for retro topics. This might sound sarcastic. It isn’t. I have a channel in a niche that is challenging to make unique content for. I can relate.
Haha thanks! And believe I know. I’m not sure this is something that’s been discussed before, but pretty much everything I’ve wanted to talk about has been covered, sometimes extensively!
Great video Sir!!! I think the Rocky & Bullwinkle, Hook and Robocop 2 were like this too.
But was the Gameboy/NES close hardware wise? Did it have the same thing going on like the Game Gear/Master System?
Also, unrelated, if you like really kickin' Gameboy music, check out the title screen music to Spot. Darn funker than it has any reason to! :D
Yo! I think Rocky & Bullwinkle for GB is it’s own game (and somehow looks way better than the NES version). Hook I think you are right, neat! Don’t think Robocop 2 is either but I haven’t really played the Robocop games too much sooo maybe? Thanks for those!
@@BigOleWords Rocky & Bullwinkle Gameboy was its own game. It plays better than the NES version, but is harder in terms of platforming.
No. Proof of it lies in the Super Gameboy. The Super Gameboy if you didn't know, has all the hardware and rom necessary to run gameboy games.. minus the buttons, d=pad, and screen. This means that the SNES in no way natively could play gameboy games..
OH. We're talking the NES , not the SNES... still a no, honestly. But I presume in a different way.
"How progressive," the reality is since the early 90s the paper boy is just someone in a car delivering the papers. Now datz progress.
Sounds like a modern remake is in order! ;)
Snowboarding down the mountain on a corpse is the coolest thing I've ever seen in a NES game.
I know right?!
There are however originally Gameboy games that I wish have its NES conversion port.
Zelda Link's awakening, Final Fantasy Legend 2 & 3.
But we have settles using the Super Gameboy adapter for the SNES instead.
Yes! Those games even if they looked like NES Aladdin would still be way fun on the Nintendo :)
I have a hunch Bram Stoker's Dracula was actually an NES to GB port, or at least the music was - the source code for both version's music is out there and it seems to suggest the music was written for the NES and then ported to the GB - the NES music source code is last dated November 1992 and the GB music is dated march 1993.
The Gameboy source also has a comment from the composer saying "THE AUDIO-NUMBERS ARE IDENTICAL TO THE 'DRACULA' 'SEGA MASTERSYSTEM' AND 'NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM' AUDIO-NUMBERS", Implying those were the original versions and the GB was a port
Huh that’s really interesting! Didn’t know there were notes like that for the audio.
Not really a fan of the Game boy
I would like to see conversions of game boy games to the NES such as Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly(yet to play this game)
I’ve never even heard of that one!
The Jungle Book 7/10
Pros: great game
Cons: no head shrinking and de-shrinking
That is a major con!
Great list, a little surprised Monopoly for the NES wasn't on here tho. The Gameboy version is nearly identical, same graphics and music, except some sounds are missing and the main track throughout the game is shorter. Strangely enough a GBC version was later reason and again it was identical to the GB version, only in color
I'll add it to the list!
Hey, maybe these GameBoy to NES conversions are just the old school style of shovelware.
When I was a kid I had NES and Game Gear. Still 2 of my favorites to collect for. But my reasoning for asking for Game Gear over GameBoy was that I wanted a portable NES. GG has games like Mega Man that are basically NES games. Fantastic Dizzy is another example.
If I could find a better way to record the footage I could do a TH-cam channel featuring GG as it is the largest part of my game collection, next to the completely uninteresting Xbox 360! Seriously, how did I end up with 500 Xbox 360 games? They're hardly worth selling.
I really love the Game Boy Advance because it feels like a portable SNES, maybe even a touch better. If only there was an NES equivalent!
You forgot to mention Jungle Book for NES/GB was also a Genesis/SNES de-make.
Whoops!
I’m sure you’ve seen or maybe mentioned and I overlooked, but I believe the Animaniacs gameboy game is the Genesis fits this similar category! They’re pretty 1-1 if I recall, while the SNES game is totally original!
