We Are Venom

The Super Game Boy is probably the coolest piece of video game hardware in existence.

It’s also probably the biggest wasted opportunity in video games.

It’s been pretty much entirely forgotten about now, because– as is pretty common with neat hardware made by Nintendo– very, VERY few games ever really took advantage of it at all. And it’s a shame, because the unique visual style of Super Game Boy-compatible games, in addition to just looking really neat, can teach a lot about effectively using colour in games. The ones that do work exist in a really bizarre stylistic place.

Games don’t look like this. They never have,1 and never will; unless you’re using a Super Game Boy.

So I’d like to take a few posts to look at a few noteworthy Super Game Boy compatible games, explain what they do, both from an artistic standpoint and a technical one, but trying to keep it straightforward as possible. I’m going to assume you probably know what one is, if only in the context of “that weird thing for the SNES that let you play GB games,” but haven’t given much thought as to what the hell it actually does.

So what the hell does it actually do?

If you’re playing a non-Super Game Boy compatible game, not much. It puts a border around the game (since the GB has a much smaller resolution than the SNES), and lets you worry about picking the colours. For a small handful of pre-SGB games, there are default palettes included, but they apply to the entire game.

If it’s a Super Game Boy-compatible game, however… well, it probably still didn’t do that much. The vast majority of SGB games simply threw in a custom border and called it a day. They don’t look particularly pretty, either.

But of course the thing is way more powerful than that. A small handful of games go above and beyond, and change the palette through the course of the game. And there’s a bunch of neat colourization techniques that let a well designed game go even further.

Okay, so explain this palette shit to me

The most important thing to understanding how the Super Game Boy works is to understand how palettes work. On game consoles, you don’t ever think of things in terms of individual colours. You think of them in terms of palettes.

The classical example of this is Super Mario Bros., for the NES. When he picks up a fire flower, the sprite doesn’t change; it’s the exact same image file on the cartridge. His suspenders aren’t ever “red,” they’re just colour 1. When it needs to change his colours, it swaps the palette, so colour 1 is now white instead of red.

So let’s break down what this means for a Super Game Boy game.

The border is stored on the cartridge, and used only by the SGB. It’s not subjected to any colour limitations other than the SNES’s. The inner screen is what matters.

The Game Boy is limited to a palette of four colours, which is exactly how many shades of grey2 the screen can render. So you can’t have a palette with more than four colours. You can change palettes as often as you want, but you can’t ever have more than four colours.

On the left is what it looks like on the Super Game Boy. On the right, the Game Boy Pocket. As you can see, the whole inner screen is drawn with a palette using four shades of red.

But, if you go outside…

It changes the palette to whatever is specifically designated. As opposed to Wario Land, wherein the whole game will be in that yellow-y orange, Super Game Boy games still have the restriction of a palette of four colours– since they’re still Game Boy games– but have control over what that palette will actually be.

It’s really important to understand that part before continuing. So this is what a Pokémon battle in Yellow looks like.

Wait a minute! That’s WAY the fuck more than four colours!

Here’s the neat thing about Super Game Boy palettes: they don’t have to apply to the entire screen (although they usually do). They can be applied specifically to a given region of the screen. There are, in fact, three seperate palettes being applied to the screen in that example image. Let me break it down.

(The region for the lifebars is too small to draw– it covers the rectangular coloured part of the lifebar, and nothing more. Edit: It’s not actually as small as I suggested. I’ve updated the diagram to correctly represent the real palette.3)

What happens is this: first, the Game Boy inside the Super Game Boy draws the inner screen like it would on a normal Game Boy screen. Then, the game sends special instructions to the Super Game Boy, which tells it to apply a palette to a certain screen area. The important thing is that this happens after everything has rendered; it’s literally just applying the palette to the rendered screen.

The update speed of this redrawing isn’t fast enough to just make it so a palette region surrounds any given sprite, so, say, individually colouring the player character on the map wouldn’t look good at all.

But still, there’s a lot you can do with just that. For example, if your screen doesn’t scroll vertically, you could colour the ground differently from the top of the sky. In a static screen– the Pokémon battle is an obvious example, but this also applies to, say, boss fights in action games– you could really go nuts.

There aren’t really many examples of actual creative uses of this technique, though. Especially since most Game Boy games were afraid of having anything but empty white backgrounds, because when you only have four colours, it’s difficult to have detailed backgrounds not blend in with the foreground. Mostly, people just used it to make fancy title screens, or colour lifebars differently in action games.

Yeah, way to really raise the bar there.

So what, did everything for the Super Game Boy just suck?

In the next few posts, I’d like to focus on the games that actually did push the bar, and use the crazy colour-pushing power of the Super Game Boy to do neat things. Four colours might not seem like that much, but there are a few– not many, but a few– that use that limit in amazing ways. The Super Game Boy could do more than just colourize, too; I’ll explain a bit more about its other capabilities later. I’ll definitely be taking a look at Donkey Kong ‘94, Kirby’s Dreamland 2, and Space Invaders, as well as some of the few other noteworthy SGB games.

Next up: fighting games on the Super Game Boy.

