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Classic GBA Game Ports We'll Never See?
Thanks to LoonyBlog for its entry discussing classic games that could be converted to the Game Boy Advance, but are unfortunately not likely to appear, since "the Game Boy Advance is an almost exclusively franchise driven platform." The writer points out: "I think the GBA could have some amazing classic games ported to it, although the failure (apparently a spectacular failure at that) of the Blizzard Classic Arcade line pretty much means we'll never see many of them", and singles out commercial releases of Sam N' Max Hit The Road ("has a point n' click interface that would translate well to the GBA"), Heroes Of Might & Magic III ("its bright and colorful style would make for a beautiful GBA game"), and Ys Book I & II ("really an 8-bit game at its core") as top of his wishlist. What would you like to see officially available on GBA?
some of the 16 bit goodness that the gba could handle, like rock and roll racing, maybe a mortal kombat trilogy-style game, not to mention everything square and enix had released, that haven't been remade.
oh, and some kirby and megaman would be good to see.
How Jaded Are You?
I would like to see some of Sid's classic games like Pirates! and Civilization......
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
The GBA isnt _that_ difficult to code for, is it?
Why couldnt scummVM be ported to gba?
According to zophar's gameboy page there are lots of nifty emulators for gba already.
Sierra's AGI, NES, SMS, SNES (!), tg16, and even spectrum.
While I would like to see more oldschool PC games ported to gba, I certainly wouldnt put this in a crisis situation. There are some pretty good alternatives.
no
I mean, all 3 vikings on the move at once, trying to coordinate verbally in synch... as well, adding a few missions that required realtime coordination between the vikings would have been a lot more stimulating than what we got...
I like Nintendo, and I like the GBA. However, developing software ports for proprietary systems is pricey, and seldom done unless you can prove profitability...or unless you are a hobbyist. In either case, I don't think we're going to see a lot of non-NES classic games getting ported.
That said, why not just re-release 'em on the PC? Truth be told, in many cases, somebody's already done the work of porting the game to some emulator or other. If I'm Bob's Software Company, author of the Sega Master System classic "Spork Wars," I would just find the person doing the emulation and say, "Ok, I don't have a problem with you releasing this game. Have fun!"
Unless you are re-releasing an absolute classic like The Legend of Zelda, you are not gonna make enough money on the re-release to make it worth your while. Therefore, it's not gonna get released on a platform such as GBA. Therefore, the "nice" thing to do is just let people have fun with emulators.
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
I thought such a thing was impossible, but I'm proud to say that I contributed my boycott to it. :P
Seriously, some classic game GBA ports that I would love to see but will never happen:
Strategy:
Master of Magic (What happened to Simtex?)
X-COM/UFO
Platformers:
Duke Nukem
Commander Keen
Combat Sims:
F-19 Stealth Figther
Silent Service II
I could probably name many more, but those are all games which I feel are consistent with the small screen, limited processing power and few controls of the GBA. Plus I used to love playing them!
Random and weird software I've written.
If they port Chrono Trigger to GBA, but why hasn't this happened yet? Anybody?
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
a portable Final Fantasy 3/6 would kick ass
it has a point n' click interface that would translate well to the GBA It sound like he has never actually played a GBA. All of those games would be horrible on a GBA. A point & click on a tiny GBA screen would be absolute torture. I have about 50 GBA games (I do a lot of travelling). With the exception Advance Wars all the good games are really simple finger twitching games. If those games were ported to GBA they would be dumbed down horrible version like all of the other horrible dumbed down ports to GBA. Have you tried Sim City for GBA?? It is so dumbed down its boring after 10 minutes.
singles out commercial releases of Sam N' Max Hit The Road ("has a point n' click interface that would translate well to the GBA"),
Umm...we *are* talking about the device w/o a touchscreen or mouse, right?
Heroes Of Might & Magic III ("its bright and colorful style would make for a beautiful GBA game")
Not quite enough pixels on that little screen, bucko. That'd make for some nasty porting problems. Hard to see what you're doing.
I agree that there's a place for classic games on the GBA (though whoever the idiot was who decided that the GBA shouldn't be as vertically high in pixels as the NES/SNES should have his kneecaps removed), but for old console and arcade games, not so much for old PC games.
May we never see th
For classic games, how about Ultima II, III, and IV (Apple IIe). Lakers vs. Celtics (Apple II). Dr. J vs. Larry Bird 1-on-1 (Apple II). Thexder (Apple IIgs).
But my number-1 wanted port for the GBA must be... the original RBI Baseball (NES) and add linked play for head-to-head action.
How about: Contra (NES) (2-player link), X-Men (Genesis) (4-player link on this one!).
And how about a -real- port of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out (NES).
MORTAR COMBAT!
The problem with the gameboy port of Global Thermonuclear War is walking around with the Gameboy in your pocket and having to put up with the constant, plaintive voice: "Professor Falken, want to play a game?" that just does not know the meaning of the word "no"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
And that explains the rave reviews on Wario Ware
Earthbound!
And River City Ransom (which already has a port in Japan, it seems).
Seeing as how FFI and Dragon Warrior pretty much were the start of my console RPG fandom, I would love to see FFI ported to the GBA. I may have to resort to using Flash2Advance or some other cart writer and dropping ROMs onto it, but there's so much more they could do (and make better) with a good port of a great game.
--trb
They are. It comes out June 7th.
I don't know where you got the GP32 for less than $70, and I'd hardly say the GBA is inferior - yeah, the GP32 has homebrew support, and it supports MP3s, yada yada, but...inferior? The GBA has how many more games than the GP32? And how many of the GP32's games are crap? It has some nice emulator possibilities and stuff like that going on, but seriously - the GP32 is a fun homebrew toy, but it's not going to be a viable gaming platform anytime soon. Or ever. And the PSP will be here soon, which will play music and movies and all that, and will probably cost about the same to get a GP32 imported (at all the prices I've seen, anyway). You can have your opinion an all, but seriously...
