GB Studio Showcase Part 1: The New Scene’s DMG

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Introduction | GB Studio

While it’s been a good 20 years (woof) since the GameBoy and GameBoy Color were discontinued, the handheld has been seeing a development resurgence thanks to a little program called GB Studio. Originally released by UK developer Chris Maltby, GB Studio offers an accessible means for indie developers to create GameBoy games with little to no programming knowledge. In addition to being useful for fledgling developers, GB Studio has also seen popularity with game jams, wherein individual developers or small teams must create games within a short time period while following specific thematic or design criteria. GB Studio has become increasingly prolific, to the point where McDonald’s commissioned a group of developers to create Grimace’s Birthday, a tie-in platformer game to celebrate their purple mascot’s birthday and possibly cursed milkshake. Games created in GB Studio can easily be played through itch.io on a web browser, but since they’re compiled as .gb or .gbc files, these games can also be played on emulators or on original hardware through flashcarts. Publishers like Incub8 Games are also releasing a few GB Studio games on limited-edition physical cartridges for collectors. Given the development possibilities for a retro console, I played through a handful of different games.

Deadeus

Deadeus is a horror/adventure game developed by -IZMA-, a UK-based illustrator. The game focuses on an unnamed boy who lives in a tiny village. The boy has a prophetic nightmare that everyone in the village will die in three days, and he sets out to see if the upcoming apocalypse can be prevented. The boy can explore his village, talking to various NPCs and picking up items, all the while learning about the village’s mysterious connection to the titular god, Deadeus. The game has 11 endings that vary depending on the boy’s actions. For example, the boy can literally sleep through the end of the world or accept the end from the village’s mountaintop alongside the neighborhood girl. Or, the boy can get involved with the local mysterious underground cult, and the atrocities they commit in the name of Deadeus. 

After-school library activities.
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The Gore Screaming Show…Never Scared Me

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Comedian Kevin Pollak has a line with his impersonation of actor Christopher Walken that has become part of my everyday vernacular. Pollak discusses how Walken talks with an unconnected line of thought, immortalized in the line “Frankenstein never scared me, marsupials do, cause they’re fast.”. This response to being asked about his most recent movie. “X never scared me” is my go-to reply to all supposedly horrifying pieces of fiction that did not successfully unnerve me. Visual novels, with their focus on character interaction, character point of view, and often expanded length should be a diamond-mine for horror. Not including a few instances, this potential marriage has left me wanting. The best example is Gore Screaming Show, as “The Gore Screaming Show…never scared me”. 

Cards face up on the table: “scary” is such a high bar (instances that could be counted with one, maybe two hands) that eliciting actual fear and dread is a line horror should not have to jump over. Instead, horror needs to be interesting. Interesting is needlessly broad, but examples of good horror involve providing creative and potentially destructive forces and spaces for taboos and complex societal issues to be examined and mangled, usually by following the journey of one or multiple otherwise regular people. None of this is intended as a value judgement; horror that has zero higher aspirations and will gladly remind the audience of such has a place. Unfortunately, Gore Screaming Show takes itself far too seriously to let it slide (even though it’s an erotic game, it designates enough time for world building and character motivations). 

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Dragon Quest Wars Review: Tactics O-Goo-re

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The Dragon Quest series is no stranger to spin-offs that step away from the main titles’ sword-and-sworcery dungeon-crawling and world-saving. The various Monsters games are the best known, but DQ has dipped its feet into rougelikes, first-person rail shooters (or sword slashers, in this case), musou beat-em-ups, and Minecraft. Surprisingly, Dragon Quest hasn’t dabbled in tactical games too heavily, unlike its rival Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest Wars is an initial, and oddly under-the-radar attempt at breaking into the strategy RPG (SRPG) genre.

Dragon Quest Wars was originally released in 2009 as DsiWare. The game was a co-production with Intelligent Systems, best known as the developers of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. The game’s producer, Taichi Inuzuka noted that Wars was intended to be an introductory game for players new to strategy games. A direct sequel to Wars never materialized, but it seems to have a successor in the mobile game Dragon Quest Tact.

