Crysis 64

I always love seeing what old and low-end hardware is capable of. Tech demos, demoscene releases, homebrew games, and end-of-lifecycle titles are my favorite brain candy. 2D fun like the ill-fated Grand Theftendo and odd ports like Big Mutha Truckers for GBA tweak the same neurons. I followed GBAdev.org from somewhere near its beginnings to its sidelining when the DS came out, so I’d seen and even jerkily emulated some basic 3D engines on the Game Boy Advance. All smoke, no fire, I thought, since the only worthwhile commercial 3D games at the time were Doom-style shooters (including a mediocre port of Doom and eventually an impressive port of Doom II). When I heard rumors of Quake for the GBA, I was intrigued, but not exactly floored by the videos. Apparently a company named Pocketeers had developed a polygonal engine and merely used the opening map of Quake as a demonstration. They had actual game ideas: two GTA III wannabes, named Zero Tolerance and The World Of Crime. Here’s one of the preview videos for the latter, with some annoying music added in.

I craved something like this, so I hung on every little update. Major gaming publications looked at Crazy Taxi’s shoddy framerate and declared that the GBA was incapable of real 3D, with irritating disregard for what sufficiently crazy coders can do with a few megahertz and a dozen megabits of ROM. The offending game, for your derision:

When it came about that Pocketeers was going to develop the GBA ports of the Need for Speed series, I immediately commited to buying one to help them get off the ground and to do my bit in keeping the 3D market alive on GBA. Not a bad decision, since they’re still around and Porsche Unlimited is one of the best handheld racers I’ve ever played, but Pocketeers dropped all pretense of caring for their own IPs somewhere after NFS: Carbon. It’s pretty, but it’s just a racing game.

Over the life of the console, I bought the games you might expect given the above - both Dooms, the lackluster Dark Arena, the surprisingly good non-port Duke Nukem Advance, Starfox clone / polygonal turd Star X, etc. I thought the best 3D the handheld had ever seen in commercial releases was Doom II, which was disheartening considering that it’s fake 3D programmed by an absolute genius. Cut to some years later, with the DS firmly established, the PSP floundering on all officially-sanctioned fronts and kicking ass elsewhere, and the Game Boy line and name essentially laid to rest. I find out the Tron 2.0 game for GBA has some 3D segments which are really quite neat.

Not amazing, but quick and stylish. The descriptions mention Gloom. Google gives me Sock Master’s website. He mentions Gate Crasher, which YouTube also had videos for:

Cue four hours of searches like “3D GBA,” “game boy prototype,” and “3D proto.” I have a good laugh as I chew through previews for old games that never came out, the find myself silenced when I reach one of YouTube’s real gems - Banjo Pilot, back when it was beautiful.

Not just beautiful, but utterly frakkin’ gorgeous. Smooth rolling hills, warm colors, clean textures, and animated water effects all done with voxels and palette hacks. The eventual inclusion of sprites would mar the baked-in perfect shading and the framerate would drop (apparently to unacceptable levels) with CPU-time shared with AI, but while most Game Boy 3D looks like early PSX work, Rare puts homebrewers to shame with levels as inviting as their N64 counterparts. After more heavy Googling and scouring of YouTube, I find out that unreleased games like 4×4 Off Road…

… don’t always go unreleased. Sadly, I can’t find any videos of them, but there are two ATV games with very nice graphics: Thunder Ridge Riders and Quad Desert Fury. Both are voxel-based, but the latter is far superior - its third-person camera, respectable physics engine, kinder AI, and smoother, prettier maps put it well ahead of its similar but less impressive cousin. There is another ATV-based racing game called Quad Power Racing, but it’s not so much ugly as missing the point - all the courses are the same width, the obstacles (trees and signs) are window dressing, and it feels very much like an affine-rendered take on Pole Position. I would be honestly surprised if the entire map’s 3D geometry is held in RAM at any one time.Smuggler’s Run had a voxel-based port for the GBA, but it suffered in different ways than any other voxel game I’ve ever seen. It seemed to be rendered at low resolution and then upscaled in a very blurry way, with sprites laid overtop this pixellated mess. It didn’t help that the map, while sizable and bounded on all sides, was constructed mostly of vast swaths of solid color speckled with occasional light and dark points. The gameplay’s not bad, but the graphics are very strange.Some of you might not consider voxels real 3D, and as far as video games go that’s almost universally true. They’re usually just well-textured, highly organic heightmaps, often with polygonal or sprite-based enemies. Exceptions like Outcast are exceedingly rare. So what about real 3D, with textured polygons and arbitrary geometry? GBAdev still hosts a number of homebrew examples, from the choppy Blue Roses engine to the excellent Yeti3D “Temple” FPS demo. Sadly, only Blue Roses has a video on YouTube - it’s the opening level of Metal Gear Solid without any characters or UI. Not interesting. However, it did lead me to a preview of yet another unreleased 3D title that would’ve been better than Ecks vs. Sever: Radium.