Apparently was partially ported then abandoned - very sad. I would absolutely buy it the second I saw it.
For those of you who don't know, in theory it's a standard Gauntlet clone. Top down maze based 2D shoot-em-up. Always 2 player cooperative and if you're alone, the computer plays as the second player. Yeah, you'll comfortably beat the computer player but it's far from a liability.
What this doesn't tell you is the superb atmosphere it creates and sheer, manic speed. The basic premise is all about some primitive Victorian era steam powered computer (the eponymous Chaos Engine) going wrong and causing a rift in time, leading to all sorts of dinosaurs and weird monsters appearing, and you being part of the gang of mercenaries who are cleaning them up. All have different balances between strength, speed and weaponry, and you can buy power ups after levels to improve performance quite markedly. Everything really looks Victorian - lots of analogue dials, brass plaques and heavy engineering. Being a Bitmap Brothers game, it's very heavy on stats at the end of each section. It'll tell you how much you've cleared, how much of the available cash you got, level times, kill rates and so on, and show the breakdown of you against the computer player or your friend.
The monsters? They just keep running at you, hard, thick and fast. I remember several levels where I was averaging around one kill per second - seriously - and I wasn't that great at it. It's just constant running flat out through the levels, taking out huge lines of monsters running towards you - many of which drop powerups or cash behind them.
Maze design was superb. Genuinely challenging with a lot of dynamic elements, keys and switches, but always ultimatlely both navigable and learnable. And the sound effects whenever you activated a node and started that torus bounding up and down its shaft while the lightning crackled, picked up a key or even opened the final level gate. I remember one where you open the final gate to get out (and hear the speech telling you this) right in the middle of a major battle section a fair way from the exit and where you haven't come close to seeing it yet. Just brilliant, and slightly worrying when you're playing.
That music. Fast techno - not something I'd normally like at all but it fitted the atmosphere so well. Constantly pushing, driving you on, fitting in so well with the pace of the game.
It sounds silly but the level coding system! Used alphanumeric level codes to allow easy resumes without worrying about save games (remember, consoles or pre-HDD computers) but they didn't just kick you in at the level, they accurately saved your game state. There was genuine purpose to going back and replaying the early levels to get a better level code to take you forwards.
I'd love to see something new like that. Short levels (2-3 minutes maximum) once you've learnt them but you could be 5-10 minutes in a level learning it. Well balanced difficulty, great level variety, structure to bring you back again and again to find that last bonus and pace of a type we seem to have abandoned in the mad rush to go 3D. It's the sort of game you can play in small chunks but keep going back to again and again. In other words, ideal handheld territory as far as I'm concerned.
On a much simpler level, I pine for a port of that old Spectrum classic Deathcase 3D! First person 3D motorbike based shoot-em-up in 9K (seriously) - you were riding headlong through a randomly generated forest chasing two other bikes and trying to shoot them with a gun mounted on your handlebars - so, you can aim right but not if there's a tree ahead and to the right... If you shoot those two bikes it becomes night and the screen turns dark for the same challenge, shoot those two bikes and it's day again but the forest is thicker, and thicker, and thicker until you're steering on reflex alone. There's bonus vehicles that appear on the horizon every now and then, and shooting them can get you a big bonus but they're far fr
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
I would love to play that game. Most any Square Enix classic RPG would do, though (like a port of CT without the super-long loading times of the PS version).
The legal hassle that takes to coordinate an old property to a new platform is pretty much hell.
Move on kids, it's time to let go, those were great games, but we live in an age of Yu-Gi-Ohs and Lizzie Maguaires (oh I hope for a misspell). Licenses sell, so I propose to do an art swap on all those old school games we all crave, stick a license and let the games begin.
So let's talk about Contra-Hamtaro (contra, guns and lovable hamsters).
Secret of Mana 2 was an excellent game which never saw a US release. Much like the first, it featured multiplayer action / adventure gaming, perfect for the GBA. Translations are available online, if you do a little goggling.
The first game in the Seiken Densetsu series, amusingly enough, was released in the US as "Final Fantasy Legends." Both were Game Boy games... A release of the third on the GBA would mark a "coming home" for the series.
The ______ Agenda
"Why buy an inferior product at a higher price?"
Higher price? The GBA SP is $70 right now. The *cheapest* GP32 there is 90 pounds, which is considerably more than $70.
Why buy an 'inferior' product? Because I like the games on that inferior product.
"Derp de derp."
Have you ever played Broken Sword? This was a fairly standard point-n-click PC game that I thought translated very well to the GBA. Inventory management, NPC conversation, etc. were all handled quite well. I would reccommend it to any adventure gaming fan. I could see something like ScummVM working OK, with some interface changes... What I would like to see is a Roguelike ported to the GBA. I've thought about taking such a project on... Something like Angband. You'd have to set up the macros ahead of time on the PC... (assuming you play on a flash cart) or perhaps a user-modifiable quicklist of frequently cast spells? Some hacks to the menu system to allow you to scroll through menus instead of pushing a key to select would help too.
Duke Nukem Forever.
I wouldn't mind Flashback. That would be cool.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I would like to see the origianl version of secret of mana released for the GBA. The fact that it was a multiplayer RPG it would make a good game that you could link up and play with friends. I remember having a lot of fun playing that game with two other people and all of us being able to control our own character. I have a feeling that this installment won't be quite up to snuff for Secret of Mana fans since it lacks a multiplayer feature
"Damn TV, you've ruined my imagination, just like you've ruined my ability to -- to, um...uh...oh well."