It’s completely unique: nothing has ever had a resolution as high as the Game Boy’s and shared the same palette imitations. In consoles, increases in resolution also coincided with sprites getting lots of colours. Super Game Boy games are detailed, but don’t have the luxury of using anything but extremely minimalistic colour use. It’s not an exaggeration; it really is completely unprecedented, and remains so to this day. ↩︎

Or if running on an original Game Boy, four different hideous shades of yellow. ↩︎

When I say that the Super Game Boy was great for fighting games, I don’t want you to make the mistake of assuming that I mean these are great games. They’re not. Game Boy fighting games have traditionally suffered from several major problems: confusing visuals after having been ported from arcade games, impossible controls that you need a real joystick to input consistently, and multiplayer being bloody unfeasible.

Unfortunately, not even the magic of the Super Game Boy can make the controls reliable. Hence the mediocrity.

But what it could do was make the multiplayer beautifully simple.

Wait, why was multiplayer ever a problem?

From the very start, the Game Boy was always ostensibly multiplayer capable. It was also always an extraordinary pain in the ass. First, you needed to get a link cable. Then, you needed to convince a sucker friend that, no, really, this game is totally worth spending $40! on, since multiplayer requires the second player to also have a cartridge. Then you needed to keep within two feet of your friend while you struggle to get the connection working. In practice, that last part wasn’t a problem, because you’d never actually get past the part where you both need to own copies of the game.1

So that’s kind of a pain in the ass.

But with certain Super Game Boy games, you could do multiplayer with a single cartridge, like any other SNES game did– just plug in an extra controller. This obviously wouldn’t work for games like Pokémon,2 but it’s perfect for Bomberman or fighting games.

Let’s talk about World Heroes 2 Jet

The arcade game it’s based off is basically completely unremarkable in every way. Most of the colourization techniques should seem fairly obvious. For instance, the character select screen is far from monochromatic; there’s pretty clearly a lot of colour on there, making every character on it stand out. But let’s see what that breaks down to in terms of palettes:

I think that pretty much speaks for itself. Every character portrait uses one of those four, and the only variation is the single accent colour. It starts by giving you vibrant colours on the character select screen, which makes a strong impression; to contrast, however, the game itself looks like this:

You can see how this screen breaks down. At the top, the lifebars are a single colourization region. At the bottom of the screen, there are three regions: one for the names/win indicators, and one for each portrait, which use the same palette as on the character select screen. And most noticeably, there’s the main part of the screen, which features a monochrome palette.

Each stage features a different palette for the main screen, but all of them are deliberately cooler, less vibrant palettes than what’s used for the character portraits.

Why is it so important that the portraits are vibrant?

The problem with having a completely monochrome screen is a fairly obvious one: you, wrongly, get the impression that all the characters are supposed to look like they have uniform colours. Or at least, you would, if not for the giant colourful portraits at the bottom, which serve as a constant reminder of what the characters actually look like.

As a result, the stage palette instead is used like dramatic lighting. You’d never confuse it for representing what the characters ordinarily are, thanks to those portraits. Instead, it’s very clearly just setting the stage’s atmosphere.

But wouldn’t it be even better with MORE colours?

For comparison, here’s the above stage, as it looks like on a Game Boy Pocket, and as it looks in the original arcade version, respectively.

The Super Game Boy version is a lot more atmospherically evocative. In black and white, the cave doesn’t make much of an impression on you at all. It’s just a dark cave. In the arcade version, it’s a dark cave, with a giant shiny pile of treasure in the middle that draws your eye away from everywhere else.

On a Super Game Boy, it’s more than just icy: it’s cold and dreary. The original rendition draws your attention towards a giant background detail, but the SGB rendition draws your attention towards a feeling. As a result, it’s a lot more visually compelling.

Okay, that’s all great, but wouldn’t mirror matches be really frigging confusing?

It’s obviously really difficult to distinguish two characters in a completely monochrome game apart. Here’s a screenshot from the absolutely atrocious Game Boy port of Street Fighter 2 that illustrates the problem, traditionally:

They’re identical! It turns out, the game is an unplayable piece of shit anyway; not being able to tell who’s who is actually the least of your concerns.

World Heroes 2 Jet gets around this problem in a really interesting way. Every character does, in fact, have an alternate colour scheme.

Holy shit! How does that work?

Here’s the trick: each character sprite only actually uses three out of the four colours. It’s actually one of the least ambiguous mirror matches I’ve ever seen; with the chaos and flashy colours and overwhelming colours common in arcade fighters, only having totally different character palette can– usually only for a second– leave you confused. It’s not a major problem or anything, but it’s non-existent in this case. There’s absolutely no way to forget who’s who: you’re either the light one in the foreground, or the dark one.

So that’s pretty neat.

Isn’t that just that game doesn’t have flashy specials? That shit’d never work for something as crazy as a KoF game!

King of Fighters ‘963 for the Game Boy has no right to be even worth talking about.

I mean, what the hell, right? King of Fighters is all about quick-paced 3v3 combat, features incredibly difficult movesets (the easy supers ask for two half circles in a row), flashy specials, and a giant cast.

