The third dimension was an enormous hurdle for video games. It took years, arguably more than a decade, and as 3D was slowly nailed down, there were those beautifully ambitious attempts to bring it to smaller consoles. We've talked every GBA FPS and many 3D GBA games, we've seen how developers have pulled off some truly amazing achievements on extremely limited hardware, but now it's time we go back even further and talk 3D Game Boy and Game Boy Color games! This is Punching Weight, a celebration of the weird, ambitious and unnecessary, and it's time to talk about truly some of the most technologically impressive games to ever grace a Nintendo handheld! We begin with the original Game Boy's sole first-person shooter: Faceball 2000! If you're not familiar with this game, Faceball 2000 is about as rudimentary an FPS could possibly be, but look at this! It's a 3D FPS on the Game Boy! You and your enemies are essentially floating emojis with Nerf guns. It's an extremely slow-moving game, barely one step above an interactive Windows 95 screensaver, though it did predict the future of FPS's with regenerating health! The object of the single-player campaign is to find and touch the blinking wall in each mazelike level, of which there are 70! The later levels do pose incredible challenges. However, that mostly stems from the inability to move and shoot with any real dexterity. It's nothing to get too excited about. The real highlight, however, is the Arena mode, a.k.a. multiplayer deathmatch, where you can have up to eight computer-controlled bots - not two, not four, EIGHT! This puts Faceball 2000 for the Game Boy on the same level as Perfect Dark! The best is loading it up with eight bots, going to the arena with no walls, and then watching the game try and render it all! This actually outdoes the Super Nintendo port of Faceball, which only let you have six bots in multiplayer. [scoffs] Faceball 2000 was developed by Xanth Software F/X, and released in 1991, meaning it came out relatively early in the Game Boy's lifespan, making it all the more impressive! It is actually a port of 1987's MIDI Maze for the Atari ST, which was notable for being one of the first PC games with a multiplayer deathmatch mode. But here's the kicker - and if you're already familiar with this game, then you know where I'm going: Faceball 2000 for the Game Boy apparently has 16-player Link Cable arena deathmatch, and that is not some wild rumor, it's right there on the damn box! But Nintendo only ever released a four-player adapter for the Game Boy, meaning that Xanth Software or publisher Bullet Proof Software would've needed to release their own proprietary cable. Now, this never happened, probably due to costs or because it's a really dumb idea. But the question still lingers! ... which side do I put this on? There we go. Has anyone ever linked together 16 Game Boys and 16 copies of Faceball 2000? And actually? We're not sure! In 2018, the fine folks at Retronauts had a Faceball meeup with fans at a couple conventions, but both times it was a bust. However, we did find evidence of a bonkers multiplayer game of Faceball that went down in 2008. The lunatic/hero in question would be UncleBob from the Nintendo World Report Forums. If you travel in these retro waters, you might have heard of UncleBob before: Some of his archival and research work was actually really helpful to us in our video on the Nintendo GBA e-Reader. Anyway, UncleBob was able to daisy-chain various generations of Game Boy systems together, using GBA Link Cables, and played a nine-player game. We haven't seen it running ourselves, so we can't really confirm it, but I don't have much reason to doubt UncleBob, who walked me through how they did it, so as far as I can tell, the 16-player does work! Still, it requires an incredible amount of harware, so then, what about emulation? Well, I haven't been able to find anyone successfully emulating more than four players, as you can see demonstrated here by Shonumi, who does some fantastic work on Edge of Emulation. We're gonna put links to all this in the description, by the way, it is QUITE the rabbit hole! Faceball 2000 on the Game Boy is noteworthy for two reasons: 1: It exists. 2: It is theoretically possible to grab 15 friends and take friendship to once-unfathomable heights! However, definitive proof of such a thing still has not yet been documented, and until such documentation materializes, I'm afraid this case remains open. So get out there, you lunatics! And invite me. I wanna play! I'll play Faceball with you, I got stuff! I'm a cool kid! I'm cool. The racing genre is often where ground is broken in graphics, and early 3D was no different! One of the first 3D polygonal games ever was Hard Drivin' for the arcades and by some miracle, the sequel, Race Drivin', found its way to the Game Boy in 1993, LOOK! Lookit those big, chunky polygons! Look at that framerate drop as you drive through a tunnel! Aw man, jumps, loop-de-loops, huge ramps... I've never been this excited to see elevation change in a game! Race Drivin' is full 3D on the original Game Boy, and it! Is! Glorious! Sometimes when you see a game pushing the boundaries of graphics this hard, you'd expect it to come at the cost of actual gameplay, but that's not totally the case here! Race Drivin' has three different tracks, four cars, and at first I found it extremely difficult and frustrating. Look, ambitious graphics will only get you so far, even I have my limits. But after I switched to manual transmission, I actually started getting the hang of it! Changing gears to keep on the road and keep from