The Switch’s long-awaited Game Boy library is here, and unlike its terrible N64 games launch, the emulation is excellent.
During yesterday’s Nintendo Direct, Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles arrived for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, while the Game Boy Advance selection arrived for those in the more expensive sub-expansion pack. Each platform has a small but impressive library of titles, with the promise of some absolute classics to come, from the Pokémon Trading Card Game RPG to Golden Sun.
Game Boy emulation is a tricky subject, and it’s clear that Nintendo went above and beyond for these releases. For example, the original Game Boy Advance screens were notoriously dim, so game developers often compensated by making their art bright and colorful, but those colors can look garish when viewed on a modern backlit screen. Here, Nintendo focused on properly color correcting GBA games, while maintaining the intent of the original graphics.
Original Game Boy games offer three display types, so you can replicate how these titles would have looked in the sickly green of the original system, the crisp black and white of the Game Boy Pocket, or with the soft coloring of the Game Boy. . Color. There’s also a screen filter mode called ‘reproduce the classic feel’, which overlays an authentic pixel grid, just as you’d see on the original screens.
There’s also an even more impressive absurd technical detail in this ‘classic feel’ option. You see, the original Game Boy display clocked in at 59.7 frames per second, a little less than the standard 60 frames per second of most modern displays. You’d expect a modern Game Boy emulator to just speed up games by a few percent to make up the difference, and while that’s fine in most cases, it can break some subtle graphical effects.
It’ll be hard to see at 30 frames per second, but Nintendo has included an option to enable the Game Boy’s lower screen refresh rate. The developers used it to turn flashing sprites, like the Chain Chomp here, into transparent sprites! I love watching it! pic.twitter.com/CZ27Fo74aWFebruary 9, 2023
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Enabling the Game Boy Screen Filter also causes these games to run at their native speed of 59.7 frames per second. As Jordan Starkweather points out on Twitter, you can quickly see the difference with the Chain Chomp in Link’s Awakening. With the default display mode, the chain seems to go in and out of a blinking state every few seconds as time goes in and out of sync. With the filter on, the flicker is kept constant, leaving the chain transparent, as it should be.
There’s another place where Nintendo has gone further as well. The GBA version of Super Mario Bros. 3 was compatible with the old e-Reader accessory, allowing you to scan physical cards which would unlock new original levels for the game. These levels are automatically unlocked here. They were also carried over for the Wii U Virtual Console version of the game, but it’s great to see them still around.
Most of the previous official Switch emulators worked well, albeit quite basic, with minimal filtering and scaling options. The N64 emulator, however, launched in pretty bad shape, with no regard for the transition to the modern platform and major graphical issues in games like Ocarina of Time. Patches have improved some of these issues, and while N64 emulation in general has always been tricky, Switch’s N64 games have often been a stark downgrade from how they presented on Virtual Console for the first time. Wii and Wii U.
That’s why it’s so good to see Nintendo go further with this Game Boy emulator. While some may balk at the thought of paying an expensive subscription to access some very old games, Nintendo’s premium treatment of these classics goes a long way to easing the pain.
It’s never a bad time to review the best gameboy games all time.