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SUPER SMASHING GREAT BOY
One of Nintendo’s weirder ideas, and one which
the company has just revived for the Gamecube/GBA, was the Super
Game Boy. In 1991, just as the first wave of popularity for the
original mono version of the little handheld was beginning to wane,
Nintendo came up with a strange piece of hardware that plugged into
the cartridge slot of a SNES console and enabled gamers to do
something which had previously been the preserve of lucky magazine
reviewers – play Game Boy games on a TV screen.
Not only could you now enjoy your GB games in
big-o-vision, but the Super Game Boy also offered a variety of
cosmetic enhancements. Games now came with elaborate screen
“frames”, but more excitingly – these were the days long before the
GB Color, remember – also offered rudimentary colour schemes, which
could even be customised to your personal taste, so if you wanted to
make Mario into a little black chap in Rupert-the-Bear dungarees,
you could. You weirdo.
Still more impressively, some Game Boy games
even squeezed proper SNES titles into the tiny GB cartridge
alongside the GB game itself. Space Invaders, when played through
the Super Game Boy, offered not only the enhanced Game Boy version
of the game, but also a full SNES port with full-blown SNES graphics
and sound. (The SNES version of Space Invaders was never released in
the UK, in fact, so the GB cart with a Super Game Boy was the only
way you could legally play it here.)
Most GB emulators overlook the features of the
Super Game Boy, but at last there are a couple which do this bizarre
peripheral justice, Best of them is BGB, a well-implemented GB emu
in its own right but which also offers full SGB functionality. Only
about 70 games ever took full advantage of the SGB’s powers, but all
the ones that did offer up examples of the kind of loving attention
to detail that you only ever seem to find in Japan.
VISUAL PINBALL UPDATE
For much of 2002, the Visual Pinball community
was hijacked and crippled by an obnoxious bunch of wreckers who
drove away most of the scene’s most talented authors in an
acrimonious ego war which looked like it might destroy the superb
pinball emulator altogether. Happily, the crisis has recently been
averted by the creation of a new home for the VP community, to which
most VP authors have now returned, and from where they’ve been
bestowing fantastic recreations of arcade pins on grateful
silver-ball fans once again. Pinball lovers should hurry along
there.
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