flying off the track, after a couple o' tries, I found myself actually getting good at Race Drivin' for the Game Boy? The larger issue is that other than racing against the clock, there's just not really any other point to this game, it's just a high score challenge. Look, there are better racing games on the Game Boy, like the slew of racing games from Punching Weight hall-of-famers VD-Dev, nothing but bangers from those guys! But there are also worse 3D games out there too, like Bill Elliott's NASCAR Fast Tracks, which did come out a couple years before Race Drivin'. But I gotta give props to Bill Nassy's Trax for being basically Screen Tearing: The Video Game! Lookit those graphics! Look at that! Man, that is so cool! I mean, it's terrible, but so cool! Race Drivin' is more impressive, and just a much better game, and this shouldn't come as a surprise: This arcade port was developed by Argonaut Studios, who'd already done impressive things on the Game Boy, like the extremely obscure Days of Thunder, based on the Tom Cruise movie. - "Yeah, well, that son of a bitch just slammed into me!" - "No, he didn't slam into you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you." "He rubbed you, and rubbing, son, is racing." DEREK: I actually don't have that much to say about this one, because its graphics are actually very similar to another Argonaut game, one that might genuinely be one of the most graphically ambitious games that has ever been made: You cannot talk about Game Boy 3D without talking about X. Released in 1992, X is a full-3D first-person open-world action game where you pilot a tank that can also transform into a jet and fly. Let all that sink in! And I bet you're thinking "Right, well I bet it plays like garbage", and actually no, it doesn't! The point of the game is to roam around a big, open field, blast enemy tanks and drones and collect items before the time runs out. And it controls shockingly well! Your tank has such a solid weight and momentum, it feels appropriately chunky and powerful, and hitting jumps at top speed to take to the skies feels... more natural than it has any right to! However, the graphics are pretty abstract, I was just too dumb for some reason to realize that these are items you need to pick up, not the enemies transforming into other enemies... I dunno, my brain just turned off, I dunno. Levels are huge, and though your little tank can really punch it, it's a lot of land to cover before the time runs out, but this is why you have warp points! These let you travel across the map quickly, but you also have to dodge obstacles along the way. These little segments are probably where X shines the brightest graphically. How Argonaut managed to pull this off is nothing short of a miracle! The problem is that it was only released in Japan, and the tutorial is LONG, took me like a half-hour to get past it! I've no idea if this is because there's a whole bunch of story, or if they were just concerned people wouldn't understand how the 3D worked. It's kinda like how in Mario 64, they turned the camera into a Lakitu, because Nintendo was worried people wouldn't understand the concept of moving a camera in a 3D space! X is simple enough, though I understand why this would be a concern; remember, this was 1992! What's crazy about this game is while it's so impressive, there's not a lot of information out there about it! Ain't no fan translation, ain't no FAQs, ain't no nothing! Which is wild, because this game is more than just a 3D curio, it is an important artifact of video game history! This little game convinced Nintendo to work with Argonaut Studios, and is THE reason we have Star Fox and most of the Super FX games released on the Super Nintendo, like Stunt Race FX, which actually got a cool, unofficial fanmade Game Boy port, by the way! The craziest thing, though, is that this game does what the Super FX chip does, but without the Super FX chip! And by that token, it might just be one of the most graphically impressive games ever made, just based on the hardware it ran on! [scoffs] Again: We almost got this game in the West: There's a prototype called Lunar Chase that was never released, but it looks like it would have been a bit of an overhaul. The West DID get a sequel in 2010: X-Scape, developed by Q-Games, which is the current studio of X's legendary programmer Dylan Cuthbert. Unfortunately it's for DSiWare, which means you can no longer purchase it, which is super upsetting! If I had known the lineage of X at the time, I definitely would've gotten it! Here's hoping this game isn't lost to history, and is re-released somewhere. Anyway, I highly encourage everyone to play this game, its quiet Japanese-only release relegated it to the footnotes of video game history, but for anyone interested in the progression of gameplay and graphics in video games, X is a mandatory piece of software! So far we've been stickin' to original Game Boy games, but there were also some cool experiments with 3D on its direct successor, the Game Boy Color, like 2001's Toy Story Racer, which is a full-motion animated kart racing game. And by that I mean that you're driving over a pre-rendered animation, so it's not rendering polygonal worlds in real-time, like X or Race Drivin'. But it's still an extremely clever way to present 3D graphics on a Game Boy, and it's certainly better than, like, Sewer Shark or any full-motion garbage that came out in the mid-90's. There were a handful of Game Boy Color games with pre-rendered cutscenes: Mortal Kombat 4 had animated Fatalities, Cannon Fodder had an animated into that just screams "I CAME OUT