(Author’s note: I was unable to screencap the game properly with my 3DS, so the screenshots used in this review are from the Dragon Quest Fandom wiki.)

None of these names will ever surpass ‘Chrono Twigger’ from Rocket Slime.
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Willingly Trapped in Farming Sims Hell

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Farming Sims have a particular problem that is hard to solve. The usual farming sim has a predefined town filled with colorful characters, a premise of starting small and growing a home front into a thriving agricultural engine, which  requires a ton of appreciation for routine. The term ‘Moon Tube’ is what I call a niche ecosystem of YouTube farm sim channels. Moon Tube discusses tips and tricks, especially hidden and unexplained strategies to minmax animals. However,  they also impart a relaxed and mellow vibe that is alien to my hyper focused experiences. In other words, a passion found in the mundane. The farming sim page of Steam entices me to make half my wish list of games in this genre, though my relationship with them is so adversarial. Farming sims at their core are about farm work, and buddy, they all soon become just that, long drawn-out work. 

Graveyard Keeper is poison. Tasty, tasty poison drinkable for hours. Building river-crossing bridges and clearing dark dungeon tunnels are the big early tasks for this game’s time traveled protagonist, and for a lot longer than most games, Graveyard Keeper is all about this life. The exploration part of the brain starts flaring when it comes to bridges and tunnels. Farm sim worlds are often small, so investigating each corner via horse riding back and forth, up and down, left and right, is its own limited joy. Oh neat, because of my effort, I now have a secret tunnel to the village center. Good job me, I found the mines where  marble is located. So that’s how embalming works? Graveyard Keeper gives the impression of productivity, like when fifty glass bottles are set to be crafted in the kiln and my character wakes up to dozens of them crowding the ground. Any game about making esoteric items will soon turn into a game about giving away esoteric items, an act of mentally juggling unpleasant people’s scheduling for delivering their every want and need. This is unfortunately the only way to advance Graveyard Keeper’s thin premise of trying to return to your future girlfriend. By the end, I was rewarded with a brief cutscene and a slap on the ass.

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Evil Tonight Review: Getting Paid To Yell at Children

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Evil Tonight was developed by Spanish studio DYA Games, composed of brothers Alberto and Dani. From some light research, Alberto is the pixel artist and character designer for all  their games. DYA previously practiced in making horror games with Viviette, which seems to be about a man escaping his mansion from his murderous wife, landlord, or overly-attached piano teacher.

Resident Evil and Sword of Mana for the GBA combine in Evil Tonight, a game about medium-for-hire Sylvia’s recent mission to investigate a haunted…ballet and theater school. Sylvia has to solve puzzles, fight monsters, ration ammo, and protect a bunch of middle schoolers from whatever has died here and will not leave. Evil Tonight starts as a survival horror, with the stamina depleting knife being the most frequent weapon. However, by the second half, the San Paolo De Rosa academy becomes an overcrowded maze of ghosts shooting projectiles and jack-in-the-boxes with sharp fangs. As in most survival hour games, running is a tactic, but often the rooms are so small that combat becomes necessary. The game’s bosses feel more familiar with adventure games than survival horror, with their lasers and teleporting.

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A Field Guide to the Iconography of Explicit Violence and Gore

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Tormented Souls could have been a better game. Dual Effect captured important visual and mechanical parts of PS1 and PS2-era survival horror, with Tormented Souls’ fixed camera angles and narrow hallways. But narratively, it’s a story of escaping an old hospital/mansion/church/research facility that never reaches the height of older-era Silent Hill or the environmental storytelling of the first three Resident Evil games. What Tormented Souls did have, though, was perhaps the most necessary element, a “This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore” start-up warning screen. 