You’ll never be able to pull off a super consistently without flinging yourself into the sky, and the cast is tiny, and the pace is all wrong, but it does deliver on the 3v3 combat,4 and more importantly, unlike the last game, doesn’t have monochrome graphics in fights.

Wait, how the fuck can an action game have non-monochromatic fights? What kind of technical witchcraft is this?

KoF '96 doesn’t do anything of any real technical innovation with its colourization. Its fight screens have four screen regions: the health bars, the main area, the top half of the super bars, and the bottom half (more on this in a bit). It’s just instead of monochrome palettes, its palettes all feature black, white, and two different hues.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what this colour relationship actually is. They’re not quite complementary, although they’re certainly a few steps removed from it. I asked my art student friend, but all he said was “There’s a word for that relationship too but no one knows it but color theory teachers.”

It’s really effective, though.

The characters are immediately set apart by their seperate colours, which is a really helpful trick in general, especially as a visual shorthand when the fireballs start flying.

For optimal distinction between the characters, they should have made the palettes use actual complementary colours: blue/orange, pink/green, yellow/purple. The point is, that because they exist as opposites on the colour wheel,5 complementary colours appear jump out when you put them next to each other. But it’s obvious why they didn’t do that. The two colours have to look very distinct when a single colour is applied to an otherwise mostly white sprite, but at the same time, go together when used in the background.

It’s a remarkably clever use of colour, and you don’t really see palettes like this in video games ever, for any reason, because anything else can just colourize sprites seperately, and would never have to try.

It’s great for mirror matches, too, although as you can see, it doesn’t quite work for characters that are mostly white.

Isn’t that like, an insane amount of work for a Super Game Boy release of a shitty port of an arcade game?

It seems completely inexplicable why these two games look so good. They don’t really play well or anything. They’re pretty exceptional as far as Game Boy fighters go– ask anyone who had the misfortune of owning a Game Boy Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat– but that’s not exactly saying something. I can only assume that, realizing that the only reason why people play fighters is for multiplayer, and nobody having ever made a Game Boy fighting game that you could ever convince a friend to drop $40 on, they had to make it seem worthwhile using other means.

While with even most of the best SGB games, the Super Game Boy mode is was put in as an afterthought, you can actually tell that KoF '96 was designed around it.

In arcade KoF games (in certain modes), when the the meter at the bottom reaches full, the bar starts to flash, drains rapidly, and changes colours. Given the way Super Game Boy colourization works, the problem with that seems obvious: in order to make it work like the Pokémon life bar, you’d have to simplify the hell out the design. But what they actually did is a lot more clever.

This wasn’t just thrown in as an afterthought. This was figured out while the UI was still being designed; which is still fairly late in development, but not that late.

So what, are you saying it looks perfect?

I don’t want to give the impression that there aren’t problems. This, for example, is something that happens a lot. Like, all the friggin’ time, in fact. Both games do it: it’s not terribly uncommon for stuff to fly into the life bar area and get miscolourized.6

Still, unbelievably, these things that should just be unnoteworthy mediocre ports are games that actually use colour in an incredibly clever way. I’d even hazard to say that they use it better than basically any arcade fighter ever did. I’m not recommending these as high quality games, but as lessons in colour design in video games, they’re frankly rather amazing. When I talk about taking advantage of colour restrictions for effect, I’m talking about things like this. You can do a lot with four colours.

Next up: the flagship of the Super Game Boy, Donkey Kong '94.

Pokémon, obviously, changed all this, by virtue of everyone on the face of the Earth owning a copy. Later, with the Game Boy Advance, the link cable could be used to download executable code, meaning one-cartridge multiplayer was possible with a number of games. ↩︎

Unless you owned the Japanese exclusive Super Game Boy 2, which had an expansion port on the side. ↩︎

It actually was released in English– only in Europe– as “King of Fighters: Heat of Battle,” but I can’t actually find it, so instead I’m working with the Japanese version. Given that it’s a fighting game, there is not exactly a lot that’s lost without translation. ↩︎

In 2000, the PSX port of Marvel vs Capcom couldn’t do 2v2 tag battles because of memory constraints. In 1997, the Game Boy port of King of Fighters '97 had standard 3v3 fights. This is basically comparing apples to oranges. Hilariously pathetic apples to oranges. ↩︎

The colour wheel should be familiar to anyone who took a high school art class, but it turns out, complementary relationships aren’t really as simple as I’m presenting them to be. It depends on what wheel you use. ↩︎

It turns out, in the first entry, I actually made a mistake about the way Pokémon draws lifebars. I’ve since edited it accordingly with a more accurate explanation.1

Anyway, let’s talk about both the pinnacle and nadir of the Super Game Boy: Donkey Kong.

What the hell’s going on in this image?!

Donkey Kong Land was released in 1995 as a direct follow up to Donkey Kong Country. It’s basically a complete fucking travesty. I’m including it here because it is hands down the ugliest game with Super Game Boy functionality, and it shows exactly how easy it is for Game Boy art to go completely, and utterly wrong.