Great video! Had no idea these ports were so close to each other, really wonder how they did that sometimes.
That's cool! If there was an NES Animaniacs I would add it to the list ;)
There was an innocence to these early games. Some sucked, some could be fun, all seem simple by today’s standard. But that’s the beauty to them.
Very true
Surprised this wasn’t talked about here, but Hello Kitty World was literally just an NES port of Balloon Kid with Hello Kitty as the main character. The music, being by Hip Tanaka, was also clearly ported the same as Dr Mario’s was because it uses the same percussion templates and other stuff between versions. Lastly, the one song brought over from Balloon Fight was replaced with the title song from the Nintendo World Champion cartridge loll. This game’s whole existence is so bizarre.
That game has come up a few times (not by me but by commenters). I definitely need to get to it at some point :)
That's funny how the console got some of its best and worst looking games at the end
Yeah it really threw me off at first!
I was thinking to myself that I was happy I'd never played Cliffhanger right up until you rode that fresh corpse down the incline...
It does make the game worth it!
Bram Stokers Dracula also was released on Sega CD. That version is a slow paced side scroller with seemless FMV bits when you complete a stage. It looks amazing but it's not that fun. The only reason I kept playing it back in the 90's is the graphics were so good I wanted to see the entire game.
I think it would be cool to look at some NES to Gameboy ports (Megaman, Duck Tales, Batman)
Megaman was not a direct NES Port. Alle the Gameboy Megaman games have always been some kind of mash-ups of different NES games. Like First GB title was a mashup of 1 and 2 of the NES, the second like 2 and 3 of the NES and so on...
That would be cool as I’m way less familiar with the Game Boy as I am the NES.
Seeing this video in 4:3 makes me feel like I went back in time to early youtube lol
Slightly acceptable since Sega was literally slapping Sega Master Systems roms onto Sega Game Gear Carts.
5:30 As soon as you said "jammin' soundtrack", I instantly realized that this was a Software Creations game; kind of meh graphics, weak gameplay, but Tim and Geoff Follin making the most out of the NES's soundchip.
They really knew how to spice up some mediocre games!
The NES Star Wars game. I had the GameBoy version growing up. Got the NES version way later in life. They're identical except for color.
I think that one may be a port of the NES game instead of the other way around, but maybe?
I love this topic for a video. I legit will never get sick of “push console x to it’s graphical limitz” vids all over TH-cam, but it was nice to see something new
Love those videos too :). And thanks!
2:35 is this where Avgn video game got the idea for the part where you kill Santa and ride his body down a hill
That's so awesome!
You could easily do this with Game Gear since some of the games are literally the same game as their Sega Master System counterparts.
Managing to make the en-ee-es colour pallet even worse is the worst crime committed here.
Wow, I thought I knew everything about the NES, but I was proven wrong. Well done, sir.
Hooray!
You can add hello kitty world to the list. It’s legit a colorized reskin of balloon kid. All the levels, music and everything are pretty much the same. The lead characters were reskinned with a few scenes in between levels redone with the hello kitty character
Wayne’s World, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and The Terminator we’re all developed by Radical Software. The same blocky graphics and short repetitive music plague all 3 games. The heads up display and status bars are identical just different colors.
Woof what a lineup
Jungle book has amazingly animated character, looks much better than 95% of NES square sprites even from good and later games, it stands out.
For sure, all the more reason why it surprised me to find the Gameboy connection!
It's amazing to know that the jungle book game on Nes was not a true nes title at all ! I had played it a long time ago and never knew
Me too!
The main reason why The Jungle book on Game boy is better then on the NES is that when you lower the difficuly, you only have to find 7 diamonds per stage instead of all 10 of them. I would never have been able to beat the game otherwise.
That would make it way more fun honestly.
That Indiana Jones coloring reminds me of how the game boy color would colorize gameboy games
Yeah for sure!