My childhood house is up on the market, so I spent the weekend excavating boyhood treasures and yeeting them right into a skip. Most of them, I am sorry to say, have been junk. There have been some pogs, just a few pale gentle toys, stacks of dog-eared Sonic the Comedian back-issues, multiple funfax, however little held a lot past sentimental worth. It was a sombre bit of private archaeology, all instructed, however there was a silver lining. On the backside of a field, glittering like diamonds, I discovered a stack of near-pristine Bit Generations video games for Gameboy Advance. 4 of the beauties! Dialhex, Boundish, Coloris and Soundvoyager.
If these aren’t ringing bells, I do not blame you. Bit Generations was a Japan-only sequence of seven video games, revealed by Nintendo manner again in 2006. All however one was developed by Skip Ltd, of Chibi Robo fame. They have been every little flights of fancy, introduced below the identify Digitylish, which I suppose is a portmanteau of ‘digital’ and ‘trendy’. Although that identify was swiftly dropped, it was apt. They only oozed model. The cartridges have been matte black plastic with shiny metallic labels. By GBA requirements, they felt costly. The packing containers have been eggshell white, the emblem emblazoned within the centre, with greater than a touch of Bauhaus. And so they have been simply barely smaller than regular GBA packing containers, and barely extra actual, wrought from exactly folded shiny cardstock. In brief, they have been espresso desk video games, made to take a seat delight of place in your fashionable front room. GBA video games for the artbook crowd. Thirty-two-bit objet d’artwork.
And the marketplace for this was… virtually zero. A couple of resurfaced within the West as digital downloads for the Wii and DS. The remainder by no means made it exterior Japan.
The video games themselves have been mini experiments. Recreation-jam-type-things which are ten-a-penny as of late on itch.io, however a lot rarer within the mid-noughties. And handled with virtually absurd reverence. Soundvoyager was the boldest. It is meant to be performed together with your eyes shut, navigating with solely stereo sound cues. As a result of the GBA SP did not have a headphone jack, and my adapter is lengthy misplaced, this one was a no-go for me, however Eurogamer’s personal Chris Donlan gave it a spin final yr and shared his impressions.
Boundish is a five-in-one package deal with 4 variants on Pong, and a rogue juggling sport thrown in for good measure. Every had an off-kilter all-caps title and a glitchy twist on the traditional pong formulation. POOL FLOWER is straight Pong however with translucent jelly blobs wandering the court docket. Hit them they usually flip stable, complicating the play discipline and gumming up your opponent’s motion. POWER SLIDER is pong on Venn-diagram rails, the place each gamers take positions on one in all two intersecting circles. BOX JUGGLING is a primary Recreation-&-Watch-like juggling minigame, but when a ball hits your head, you are briefly shocked. HUMAN LEAGUE, offers every participant two parallel Pong-paddles, strung collectively like marionette foosball. It seems to be pleasant and handles poorly.
The standout is WILD GO ROUND, the place each gamers have 360 diploma free motion across the edges of a vinyl document. When your paddle touches the ball, the document spins, matching your momentum, dashing up or slowing down the background music, and curving the ball’s path in unpredictable arcs. The controls are a sizzling mess and it is virtually unattainable to guess the place the ball will go subsequent however, truthfully, regardless of all that, it is a tiny triumph. These video games are finest performed with two folks, and are every fairly primary. However they’re made with love, ingenuity and the 32-bit soundtrack legitimately slaps.
Against this Dialhex – later launched as Rotohex on the Wii eshop – is much less zany. It is a stately match-six puzzle sport, performed in a hexagonal grid. Colored triangles fall from the highest then slip down the graceful sides. You rotate them with a hexagonal cursor, like spinning the dial of a rotary phone, making an attempt to match a full hexagon. It begins sluggish, then ups the pace and provides colors, till the march of entropy creates such a jumble you are compelled to scramble, thumb slipping off the D-pad, sweaty palms, utterly out of kilter with the breezy hotel-lobby soundtrack. It is a pretty factor actually, and the vibe is greater than a bit Lumines. Nevertheless it’s additionally fiddly, and the choice to restrict the color palette to pastel shades of inexperienced and orange is baffling. On the muted GBA display, they’re unreadable.
Final, we’ve Coloris, one other colour-match puzzler. Coloris performs like bejewelled. Solely, right here, as an alternative of swapping items round, you modify their colors. The colors are ordered on a gradient – from crimson to yellow, for instance. The cursor swaps randomly between the 2 extremes. So, if the cursor is crimson, you may morph any block one shade nearer to crimson, and if it is yellow it goes within the different course. Match three they usually evaporate. It sounds complicated, however in apply it is intuitive. Early ranges begin easy, with solely 4 tones. Later ranges have distracting patterns, extra tones and fewer distinct gradients. There are just a few themed ranges additionally, together with a Sakura palette that grades from mild pink to blushing purple, with dancing windblown petals.
Once more, Coloris will get fiddly. The pacing is erratic, the LCD panel is not contrasty sufficient to separate the varied tones and, even when it have been, the entire thing is a colourblind nightmare. However as earlier than, it is bought soul, and spark, and lovely sound design and, finally, the tough edges merely do not matter. As a result of these weren’t full video games. They have been experiments. Fantastic, pointless little follies, made for nobody and purchased by goodness is aware of whom. And I really like them for it.
Nintendo have not misplaced their style for the experimental, in fact, as Labo and Ring Match nicely attest. However, within the age of the digital obtain, the place Steam and Recreation Move rule the roost, and PlayStation 5s are bought with out disk drives, Bit Generations makes me keenly lament the sluggish obsolescence of good sport packing containers. Brick and mortar shops limp on, and Restricted Run Video games are doing their degree finest to maintain the artwork of the bodily sport alive, however these are made for hobbyists. Bit Generations, in a match of new-millennium optimism, pitched Gameboy Advance video games as govt workplace toys. Yuppie desk ornaments. Tiny artsy idea items. Digitylish! It was obvious, even then, that this market barely existed. However as of late it could not occur in any respect.
So, do you have to rush to eBay and purchase up the final remaining Bit Generations video games on import? At sixty kilos plus, they’re insubstantial. Thought of as video games alone, I am not even positive they’re value what I paid in 2006. Am I going to promote them, then? Not an opportunity. They’re beautiful little oddities. No! I’ll put them on show, two on the bookshelf, one on the mantlepiece and Boundish on the espresso desk. A speaking level, as all espresso desk objects needs to be, with a gameboy alongside to play it.