The problem should be fairly obvious: all the details run completely together. There’s no careful balance of light colours and colours, no borders, and as a result the foreground characters frequently blend into the background. It’s honestly not even that much better in motion. You’d certainly never be able to figure out what any of the sprites are supposed to represent if you’ve never played Donkey Kong Country.

Even when it’s colourizing static screens, it looks awful. It turns out, you can’t just take pre-existing art resources, slap colours on them, and expect them to look like anything but absolute rubbish:

The worst thing is that while the art is clearly not hand-crafted for the Game Boy, this title screen was actually modified with the Super Game Boy in mind. There’s some small things that give it away: the giant shadows around the brown parts of DK are to accomodate the palette changing from the brown one to the blue one.

Alright, so what’s the Super Game Boy’s pinnacle?

The reason why I’m showing you how things can go completely wrong is because I’d now like to show you a game where everything went absolutely right: Donkey Kong ‘94.

DK'94 was the very first2 game released with Super Game Boy functionality, and because it was used specifically to promote it, a lot of work went into making it look impressive on it. A lot.

It got a sequel exactly a decade later in the form of Mario vs Donkey Kong for the Game Boy Advance. It’s also one of the greatest action/puzzle games ever, so if you haven’t played it, stop right now, and go do so. It’s amazing, and I’m going to give away some of the surprises. No, seriously: go.

The game starts off by tricking you into thinking it’s actually just another version of the arcade game. The first four levels are right from the original, and are just as sparse for detail as they were originally, including the empty backgrounds. Between levels, it shows the arcade’s equally familiar stacked Donkey Kongs:

When you finish the fourth level, like normal, you end up happily with Pauline… then Donkey Kong gets back up, grabs her and runs off, and then the game begins in earnest, changing to puzzle-based gameplay. After a short cutscene, you’re shown the new inter-level screen: a world map. It does a pretty great job at showing just how different the rest of the game’s going to be.

That’s pretty colourful, but why does that matter?

Honestly, this transition wouldn’t work half as well in black and white. The sudden use of colourful detail like this is shocking after having experienced the earlier pretty standard minimalism. Before, the colours were segregated into their own sections, but here, it’s used to sell the busyness of the city; the blue, gray, and red are all mixed together. We’ll get to how this was done technically in a minute, but it’s not just the world map that’s newly detailed.

The levels also have backgrounds now; as you can see, background elements are separated from the foreground by never using black in the background. Darker elements are always in the front.

There’s one more thing about the in-level palettes, though: only one hue ever actually significantly changes. Here’s what those palettes look like.

But why would you always keep one colour the same? Isn’t that limiting?

The main colour of the level is that third one. The other three colours are adjusted slightly to go with it; in the purple city levels, for instance, you can see that the black is actually a dark blue. That’s neat, of course, but what’s more significant about this is that the second colour is always that sort of light salmon-y red.

What this means is that while each of the levels has its own unique colour scheme, Mario never changes. Unlike in the monochrome examples, where the character’s colour is based off whatever world they’re in, Mario always looks the same; it’s the level that changes around him. DK'94 does a great job at never making it particularly obvious that the game is restricted to four colours.

What’s the deal with all these static screens?

Donkey Kong '94 has a lot of static screens. Every four levels, there’s a cutscene introducing a new mechanic. Every time you finish a level, you go back to the world map. And if you collect all three items in a level, you get one of a couple possible bonus screens for extra 1ups. You only have 200 seconds to clear a level, and playing blindly, most only actually take about a minute. If you die, you get booted back to the world map.

That is to say, you only usually spend about a minute on a level, which has a restricted palette, before being given a static screen. As a result, these common, colourful static screens make a very strong impression on the player. This was probably a deliberate move on the part of Nintendo to oversell just how colourful Super Game Boy games could be, and it does work.

Here’s another colourful world map, and it mixes it up even moreso.

But… look at the lake! And the cliff! How can you colour that with rectangular regions? Could it also colourize per-pixel?!

What makes this impressive (and what made me realize my earlier mistake) is that the colourization regions aren’t, in fact, per-pixel. The Super Game Boy just isn’t capable of having that kind of precision. This one confused the hell out of me; I had to dig into the Nintendo Game Boy programming guide to figure out what’s going on in this screen.

As it turns out, the answer is simple. The smallest area that the Super Game Boy can apply a palette to is 8x8. Here’s what that world map looks like, with an 8 pixel grid applied:

So you can see for yourself how that works. Normally it doesn’t look like it’s using rectangular regions, but the cliffs never actually touch the edge of the forest. It impressively uses shadows to mask that, even adding a single stray brown pixel in the upper row to complete the illusion.

And the lake is even simpler: it shares a colour with the green palette. By doing this, they also ensure that the sky and the lake look lighter than the grass when it’s in black and white mode, too.

This sort of colourization wasn’t ever common in Super Game Boy games. It’s pretty much only Donkey Kong '94 that went that far.