It was from Radium that I found a video for the opening segment of Kill.Switch. This is what I wanted from Pocketeers - a game that treated the GBA like an underpowered PSX instead of an overpowered SNES. Within an hour of seeing this video, I had a copy ordered on Amazon. The game is far from perfect, and so far as I’ve seen it has very little to do with the console versions in terms of level design and plot, but it’s fun, strategy matters, and for every CPU-budgeting hack that gives the AI a leg up, there’s another you can learn to take advantage of.

It is an unfortunate reality that there will be no more GBA games like this with a Nintendo seal of quality. Metroid Prime: Hunters put solid 3D gaming on the DS. Oblivion very nearly saw a PSP release, and I’d probably own one if it had. The Game Boy Advance is well past the point of expecting a big-name, end-of-lifecycle release like Kirby’s Adventure, FFXII, or Twilight Princess, so we can only look back at what is and might have been. Let’s start with a big game from a big company.

That’s right, Resident Evil 2. Doesn’t look bad, except for the somewhat dull lighting and the closeups of Leon’s blocky hindquarters. Blue Roses was the engine used for Big Mutha Truckers, seen here with lower polycount and better textures than in that commercially released title. I’m not sure why Capcom chose not to release it. The conversion would’ve been fairly quick, and the gameplay looks well-preserved from the pre-analog days of the PSX controller. The ROM would’ve been fairly large with all those screens, and I think that’s the big reason - expensive carts, little expected demand, not a breadwinner. Here I’m assuming this had anything to do with Capcom in the first place, and that Raylight wasn’t just flattering them with a “hey, look at this” tech demo / pitch out of the blue. This next bit I’m almost certain was an official development.

Resident Evil for the Game Boy COLOR. Blocky, off-color, and cheap as all get out, but the game is amazingly close to the Playstation original. This would’ve been amazing if it had seen the light of day. Can we go lower than this? Why yes, yes we can.

Diablo, for the Game Boy. The Game Boy Game Boy. Word is that it was an internal project at Blizzard, back when the world cared about both the original 4-color Game Boy and the mouse-destroying glory that was Diablo. It only ever got this far, but already it looks quicker and more fun than similar, thumb-destroying efforts to translate modern Gauntlet games to the GBA. It probably would’ve worked out about as well, but I can dream. The Game Boy doesn’t have a reputation for being responsive outside its 2D-ortho areas of expertise. Ask Faceball.

Faceball was fun for a bit, but grew old quickly. The gameplay progression was classic: take what you have and make it harder to win and easier to die. This is the only FPS ever released for the original game boy, but not the only polygonal 3D game. Days of Thunder was the only other example I knew of until just recently, taking all the excitement of going fast and turning left to the handheld with a fairly impressive wireframe engine. Thankfully there was another example, complete with filled polygons, 3D cars, a physics engine, and even a YouTube video.

Race Drivin’ was an update to the original 3D driving game, Hard Drivin’. I recommend the Fatt Man’s review of the original’s console/computer ports if you want to see how small an update it is. The controls are awful, the physics are frustrating, and the game is generally poorly-known with good reason. I ask again: can we go lower? We most certainly can.
http://lostlevels.org/shots/harddrivin/03.jpg link to LostLevels.org
Hard Drivin’ was ported to ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and Genesis well before the Game Boy edition came out. Somewhere along this laundry list of ports that provide none of the smooth responsiveness and driving realism of the arcade original, some unfortunate but plucky programmer named Mark Morris was tapped to cram the thing onto the uber-successful Nintendo Entertainment System. By the look of these screenshots, it was about as simplified as and slightly less colorful than the Genesis version, which is to say it was well ahead of the ZX and C64 ports. The inclusion of AI would likely have brought it down a peg. I’ll close with a video that I think demonstrates nicely how much can be done by dedicated programmers with entirely too much free time.

The title and sprites are Doom, but the engine isn’t so capable as all that. The controls are quick, the display is drawn in full-screen and full-res, and hit detection is already implemented. With some different wall colors, simple AI, and maybe a reduction in resolution for the 3D area onscreen to eke out more memory and CPU time from the twenty-year-old system, yekhnbeh could have himself a very capable port of Wolfenstein 3D. I’m something of an optimist, and even I don’t believe the NES is capable of Doom with or without texture-mapping… but I’d love for this guy to prove me wrong.

This entry was posted on 3. December 2007 at 03:44 and is filed under Games, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.