Like the comforting and often remixed startup logo drop of the Game Cube, the horror game warning screen invokes a nostalgic bygone. A proper warning screen is the first snapshot of  survival horror. These images can be broken down into two types: still shots of backgrounds with ominous vibes, and simple portraits of a character mid-combat. Capcom is most attributed to using these  relics. A ten-minute google search did not provide an answer to whom or why these disclaimers were necessary. Backgrounds, like the Resident Evil 2 screen of the Raccoon City Police Station or the castle from Haunting Grounds, are good examples of a term I use when discussing horror, which is utilizing the “bad place”.

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Original Character, Do Not Steal – Passive Roleplaying in Video Games

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In Etrian Odyssey, a series of dungeon RPGs (DRPGs) modeled after old-school DRPGs like Wizardry, the party members are created by selecting portraits and job classes (later games added voice acting) by the player, but since the games use a first-person view, the characters generally aren’t seen outside of menus. I haven’t played an EO game besides the loose Persona Q spin-off (whose selling point is getting to play and watch pre-established characters from different games interact), but to my knowledge, EO games are generally focused more on exploring and conquering dungeons, over deep characterization. In an article from the developers of EO, they encourage players to use their imagination to give personality to the party members. The EO devs seem to be describing a form of “passive” role playing in their article; noting that players might imagine their party members to have specific personality quirks or react to situations in particular ways. It’s an interesting extraneous way to engage with a game that otherwise has silent characters.

For the purpose of this article, I’m defining “passive roleplaying” similar to what the EO devs said: consciously (or maybe subconsciously) imagining elements of personality and reactions to situations onto otherwise silent characters. Regarding the “passive” descriptor, I’m focusing on the roleplaying element as an improvisational aspect, but not discounting the idea of players coming in with a pre-existing character and letting ideas change organically as they progress. Also, this article mostly discusses my personal experiences with passive roleplaying; your mileage and adventures may vary.

I’ll forever appreciate 7th Dragon‘s fantasy race’s bizarre sexual dimorphism consisting of cat girls and elf boys.
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Miyoo Mini + Review: Retro Rampage

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Since hacking the 3DS and Vita in the past year, I’ve gone down a bizarre rabbit hole that led me to single board computer gaming. The term is broad and, as the name implies, refers to computers built on a singular board. While the term can refer to devices like the Raspberry Pi, or handheld consoles like the GameBoy and Steam Deck, it’s also commonly used in the context of portable emulators. SBC portable emulators typically originate from China, due to lax copyright laws, and are usually built on custom Linux or Android operating systems. These emulators also come in a variety of form factors and hardware power, from the teeny-tiny Trimui Model S to the beefier Switche-sque Ayn Odin. 

The 3DS isn’t perfect for emulation. Specifically, the 3DS struggles with pixel-perfect upscaling, resulting in GB and GBC games either being windowed to match the aspect ratio or being scaled up with an ugly blurry effect. Additionally, the 3DS’s inherent SNES emulator can be fussy with certain games, like Terranigma, and need to be played using a third-party emulator. While the 3DS can run GBA games well, they still have the aforementioned aspect ratio problem, don’t have save states, and cannot be put to sleep. Well, you can technically make injects that work with sleep mode, but they aren’t perfect, re: my 50+ hour Mother 3 file that tracked my time even when I hibernated the 3DS. Lastly, I was fed up with having to make injections for games, instead of being able to plop ROMs onto the SD card. The PS Vita fares much better with emulation, but (and this is honestly a weak excuse) I wanted to reduce wear and tear on the console. 

For personal emulation needs, I wanted something that could at least handle GB/C, GBA, and SNES. I’m not currently interested in N64 or Dreamcast emulation, and any sixth-generation home consoles would be covered by a potential future Steam Deck purchase. I currently don’t do a lot of public transportation commutes or long-form traveling, but I wanted something small-ish that I could pick up for short bursts AND long periods. Basically something I could use to kill 15-20 minutes on puzzle games before going to cycling class or for camping at a coffee shop for a couple of hours to dig into an RPG. My current emulation interests are Pokemon ROM hacks, the dearth of fan-translated JRPGs, some attempts at getting into Tetris and Puyo Puyo, and indie stuff like Pico-8 and GB Studio games. Ultimately,  I decided to go for the Miyoo Mini +. 