The goal of DK'94 was probably to set the bar for Super Game Boy colourization high, but as I’ve shown, it requires a lot of deliberate design work in order to make happen. The Donkey Kong Land approach, meanwhile, is a lot more typical; it’s probably the best example of what you get when you don’t have the art resources be specifically designed for colourization.

Next up: other various action-platformers, and putting an SNES game on a Game Boy cart.

Specifically, I said that the lifebar changes colours, and that it only colourizes a 2 pixel tall area. The latter is impossible– the Super Game Boy can only colourize in 8 pixel increments, which is actually somewhat important. What Pokémon actually does is change the lifebar’s palette. There’s a noticeable delay when it does this. ↩︎

Now let’s talk about what the Super Game Boy could have done, but didn’t.

While it was certainly the primary feature that it was marketed with, the Super Game Boy could do more than just colourize. On top of the single cartridge multiplayer mentioned previously, it had several ways that it could take advantage of the Super Nintendo’s far superior hardware.

But let me guess– nothing ever did?

The most prominent of which was the ability to play music or sound samples using the Super Nintendo hardware, which had significantly more sophisticated audio hardware. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because frankly, it’s a little bit out of my area of expertise. But I’ll provide a fairly obvious example from one of the dozen or so games that did provide Super Game Boy-specific music: Animaniacs.

For your comparison, the title menu music, as heard on a Game Boy:

And the title menu music as heard on a Super Game Boy:1

Animaniacs actually has a complete Super Game Boy soundtrack, which is fairly unusual. More common were just including voice samples– as Donkey Kong ‘94 did, for example.

Why didn’t more games do that?

Because cartridge space was at a premium. Donkey Kong '94, for instance, uses a 4-megabit (or 512 kilobyte) cartridge.2 Larger cartridges were more expensive, and that’s not a lot of space to work with. Fitting two seperate soundtracks, one much larger than a normal Game Boy soundtrack would be, doesn’t come at an insignificant cost.

Another thing that doesn’t come at an insignificant cost: actually composing new music for the SNES. Animaniacs is a port of a Genesis game, so the higher quality sound already existed.3 If DK'94 had included SNES music for the whole game, not only would it have taken up much more space on the cartridge, but it would’ve needed entirely new renditions to be done, rather than being able to get away with modifying original console music.

More impressive than using the Super Nintendo’s hardware for music, however, is using it for graphics. Theoretically, the Super Game Boy had insane amounts of potential available in what’s called OBJ4 mode.5

OBJ mode works in the same way that the borders do. It takes bitmap data (ie, sprites), and instead of drawing them to the pre-colourized Game Boy video memory, it draws them into the SNES’s video memory.

In case that doesn’t make much sense, here’s essentially how the Super Game Boy renders things: 1. The background layer is drawn to the Game Boy’s video memory. 2. The sprite layer is drawn to the Game Boy’s video memory. 3. The Game Boy’s memory is drawn onto the center of the Super Nintendo’s video memory. 4. The screen is colourized. 5. All SNES graphics, including the border, are drawn to the Super Nintendo’s video memory.

In simple terms: remember what I said about the Super Game Boy being unable to individually colour sprites? That wasn’t actually true. Using OBJ mode, independantly coloured sprites can be drawn on top of everything else.

Amazing! So what games actually took advantage of this crazy magic?

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one game that’s actually used it: Mario’s Picross.

And if you think that’s disappointing, wait until you find out what it was used for!

Most Super Game Boy games that considered colourization important6 simply locked out the user from setting custom palettes. Mario’s Picross doesn’t. This is what happens when you change the palette:

Yes, that’s right. Mario’s Picross uses OBJ mode, the mostly unused amazing superpowers of the Super Game Boy, with the power to completely bypass the colourization restrictions, to prevent the player from recolouring the logo on the title screen.

Seriously.

This is the only documented use of it.

Okay, so are there any other insane things you could do with the Super Game Boy that took advantage of the SNES?

There’s one other crazy thing, that only a single Super Game Boy game ever did. Here’s what Space Invaders looks like normally,7 in “Super Game Boy mode”:

In order to mimick an actual Space Invaders machine, it uses the colourization in the same way that a real Space Invaders machine used colourized cellophane overlays. Now, here’s “Arcade mode”:

How the fuck does the Super Game Boy do THAT?!

The effect here is completely impossible on a Super Game Boy game, plain and simple. Take note of the resolution, the transparencies, and the massive palette.

Space Invaders actually has an entirely seperate SNES game on the cartridge. Arcade mode loads that game into the Super Nintendo’s memory, and then it runs like any other Super Nintendo game; once it’s loaded, it bypasses the Super Game Boy completely.

It’s the only game that ever did this, and it’s fairly obvious why: it requires the development of an entirely separate game. Since the SNES and Game Boy are completely different architectures,8 and obviously radically different hardware-wise, they couldn’t even share any code.9 Not only is this insane for development, but it obviously would take up a lot of room on a cartridge where space is at a premium. It makes sense that the only game that did it was one that was incredibly simple.

What should be apparent, though, is that the Super Game Boy was a lot more powerful than most assumed it to be. In the next and last post, I’m going to look at how it might’ve been used to its full potential, and talk about why it failed.