BEFORE 9/11!!" but Toy Story Racer takes it to a whole other level! It, and Dragon's Lair, the very first Punching Weight game ever, by the way, take this pre-rendered rotoscoped animation tactic to incredible heights, and are definitely among the most ambitious Game Boy Color games ever! But how does it actually play? Well, at first I agreed with most reviews I found of this game, in that its controls are super slippery. However, here's a tip: Bo Peep is S-tier. Woody and Buzz are just drunk or something, I dunno, Miz Peep is OP, Toy Story Racer was made by Tiertex Design Studios, and if anything, we should actually be talking about F1 Championship Season 2000 instead, which they also made, and does some similar stuff with animations and some really impressive in-game polygonal work. But you cannot deny that Toy Story Racer just looks fantastic by comparison! Tiertex has come up in some other videos; Before the Game Boy Color era, they used to make really terrible ports of PC games, like the PAL region version of Street Fighter I, which we talked about with Ben Paddon from PortsCenter in our Street Fighter video. It's good to see that Tiertex stepped up their game a little later down the line. Okay, our next game is... ... Tyrannosaurus Tex, which you might remember from our video on GBA FPS originals! PAST DEREK: The finished, completed game was bought by Piko Interactive in 2016, and then released in 2017, and we really wanna get our hands on it! It runs and controls pretty well, but it's hard to review this game properly just by going by a prototype. I have a feeling we'll be coming back to Game Boy first person shooters on a later episode, we just wanted to give T-Tex a quick shout-out. - Well, one of our Patreon supporters is letting us borrow their copy! Thank you! So, now that we finally got our hands on it, let's take a deep dive into the Game Boy Color's only first person shooter! Tyrannosaurus Tex was developed by Slitherine Software, and was originally announced in early 2000, but it was cancelled and unreleased for a couple reasons: 1: It would've required a 16 megabyte cartridge, which would have been expensive to produce, 2: Publishers were afraid to take on that expense when it wasn't attached to an existing property, 3: Development was difficult and took longer than expected, 4: The Game Boy Advance was just around the corner, and 5: The lead developer and founding member of Slitherine took the hard drive with the source code home one day, and then literally fled the country! To this day, there is still a warrant out for his arrest! Now THAT is some drama! It was all bad enough that the remaining members of Slitherine decided to pivot to PC games, and they're still around to this day! While the original source code for T-Tex went missing, they still had backups, and that allowed Piko Interactive to finally release the game in 2017. The game itself actually runs really well, and looks great, about what I expected coming off the prototype. Strafing, movement and placement in the world is very tight, better than some GBA FPS's, like Wolfenstein 3D. I found it easy to dodge enemy fire and pick up items. It's also HUGE! Beyond having full-color sprites, T-Tex has six guns, over 10 types of enemies - more if you count these dang cactuses and boulders - and 28 sprawling levels! Though it feels like the game's impressive tightness comes at the cost of the level design. Without the map on the pause screen, it'd be one hell of a slog! Levels are pretty long and have neither music nor checkpoints, so dying takes you all the way back to the beginning of the level. It's a tough game! I made it through 8 levels, which is about a quarter of its apparent 20-to-40 hours to beat this game, so I guess I can't speak all that authoritatively on it, but I mostly enjoyed the time I spent with T-Tex! They spice things up by having a fair amount of story between levels. This unreleased cowboy-dinosaur-alien first person shooter on the Game Boy Color sure has a lot of story! ... now there's a sentence I never thought I'd say. And it does have multiplayer, but I wasn't able to try it out, since I only have one cartridge. I was able to unlock maps and characters for the multiplayer as I went through the levels, and they were just taunting me! Just was a warning; the packaging itself from Piko leaves something to be desired. There's typing errors on both the box and instruction book, which isn't sized correctly for the box, by the way, they both feel pretty cheaply made... D- Don't worry, dude! I've been as gentle as I possibly can with it! Still, I gotta be happy that such an ambitious game actually beat the odds and made it out into the world! Occasionally, sometimes, these things do just work out! That's gonna do it for this episode of Punching Weight, thank you so much for watching, it's been a good, long while since we talked about Game Boy Color games! The very first episode of Punching Weight was about ambitious GBC games, so huge shout-outs to our Patreon supporters, who've been supporting the show since 2015, join their ranks, see your name here, or hey, just subscribe, hit the bell, watch more videos, see us on Twitter and Instagram and all that stuff, thanks for watching, and we'll see you again real soon!
I FUCKING LOVE THAT CHANNEL SO MUCH! some guy hacked onto my utube channel and I had probably 500 channels I was subscribed to including etikas original channel which I cannot sub to anymore... So someone hacked me, unsubbed to all channels and subbed to james charles... I completely forgot about this guy! thank you so much for bringing me back man!