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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Was the Game Boy Color a successor to the original Game Boy?

 

Was the Game Boy Color a successor to the Game Boy?

Yes 42 48.84%
 
No, it was an upgrade 34 39.53%
 
No, it was a refinement 9 10.47%
 
Other, explain in the thread 1 1.16%
 
Total:86
Ganoncrotch on 13 July 2016

It was a successor without a doubt, the shape was the same but there is a huge difference in the graphics which some of the GBC exclusive games have

Seriously look at that gameplay, and think is there anything on the original Gameboy which comes even close to that level of detail or size of game world as the GBC also allowed more memory in the game carts, Alone in the Dark coming in at a giant 4MB of size, double the max which the Gameboy original allowed.

Also yeah... 400+ games which were not compatible with the original hardware GB puts this more in line with the Gameboy Advance over the GBC rather than comparing it to the DSi or N3DS in terms of developers actually moving onto this hardware and away from its older Green/Black Brother.



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S.Peelman on 13 July 2016

What about the DSi then? For those that say the exclusives make it a real successor, if you call the GameBoy Color a seperate generation so should you the DSi. Also, a sales number being available or not isn't relevant either, because we also know 3DSXL or even GameBoy micro sales numbers.

Nintendo says GameBoy Color is a variant of the GameBoy, and that's all we need to know. They have and are presenting it as one device as they do with DS/DSi and 3DS/n3DS.



Barkley on 13 July 2016
S.Peelman said:
What about the DSi then? For those that say the exclusives make it a real successor, if you call the GameBoy Color a seperate generation so should you the DSi. Also, a sales number being available or not isn't relevant either, because we also know 3DSXL or even GameBoy micro sales numbers.

Nintendo says GameBoy Color is a variant of the GameBoy, and that's all we need to know. They have and are presenting it as one device as they do with DS/DSi and 3DS/n3DS.

DSI has 6 exclusive retail titles.

GBC has 416 exclusive retail titles.

GBC is a successor, it is a 5th generation console, the Gameboy is a 4th generation console released almost 10 years prior.



Ganoncrotch on 13 July 2016
S.Peelman said:
What about the DSi then? For those that say the exclusives make it a real successor, if you call the GameBoy Color a seperate generation so should you the DSi. Also, a sales number being available or not isn't relevant either, because we also know 3DSXL or even GameBoy micro sales numbers.

Nintendo says GameBoy Color is a variant of the GameBoy, and that's all we need to know. They have and are presenting it as one device as they do with DS/DSi and 3DS/n3DS.

Kinect has exclusive titles to it, does that make Kinect a successor to the Xbox360?

G-Con45 has exclusive games on the PSone

G-Con2 Has exclusive games on the PS2

See... you should more so look at why those titles are exclusive on the DSi all 6 of them are because of things such as the camera on the system, basically no different from what Kinect adds to the x360 to allow it play Kinect exclusive games, if you look at the graphics of the Alone in the Dark Video I linked above... you can't surely imagine that running on the original Gameboy? or I could be wrong, what would you wager as the most graphical game the original Gameboy is capable of? outside of the obvious hardware limit on storage being half that found in the GBC so if there was a lovely looking game it is going to be very limited in size still.

Before even looking for said games btw, should be noted that the GBC processor is almost double the speed of the original system complete with 3x the system ram (and having dedicated vram rather than just system ram) so I think the task would be similar to finding a game on the NES which looks better than what the SNES can offer. (even more so because the NES > SNES leap didn't double the cpu clock)



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S.Peelman on 13 July 2016
Barkley said:
S.Peelman said:
What about the DSi then? For those that say the exclusives make it a real successor, if you call the GameBoy Color a seperate generation so should you the DSi. Also, a sales number being available or not isn't relevant either, because we also know 3DSXL or even GameBoy micro sales numbers.

Nintendo says GameBoy Color is a variant of the GameBoy, and that's all we need to know. They have and are presenting it as one device as they do with DS/DSi and 3DS/n3DS.

DSI has 6 exclusive retail titles.

GBC has 416 exclusive retail titles.

GBC is a successor, it is a 5th generation console, the Gameboy is a 4th generation console released almost 10 years prior.
Ganoncrotch said:

Kinect has exclusive titles to it, does that make Kinect a successor to the Xbox360?

G-Con45 has exclusive games on the PSone

G-Con2 Has exclusive games on the PS2

See... you should more so look at why those titles are exclusive on the DSi all 6 of them are because of things such as the camera on the system, basically no different from what Kinect adds to the x360 to allow it play Kinect exclusive games, if you look at the graphics of the Alone in the Dark Video I linked above... you can't surely imagine that running on the original Gameboy? or I could be wrong, what would you wager as the most graphical game the original Gameboy is capable of? outside of the obvious hardware limit on storage being half that found in the GBC so if there was a lovely looking game it is going to be very limited in size still.