Next up: Kirby’s Dreamland 2.

And only on a Super Game Boy. While modern Game Boy emulators have no problem with screen borders or colourization, none have implemented any other Super Game Boy functions. Currently, only BSNES is capable of emulating the Super Game Boy completely, but it’s very resource intensive. ↩︎

See Mario Wiki. ↩︎

The Super Game Boy version’s title screen is an entirely original composition. The rest of the game’s music, as far as I can tell, is translated from the Genesis version; although there are obviously some discrepancies, since SNES has very different audio hardware. I don’t know enough about old console audio systems to go into more detail here. ↩︎

Refering to how the SNES handles graphics: there are several BG layers, for background components, plus a single OBJ layer, for sprites. ↩︎

The painfully technical details. ↩︎

And, for no apparent reason, the haphazardly colourized second two Donkey Kong Land games. ↩︎

It actually gives you several options for colourization: black and white, “colour” (pictured), and “cellophane”, which makes the colourization region borders more pronounced, to add realism. ↩︎

The SNES using some insane Nintendo custom processor something fairly obscure, and the Game Boy using the ubiquitous Zilog Z80. ↩︎

The story of the Super Game Boy ends tragically.

Kirby’s Dream Land 2 isn’t particularly exceptional. I’m rather fond of it,1 and playing it in SGB mode is what inspired this whole series, but all in all, it’s a fairly disappointing sequel to Kirby’s Adventure that doesn’t quite capture the magic, and has an almost completely standard use of monochrome palettes. Nevertheless, for the most part, its colourization works very well.

Every level gets its own palette, which the game mostly sticks to (although it does mix them up occassionally, especially in boss rooms). It especially works well for Kirby, since his sprite is mostly white; meaning the screen colouring largely only affects his shading.

What about the colourization of static screens?

But what’s really cool about each level getting a unique palette is that this also transfers to the level select screen. All the unselected islands just get coloured like the rest of the background, but the selected one is shown with its level’s palette. It’s not technically a static screen, it’s just that it only applies the colourization when the screen scrolling has finished.

So that’s neat.

Of course, the menus are all super-colourful too, but what’s more impressive is that at the start of each level, you get a short cutscene featuring Kirby’s friends, which take advantage of the fact that they’re static to use multiple palettes for the terrain. It’s simple, and pretty obvious how it’s done, but it’s nevertheless a pretty dramatic effect.

It’s pretty similar to Donkey Kong ‘94’s colourful worldmaps: they leave a strong impression even afterwards, and after about twenty minutes you go the next level and get another one.

So where’s the disappointment?

As you go through the last couple levels, it becomes clear that the game’s palletes are building up to something. You go from bright colours to cold blue, then stark red, and then finally, the last level is a deep purple.

Dramatically, this continuity works really well. You can tell that things are getting darker as you go along. The penultimate boss, Dedede, has a sinister pink palette, which works great for the storm clouds in the sky.

Immediately after this, Kirby will fly off into the sky, chasing Dark Matter. It’s obvious that it’s building up to something dramatic for that final boss fight. In the prior Kirby game, Kirby’s Adventure for the NES, the final boss stage is absolutely beautiful, bombarding you with rapidly changing dark psychadelic colours.

What crazy colourization DOES it use? What’s this all building up to?!

Absolutely nothing.

Are you fucking serious?

The final fight with Dark Matter is entirely in a grayscale monochrome. That’s what the game’s awesome colourization has been building up to: absolutely nothing.2

That’s what Kirby’s Dream Land 2 is all about: disappointment. It does a lot that’s neat, but it doesn’t really ever go far enough to be actually amazing. There’s simple wasted opportunities left and right.

What could it have done differently, then?

I don’t want to be an asshole here; what I’m going to get to in a little bit is why HAL, and every other Game Boy developer, didn’t go to great lengths to do anything amazing with the SGB. There is good reason and I sure don’t fault them for it.

Nevertheless, now that we understand pretty well what the Super Game Boy can do, I’d like to apply that to a few parts of Kirby’s Dream Land 2. The colours may be a bit off,3 and ultimately, I’m not really an artist. I’d just like to inspire your imagination with a few mock-ups.

First off, only one of the boss fights has a scrolling screen in the entire game. So what if we did the same thing to the terrain that the cutscenes do, and colourize the terrain differently?

We could also swap palettes for dramatic effect in the same way that the level select screen does, during fights. The sky lightens and darkens during the fight between Mr. Shine and Mr. Bright. But what if it also changed palettes?4

With Dark Matter, there’s a lot that could be done. If you wanted to be really dramatic, you could include a different background and just gradually shift the palette darker. Or you could use OBJ mode to draw Kirby and Dark Matter different colours.

But even if you didn’t do either of those things, you could still go crazy with the colours.

What I’m trying to get at here is that there’s a lot of unused potential here.

You said there was a good reason! What the fuck could that possibly be?

The sad truth of the matter is that nobody was willing to spend a lot of time or money on doing Super Game Boy work, other than the flagship Donkey Kong '94. Most, they just didn’t bother. There’s a few5 other good looking games that I haven’t had the chance to mention. But not many.

