Game Boy Color Hidden Gems That Were Ahead Of Their Time
The Game Boy Color's library is full of hidden gems and underrated games, many of which may have been missed by fans of the Nintendo handheld.
To those not familiar with the system's library, the Game Boy Color is often regarded as a simple, color-enabled upgrade to Nintendo's original Game Boy, but its enhanced hardware made it a console of its own. The GBC's advanced specs meant it received many exclusive games, including several hidden gems and overlooked titles some Game Boy Color owners likely missed.
Despite being out-powered by its competitors almost immediately after its 1989 release, the original Game Boy saw success throughout the '90s. But by the time Nintendo had moved its console gaming into the third dimension with 1996's N64, the black-and-white handheld began to look even more dated than it already was. Enter the Game Boy Color, a 1998 release positioned to hold fans over until the Game Boy's true successor, the Game Boy Advance, arrived in 2001.
The GBC delivered the ability to play original Game Boy games with preset color palettes, spicing up players' existing libraries, but it also resulted in a wave of new, exclusive games. While some of these - the Zelda Oracle games, Metal Gear Solid, and Shantae, for example - are well-documented classics, others never got the exposure they deserved, making them underappreciated titles for an already underappreciated console.
Hamtaro: Ham Hams Unite! is undoubtedly a kids' game, but it's a dang good one. Based on Hamtaro, the 2000s children's anime, this simple adventure title is all about wandering the cartoon hamsters' diminutive town, adding "Hamchat" abilities to Hamtaro's dictionary, and using them to convince stray Ham Hams to head back to their clubhouse. It's an enjoyable, low-stakes premise that makes Ham Hams Unite! a chill playthrough, but the game's best feature is undoubtedly its amazing character sprite work. The Ham Hams' cuteness beats out even Kirby, and their sprites are perhaps the cleanest and most expressively animated of any Game Boy Color game.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets features less impressive character sprites, but makes up for it with beautiful environmental pixel art and an even better soundtrack. This Final Fantasy clone sees players adventuring through the events of the second Harry Potter book (not the movie), collecting equipment and fighting monsters in turn-based battles. There's not many surprises in Chamber of Secrets, as it mostly sticks to established genre formulas, but it's still worth a look for its unexpected quality as a licensed RPG.
Players hunting for a less conventional RPG might look to Legend of the River King 2. Fishing may seem like a boring activity to base an RPG around, but like the Nintendo Switch's Golf Story, it makes for a surprisingly compelling adventure. Players fish, dive, pick flowers, catch bugs, and even engage in random battles against forest creatures on their quest to reel in a god-turned-fish, and they'll see a significantly different story depending on which of the game's two playable characters they pick.
This Japan-only title plays mostly like any other horizontal shoot 'em up on the Game Boy. In fact, its gorgeous title screen may be the most interesting thing about it, but that doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable. Magical Chase GB is a portable port of a 1991 TurboGrafx-16 "cute 'em up" starring young witch Ripple, who is on a quest to capture six escaped demons. It's a simple but charming alternative to the system's other shmups.
Perhaps the least-known game on this list, Supercross Freestyle is a Europe-only motocross game developed by Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail. The two, later teaming up to form VD-Dev, would go on to produce some of the Game Boy Advance's most graphically impressive 3D games, and Supercross Freestyle was their last effort on the GBC. Its side-scrolling stunt mode is nothing special, but its races are visually impressive and extremely fluid-feeling for such an underpowered system, mostly due to the plethora of jumps peppered throughout, which feel like they have a real physics system behind them. Games like Cruisi'n Exotica and Velez and Dubail's own V-Rally and Wacky Races are often helmed as the Game Boy Color's best racing games, but Supercross Freestyle's jump-filled tracks make it more fun than any of them.
Games like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars made the Game Boy Advance a comfortable home for turn-based strategy titles. But before all that, Bits Studios somehow managed to squeeze a real-time strategy game onto the GBA's less-powerful predecessor. Warlocked is an old-school RTS in the style of Warcraft and Age of Empires, albeit simplified to run on an 8-bit system. It's still impressively fully-featured, however, with voice samples, quality music, readable sprites, in-game tutorials, fog of war, two unlockable minigames, two playable factions, player-versus-player battles, and more. If the Game Boy Color ever had an overlooked classic, this is it.
The Game Boy Color released in North America on November 18, 1998.