Before even looking for said games btw, should be noted that the GBC processor is almost double the speed of the original system complete with 3x the system ram (and having dedicated vram rather than just system ram) so I think the task would be similar to finding a game on the NES which looks better than what the SNES can offer. (even more so because the NES > SNES leap didn't double the cpu clock)

6, plus a couple hundred digital ones, those are always forgotten.

Besides, what's the cut-off point then? 1 exclusive? 5 exclusives? 10? 100? The type of game doesn't matter either, there's Gameboy Color games that couldn't run on normal Gameboy, but Xenoblade can't run on normal 3DS either, so again; where's the line? Call one of them seperate generations, then call of them that. And again, Nintendo doesn't do that themselves with any of them.



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Ganoncrotch on 13 July 2016
S.Peelman said:
Barkley said:

DSI has 6 exclusive retail titles.

GBC has 416 exclusive retail titles.

GBC is a successor, it is a 5th generation console, the Gameboy is a 4th generation console released almost 10 years prior.
Ganoncrotch said:

Kinect has exclusive titles to it, does that make Kinect a successor to the Xbox360?

G-Con45 has exclusive games on the PSone

G-Con2 Has exclusive games on the PS2

See... you should more so look at why those titles are exclusive on the DSi all 6 of them are because of things such as the camera on the system, basically no different from what Kinect adds to the x360 to allow it play Kinect exclusive games, if you look at the graphics of the Alone in the Dark Video I linked above... you can't surely imagine that running on the original Gameboy? or I could be wrong, what would you wager as the most graphical game the original Gameboy is capable of? outside of the obvious hardware limit on storage being half that found in the GBC so if there was a lovely looking game it is going to be very limited in size still.

Before even looking for said games btw, should be noted that the GBC processor is almost double the speed of the original system complete with 3x the system ram (and having dedicated vram rather than just system ram) so I think the task would be similar to finding a game on the NES which looks better than what the SNES can offer. (even more so because the NES > SNES leap didn't double the cpu clock)

6, plus a couple hundred digital ones, those are always forgotten.

Besides, what's the cut-off point then? 1 exclusive? 5 exclusives? 10? 100? The type of game doesn't matter either, there's Gameboy Color games that couldn't run on normal Gameboy, but Xenoblade can't run on normal 3DS either, so again; where's the line? Call one of them seperate generations, then call of them that. And again, Nintendo doesn't do that themselves with any of them.

But do you think that the GBA was the same generation then as the original Gameboy? because it could play all of the GB/GBC titles but it also had its own software line? Again that system doubles the CPU clock from 8mhz up to 16mhz and had 7 times the memory in place of the GBC.

See having backwards compatibility with the older gen 4 hardware of the Gameboy line shouldn't make you think the Gameboy color isn't a 5th generation machine, or that the GBA isn't a 6th gen one. Just because the shape of the plastic casing changes between the GBC and GBA the software/hardware upgrade which happened there is the exact same.



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Ganoncrotch on 13 July 2016

4 pages of replies and just 7 votes in the poll, even the poll doesn't know :D



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Mr Puggsly on 14 July 2016
Shadow1980 said:
Mr Puggsly said:

No, that extra power was used to make more advanced games and GBC only carts could use more storage space (a huge advantage).

If the extra power was just for more colors, there wouldn't have been so many GBC exclusives.

Yeah. I forgot it had a fair amount of games that didn't work on the older models, like 400+, a lot more than the DSi or New 3DS would get. Still, I'd argue that even all that exclusive content doesn't quite make it a true next-gen successor to the Game Boy. It's still fundamentally the same system, just upgraded. Even Nintendo lumps it together with the older models in their shipment data; in fact, we don't even know what portion of Game Boys sold were Colors outside of Japan (we only know the Japanese figures because of old Famitsu data). So, between the specs and Nintendo's own intent, it was at best a pseudo-successor. That makes it a rather odd duck amongst game systems, but there's nothing else that quite did the same thing. The closest I can think of was the Sega Mark III/Master System, which replaced the SG-1000 and had a bunch of games exclusive to itself, but was basically just an upgraded version of the SG-1000, though a lack of relevant data means there's no way of telling if Sega treated both as part of the same product family.

While GBC didn't get the same kind of push as a new platform, but it was totally a successor. It rendered the original GB useless for many major releases.

I mean c'mon, if you wanted to play the new Zelda and Pokemon but had to buy a new console to play them, then how is it not successor?



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Wyrdness on 14 July 2016

It was actually an upgrade to buy time for an actual GB successor but it took off well and the successor ran into development problems causing delays until being redesigned as the GBA.



Jumpin on 14 July 2016

It was an upgrade. It was a Gameboy with an added multi-colour palette.



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