The purpose of the thing always seemed kind of unclear. The selling point of the Game Boy was always its portability, and the Super Game Boy obviously runs contrary to that. People got the impression that all it could do was apply a single palette to the entire screen, because that’s all it could do with pre-Super Game Boy games. Nintendo didn’t help this impression at all by suggesting that players change palettes manually in games like Metroid II. And it didn’t sell terribly well initially.

This basically turned into a feedback loop. Nobody bought an SGB because nobody knew that the SGB could do anything neat because few games did anything neat because too few people bought an SGB to make it worth spending a lot of money on. So everyone associated it with shitty colourization and nothing else, and therefore didn’t buy one.

Nintendo learned a pretty valuable lesson when the Game Boy Color came. The official developer’s manual6 says that Game Boy Color developers had to specifically prove that their games fully took advantage of the system’s colour capabilities, with a strict set of guidelines: Differentiation, simulteneous colour use, appropriateness of colour use, variety of colour, and contrast/saturation. You can tell that Nintendo specifically had the failure of the Super Game Boy in mind when they wrote the section on differentiation:

>Differentiation - If a game is to be considered CGB-compatible, then it must appear significantly more colorful than a monochrome Game Boy game when “colorized” by the CGB hardware.7

Long story short; they were serious about making sure developers took advantage of everything available because they didn’t with the Super Game Boy.

Now, imagine you’re a Game Boy developer. You want to add the bullet point “Super Game Boy compatible!” to your box, because it’ll help sell a few more copies. But not many people own one. If you want to do something really neat, it’ll add entire days to the project, require changing some art resources, and doing extra testing on a completely different system. Going that extra distance is going to cost a lot of money, and won’t help that much because most people don’t own an SGB to see it. What are you going to say?

Man, fuck the Super Game Boy!

Exactly.

Being both the first video games I ever bought with my allowance and one of the first games I ever beat as a child, it holds a pretty special place in my heart. I enjoy it a lot, and the fact that it’s objectively pretty mediocre will never change that. I am pretty biased here, but I think I can look past that. ↩︎

Also, it’s painfully difficult and not at all fun, but that’s not the Super Game Boy’s fault. ↩︎

Specifically, I didn’t make the palettes strictly line up with what’s available on the Super Game Boy; that would be really difficult with the tools I have available. But all the palettes I’ve used are close enough to what’s available that I don’t feel there’s anything misleading here. ↩︎

For both fights, I’m using background data that’s already available on the cartridge; just with a different palette applied. ↩︎

I regret not being able to figure out how to fit in Mega Man V into this. It looks really great, but not because of any techniques that DK'94 doesn’t do better. ↩︎

GameBoy Programming Manual. ↩︎

[Was inspired by a Tumblr friend to write this story.]

We made out in the Uber on the way to my place from our first date: dinner, swing dancing, wine, and a little grab-ass when we thought no one was looking. We barely made it through the door to my apartment without your pinning me to the door and ravaging me in front of the neighbors. But we make it inside and skip the tour: my bed is the only stop either of us is interested in.

I sit next to you and, even though we just spent a 30 minute drive making out – come to think of it…it shouldn’t have taken that long to get here…was our driver enjoying the show? – well, after all that, I still start by looking deeply into your eyes with my hands on either side of your face and pressing my lips gently to yours. Our hunger takes over once again, and your hands begin to wander across my body. But I grab them in mine and hold them behind your back.

As I break our kiss, your mouth strains to reclaim mine, but I’ve begun to make my way down to your neck. Then to your collarbone. Then I release your hands and put my own at the bottom of your top and search your eyes for permission to remove it. My answer comes in a half-feral grunt and an emphatic nod. And so I pull your top up and our mouths reconnect for a moment while I remove your bra, before I begin the journey back down.

Slowly.

Teasingly and tantalizingly slowly.

But once I’ve kissed down your sternum, I take one breast in my warm hand as I lavish the other with firm, wet licks from my tongue and gentle sucks from my hungry mouth.

I switch back and forth between them as I feel you straining for more, writhing in eagerness for what is to come.

I kiss my way back up your sternum. To your collarbone. To your neck. To your earlobe. And finally to your mouth. My hands play with the waistband of your bottoms, teasing them down as I begin my journey back down your body, leaving even more kisses everywhere, worshiping you. I pull your bottoms and panties down, carefully unrwapping this gift from the gods without stopping my kissing pilgrimage down your body.

I stop at the mound of your pussy and reverse course. Your hands snap to my shoulders and push them down in frustration. My own hand finds your right nipple and begins to brush it. You lose your grip on my shoulders and I tease my way back up your body, a wicked grin on my face.

As my tongue flicks your nipple, my hands start to caress your thighs. As as I work my way down the path of kisses I’ve created so thoroughly, my hands move slowly up your thighs until they almost meet at your dripping wet pussy.

You spread your legs wider as my hands move up and as my mouth approaches your eager sex. And as you feel my breath, hot with desire against your pouting lips, my head turns to the side and plants a kiss on your inner thigh.