Retro earbuds courtesy of Retro-Ko.
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The Annals of Mobile Game Preservation

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Listening to The Video Game History Hour podcast made me think more about game preservation. Specifically, the issues of preserving mobile games for smart devices. Gacha games are difficult to fully preserve unless the developers choose to make offline versions, usually leaving players to archive assets on their own. Stand-alone mobile games are also tricky; due to Apple and Android operating systems receiving regular upgrades, it becomes difficult over time for developers to maintain their games. As a result, many devs will simply opt to delist their games. To make matters more complicated, iOS being such a closed operating system means that emulation is difficult, and obtaining exclusive games that are delisted requires sideloading methods. The frustrations of fleeting digital media ownership on top of everything is a conversation for another day, but it’s the unfortunate cherry on a shit sundae. For example, one of the games I remembered was one that I legally own but can no longer access since it was a) delisted and b) I no longer own an Apple device with an old enough version of iOS to even play it. With so many mobile games available on smart devices, I wanted to examine a couple of games from the early 2010’s that received ports to other consoles, and one more that didn’t/hasn’t been ported, and why that is concerning.

Chaos Rings

Ah, young love.

Chaos Rings are a series of turn-based RPGs published by Square Enix around the early 2010’s for mobile devices and later ported to the PS Vita. The games were developed by Media.Vision, who originally worked on the Wild Arms series and later Valkyria Chronicles entries. The first Chaos Rings game involves a group of couples forced into a death tournament by a menacing entity. Of course, things are not as simple as they seem, and the game’s plot is later revealed to be the more complicated plannings of a higher being. 

Chaos Rings I is  interesting from a technical and mechanical standpoint. The series l is a genuine effort from Square Enix to create fully realized JRPGs for mobile devices, with design nods to old-school JRPGs balanced out with accessible mechanics for more casual gameplay. For example, the first three games utilize 3D models on top of pre-rendered backgrounds, evoking the feel from PS1 Final Fantasy games. The first game allows players to set the levels of enemies in each area, which allows for easier exploration and the ability to grind levels more easily. In combat, the couples can function as either independent entities or pair up; pairing up allows for more damage done in a single turn but both characters will receive damage at the same time if attacked. Both characters can also learn and equip various skills from “genes” that can be obtained by defeating enemies.

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Machina of the Planet Tree -Planet Ruler- Review: Slogging Through Fantasy Mines

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Machina of the Planet Tree -Planet Ruler- (from now on, referred to as Planet Ruler), released in 2013, is the first game in the Machina of the Planet Tree series, developed by indie studio Denneko Yuugi. Like Sting Entertainment’s Dept. Heaven series, other Machina of the Planet Tree games (which so far only includes Unity Union) seem to share the same name but do not follow the same playable characters. On the topic of playable characters, Planet Ruler follows big-gauntlet-welding mining student Cram and mercenary cat-girl Retla, as they work together to find and protect Machina Tree priestess Etsy from the villainous Elite Four. 

An initial problem with Planet Ruler is that it requires getting reacquainted with the difference between story and plot. The short sentence above, about who our heroes and villains are, is seemingly the entire game’s plot, wherein the heroes must protect a person or thing from a Megaman Battle Network-sized team of mono-colored bad guys. The story of Planet Ruler is faux complicated  by the way characters tell it. Planet Ruler is supposedly not a long game, which means all this world building and lore must get crammed into every sentence. New term after  new term must be given and then defined. The game does have  cute optional side chats with the heroes vamping about save crystals or some nonsense from Cram’s far more interesting gauntlet Chronos; it’s a feature that makes Tales of games special. cannot replace turning all characters into creatures of exposition. RPGs involve caring about party members because they are who the player follows and controls. Their dramas and conflicts, their adventures and setbacks, their tastes in high fantasy monster burgers, all need to mean something. After a few hours, I was left feeling that Cram sure was smug, Retla was cute but does not get to do much, and Etsy sure is a robot girl trope character. 

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