May 27, 2019 at 16:32

Cartridge Versatility: Sensors in Games for Game Boy

Original author: Mark Christian
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By the late 90s, most gaming home consoles switched from cartridges to optical discs. However, most portable consoles, with a few exceptions, never switched to drives; they continued to work on cartridges and gradually migrated towards downloadable content 1 . The cartridges were quite small, containing only the essentials for the game, and they did not need to precisely position the laser on a tiny rotating disk in a frequently moved device. Over time, progress in miniaturization has allowed even more advanced hardware features to fit into the cartridge. This trend has gradually led to the appearance of cartridges with sensors that expand their capabilities.

In this article, we will look at three cartridges for three different generations of the Nintendo Game Boy platform, each of which contains additional equipment. These unsuccessful cartridges allow us to understand where, according to Nintendo, the technology should have led them.

This is the third article about curious video game cartridges. Translation of the first and second: 1 , 2 .

Game boy camera


The Game Boy Camera, launched in 1998 for the first Game Boy, was an unusual-shaped cartridge containing a full-featured digital camera and memory for thirty photos. Despite the fact that the resulting photos were microscopically small and grainy by modern standards, at the turn of the century, the Game Boy Camera attracted a lot of attention and was even recognized as the Guinness Book of Records in the 1999 edition by the smallest digital camera 2 .

Software for Game Boy Camera was created by Game Freak. This name may be familiar to Pokémon fans: Game Freak is the main developer of the Pokémon series of games; she developed all games from Pokémon Red and Blue (1996) to Sword andShield (coming out at the end of 2019). Creating software for the Game Boy Camera is a strange page in the history of 3 companies, all other projects of which were versions of an extremely popular franchise.

In keeping with the style of the gaming platform for which Game Boy Camera was created, it had a fun user interface that resembled the aesthetics of the WarioWare Nintendo series . Each screen was decorated with chaotic symbols, and almost everything in the interaction moved and twitched. The cartridge allowed the owners not only to take pictures, but also to decorate them with stickers and scribbles that looked as crazy as anything else.

Although at the time of the release of Game Boy Camera, digital photography was not something completely unknown, until cameras appeared on smartphones 4, who opened the door for amateur photography, there were still a few years. And at this time, the Game Boy Camera was a relatively inexpensive medium for research and creativity, which became an interesting look at the origin of the movement, which later had a huge impact on society.

Several years ago, blogger David Friedman shared treasure trove of photographs of New York, made Game Boy Camera in 2000 5 . It is a wonderful, plain and pixelated time capsule; Flickr also has other sample photos from Game Boy Camera 6 .

Given the absence of any sequels, it is logical to assume that the Game Boy Camera did not become a terrific hit for Nintendo. However, photography was obviously a company weakness anyway: the Nintendo Wii, released in 2006, had a digital photo gallery application, while DSi (2009), 3DS (2011), and Wii U (2012) had built-in cameras. And although most people today do not see much benefit in low-quality low-resolution black and white cameras, the Game Boy Camera continues to attract attention. Inventive users have come up with many ways to transfer images from the camera to computer 7 , although for me it was always easy for me to simply take a photo of the Game Boy screen using a smartphone.

Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble


Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble was the first example of a new kind of game input built into the Game Boy 8 cartridge . This hot pink cartridge, released for Game Boy Color in 2000, had a built-in accelerometer that allowed (or rather required) to control Kirby tilts of the Game Boy in different directions.

The gameplay itself is approximately similar to an infinite number of slope-driven mobile games of the late 2000s - a prisoner in a Kirby ball must make his way to the exit, collecting objects along the way. Controlling a real-world object instead of a character gave the game a touch of novelty, and overall it received a supportive welcome. But despite the good reviews, no games with an accelerometer were released for Game Boy Color (however, two such games appeared on Game Boy Advance 9)


Players themselves had to calibrate the accelerometer.

