It always cracks me up when I go looking for information on an old GBA game and find that it shares a Wikipedia page with the console version. That's like ꦺJon Favreau, the director and Iron Man star, and Jon Favreau, the Pod Save America co-host and former Obama speechwriter, sharing a Wikipedia page because they have the same name. The handheld “ports” of console games in the ‘90s and ‘00s were ports in name onl𝓡y.
The Tony Hawk Game Boy Ports Were Nothing Like The Console Originals
Here’s one of the first examples I remember encountering: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on PS1 and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on Game Boy Color were fundamentally different games. One is a 3D arcade𝓡 skater where you traverse maps in third-person, attempting to accumulate as many points as possible within a time limit. The other is 2D, with pixel art graphics. Its gameplay is split into a side-scrolling half-pipe mode and other modes with top down races. It bears little resemblance to its console counterpart, and yet they're treated as one game in different formats.
We’ve𒉰 Beenﷺ Robbed Of So Many Good Vicarious Visions Games
The long-ru♍nning studio behind Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 deserves to be known as more than just Blizzard Albany.
This was one of the fundamental lies of gaming in the '90s and early aughts. When a publisher wanted to capitalize on a potentially popular game launching on consoles, they would hire a smaller developer to make a new game, with some similar characters, story beats, and/or mechanics, that they could release with the same name on handheld. So, as a kid, you would buy 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网🌞:Tꦿhe Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on GBA, naively expecting something thꦕat looked like the console version, a🌟nd get something else entirely.
Sometimes the publishers were more honest, and gave the handheld game a different name. When Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland launched on console, Activision simultaneously released Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land on DS and Game Boy Advance. It featured a lot of the same levels, but the different names made it clear that the two weren’t the same game. Nintendo did something a bit different but with the same synergistic end goal when it launched GBA game Metroid Fusion on the same day as the GameCube’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metroid Prime.
Even If These Ports Are Different, They're Still Pretty Impressive
As weird as this bait-and-switch trend was, I have affection for those weird little handheld ports. In his book Arcade Perfect: How Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, and Other Coin-Op Classics Invaded the Living Room, author David L. Craddock talks about the sheer difficulty of bringing sophisticated arcade games to the much less powerful home consoles of the '80s, '90s, and '00s. Though few people would argue that these ports were as good as the original games, they often represented impressive feats by developers w༒ho had managed to pare back games that used 12 different buttons on a bespoke cabinet to the few available on a console controller.
I feel the same about these handheld ports. Developers were porting to even simpler hardware💖 and needed to consider the essence of the source material, then attempt to capture that essence with more basic graphics, fewer buttons, and a far more limited memory and sound. It can be easy to forget this two decades after the DS brought N64 quality graphics to handheld, and seven years after the Switch brought near parity between handheld and home consoles.
But handhelds used to be significantly underpowered, and could only reliably play 2D pixel art games. That developers working with the Game Boy Color managed at all to make something that could be considered a "por🐻t" of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is impressive. Even if it is kind🍨 of a lie.
Game Boy Advance♊ Ports Now Feel Like Indie ꧅Darlings
Why play Starfield when you can play Max Payne's surprisingly 💟im꧅pressive Game Boy Advance port?