And then the other.

And while I did that, my hand slides up to your pussy and spreads your lips wide.

And then I take my first taste.

Long, slow, broad licks with my whole tongue, alternated with zig-zags across your lips, avoiding your clit for the moment. But as I sense you are ready, I suck gently on your clit and slide just one finger inside you. Your warmth is overwhelming. I bring you to the first of what I hope will be many orgasms this evening.

Sated for the moment, if only slightly, you begin the task of undressing me. While you unbutton my shirt, we kiss, and you can taste your essence on my tongue. Finally shed of my clothes as well, we embrace, finally feeling each other’s warmth without barrier.

As hard as it is to break away from our first uninhibited embrace, you want to feel and see my rigid cock for the first time, so you muster the strength to pull away from my kiss. Your hands slide down my chest to my tummy to my pelvis, with none of the patience I’ve just shown. You feel it radiating heat before you actually touch my cock, which is straining for attention and leaking precum.

You stare for a second, taking it in, before your own sodden and swollen sex reminds you what you’re after. Your hand grasps the base of it and you extend your tongue for a taste of the pearl of clear fluid just emerging from the tip of my uncut cock.

Your eyes find mine as your prepare to take the head into your warm mouth. I nod. My hand grips your shoulder ever so slightly.

And as you close your mouth over it, you lost my eyes, which have rolled back with the rest of my head. My grip on your shoulder tightens perceptibly. You take only a few short treks up and down my shaft before I pull you back up to eye level and whisper in your hear that you can have more of that later.

“First, I need you to put our first child inside you,” I whisper hotly into your ear, my voice ragged with desire and need.

I feel you shudder as you comprehend my words and my hands grasp your hips, both to steady you and to claim you. I take my place atop you once again as I pull my hands up the sides of your torso to your underarms and then up your arms, extending them above your head as we kiss madly. Each of my hands finds its partner at the end of your arms and grasps tightly, fingers intertwining.

I bring all our hands together just above your head. Our kisses continue, and your hips gyrate madly under mine, straining now for what I’ve promised.

I free one of my hands and leave the other holding both your wrists against the mattress. The free hand finds your left nipple. As you arch your back in response to this newest stimulus, I thrust my hips toward you, dragging my cock against your aching mound.

Unsure which direction to push toward, my hand or my cock, you are left to buck wildly under me, whimpering and desperate for me to finally push into you.

I linger here for an exquisite moment, my mouth on yours, enjoying the control I’m about to so thoroughly lose. For as soon as I slip inside you, I know I’ll lose myself to you. But for the moment, I revel in it.

I break our kiss and pin down your hips with mine, my cock resting against your mound. My eyes find yours. Hunger and passion and desire have given mine a fierce glow.

“Tell me what you want,” I demand. My voice shaking from the anticipation.

“You,” you reply.

“And?”

Your hips adjust under me, trying to coax me inside. “Your cock. I want your cock.”

“Why?”

My mouth nibbles your ear lobe before you can reply, sending a small shock-wave through you.

“Fuck!” you shout. “Because I’m ready to be the mother of your children. Because I need to be. Because if you don’t put a baby in me right now I’m going to pin you down and take it myself.”

“Maybe the next one,” I say as I shift my body down and allow my cock to rest just at the entrance to your pussy. I can feel your warmth. Your slickness. You’re ready. The trail of precum I’ve left along your mound is evidence of my own eagerness.

My free hand returns to the hands above your head. We intertwine fingers again and I push both hands into the mattress. 

“Oh god, fucking take me!” I hear you growl, in a voice I’ve never heard before.

The reaction of my body is immediate and involuntary. My hips thrust forward and the head of my cock finally finds its way into your passage.

The heat generated by this moment is satisfying. We both lose some of the tension that has built up in our muscles. But as the tension dissipates, we lose none of the drive. Your body has eased the path for my invading cock to make its way toward your pouting and hungry cervix.

As I bury myself entirely inside you, my balls press up against you, and you know that I’m all the way in. Your mouth reaches for mine.

I kiss back, but this kiss is unlike the others we’ve shared to this point. It is as though I might devour you with this kiss. And as we kiss my hips start to find a rhythm pumping into you. Staccato. Hard. Fast. Purposeful. Each one punctuated with a grinding of my hips against you, as though I were trying to push my entire being inside you.

My kiss has become ravenous. I find your breasts with my mouth as I continue to thrust into you.

“Oh God, I’m gonna cum!” you shout. I only growl in response, redoubling my thrusts. You’re meeting each with your own, pushing back against me.

As I feel your pussy clench around my cock, you exclaim, “Aah! I’m cumming!” And that sends me into a blinding orgasm. 

My hips stop thrusting with my cock buried as far as it’s ever been inside you. 

My red-hot cum shoots straight at your cervix. 

Your spasms drink in my sperm, assuring that one of them will find its target.

We stay like this for what feels like forever. Shaking and panting and cumming.

When I’ve regained my senses, I grab a pillow from the bed and place it under your hips. Elevating you to make sure none of my cum is wasted.

Peach - Seduction