Tumble was created by HAL Laboratory, a 10 partner developer that has had close ties to Nintendo for many years. Satoru Iwata, president of the HAL Laboratory, got a position at Nintendo around the time this game was released, and two years later even became president of this company. Given the order of events, we can assume that it was Iwata who brought Nintendo an interest in gesture control. In the end, the Wii launched in 2006 depended entirely on gesture control, not to mention accelerometers similar to those used in Tumble . Of course, we are not obliged to take this assumption at face value - for example, the first iPhone released in 2007, tooHe actively used accelerometers, which led to the emergence in several years of his life a huge shaft of motion-controlled mobile games. Perhaps then the time has come for the idea of ​​controlling motion using accelerometers.

WarioWare: Twisted!


The second part of the long series of WarioWare, released in 2004, WarioWare: Twisted! for Game Boy Advance, it had not only its own input type, but also a special output method: a gyroscope determined how the player holds the console, and a small vibromotor created a noisy tactile feedback. Although the vibration function was not a novelty, it was a gyroscope 11 .

Like its predecessor, Twisted! was a collection of so-called "microgames" - small tasks that needed to be explained, understood and completed in just a few seconds. Most of the microgames in this part of the game used a gyroscope, which forced players to turn and turn the console in conditions of strict time limits. Twisted!Nintendo turned out to be a big hit and the first step in transforming the concept of WarioWare from one successful game into a long series. Fifteen years after its appearance, six more sequels were released.


One of the microgames: Vario’s curved spine needs to be replaced.

Twisted! , like Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble , can be considered the first steps on the road to creating a Wii. A few years after the Wii was released, its accelerometer-based controllers were supplemented with the MotionPlus gyroscope. Accelerometers used by Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble and the first Wii controllers measure acceleration. They are useful for measuring orientation changes or sudden movements, but cannot determine how the player is holding the item. Gyroscopes do not measure movement, but orientation, which provides much more precise control of movement. If you combine these two types of sensors, as was done in MotionPlus, you can implement very precise motion control.

Twisted! was the only WarioWare game with specialized equipment, but experimentation with gameplay styles continued: on Touched! (2004) using the DS stylus, Smooth Moves (2006) using Wii motion control, and Snapped! (2008) - DSi camera. The WarioWare series has become a kind of test platform for curious gameplay ideas, and experiments with new types of input began precisely with it.

Conclusion


Each of these cartridges brought something new and interesting to its console, but the integration of additional equipment into the cartridges had its drawbacks. Obviously, these cartridges were more expensive to manufacture, that is, additional equipment had to justify itself. In fact, this happened quite rarely, but sometimes such experiments could lead to a new and even unique gameplay.

In the next, last article of this series, we will talk about completely non-standard cartridges that allowed players to communicate with the outside world.

Notes


  1. Sony PlayStation Portable is the only portable system known to me for which optical discs ( Universal Media Discs ) were used as media .
  2. You can buy a copy of the 1999 edition of the Guinness Book of Records for about $ 4 on eBay, or take Petapixel for a word .
  3. Of the 45 Gamefreak games released since the company was founded in 1989 until the end of 2018, two-thirds are related to the Pokémon franchise.
  4. There is a wide selection of devices, from high-quality products like BitBoy to homemade products, for example, such an Arduino-based solution . Fans of vintage hardware can even buy MadCatz Camera Link , a device released at a time when the Game Boy Camera was still on the market.
  5. The history of camera phones is amazing. Despite the fact that they spread everywhere only by the mid-2000s, a fully implemented camera phone was patented back in 1997 .
  6. David Friedman shared his discovery in 2014 on a blog , and kindly allowed me to use one of the photos in my post. Thanks, David.
  7. Flickr appeared a few years after the heyday of the Game Boy Camera, but the GameBoy Camera photo collection still has many wonderful photos. As far as I can tell, this 2004 Christmas tree photo is the first Flickr shot taken by Game Boy Camera.
  8. Some might argue that this title should be conferred on Game Boy Pocket Sonar, a fish detection device sold only in Japan, but since the sonar was not used to control games built into the cartridge, it cannot be considered an input device.
  9. Koro Koro Puzzle Happy Panechu! (2002) and Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (2004), published by Nintendo.
  10. The partner - developer ( second-party developer) is a gaming studio that creates games exclusively for the owner of a particular platform.
  11. The Vigilante 8 port , released in 1998 for Game Boy Color , was the first game for the Game Boy console to feature vibration.

References


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