Top game boy color games

While offering the same fun and excitement players have grown to love. Who knew stacking blocks were so much fun. This game was a blast to have inside the pocket machine. No need to buy a giant pinball machine for this classic. How charming. A definite hidden gem and late arrival to the Gameboy Color party.

Shantae was a colorful and adventurous platformer on the handheld. Shantae reinvented great ideas from past Nintendo titles and offers new inventive twists on the platform genre. Inventive gameplay moments such as turning into animals to solve puzzles, gather items, and reach hidden areas. Feel like crawling up on walls? Turn into a monkey. An obstacle in your way? Turn into an elephant.

These creative ideas add to the overall diverse strategy and fun of this game. Adding to the replay value are hidden collectibles and offering a day and night cycle for risk and reward situations and you have a fantastic gem of a game. Okay, you need a lot of batteries for this game. Plus a slew of new minigames, a stage redesign, and a newly added level to play on gave this Game Boy Color port something extra to keep longtime fans enthralled.

R-Type is one of the better-known names within that long and storied genre. This portable compilation for the series features two games that received welcome enhancements. And to the surprise of no one, those upgrades included the implementation of a nice color palette.

Shooting down countless waves of rival ships and massive aliens were definitely worth the price of admission back when R-Type DX released back in Since it came with a massive rumble pack inside it that offered force feedback during gameplay, the cartridge for this memorable portable pinball game added to the total weight of Game Boy Colors everywhere.

Rushmore of greatest Wario games ever made. The gimmick attached to taking different body forms after getting hit by certain enemies gave way to a fun level exploration focus. Wario Land 3 took the feeling of being a shameful treasure chest robber and made it feel oh so good.

Gotta give props to this game for featuring a pretty rad golfing minigame, too. Either game was brilliant in action and animated with quirky pixel perfection on the Game Boy Color, but owning both would reveal some real magic under the Nintendo hood. Using a password system, both games could communicate with each other and help create a more complete experience.

Finish the one game, and you'd get a password which could be used on the partner title to drastically change the journey and replace the Veran and Onox boss fight with a classic showdown against Ganon. There hasn't been another Zelda adventure like the Oracle games, but this pair of colorful siblings gave the Game Boy Color a terrific send-off just as the Game Boy Advance was preparing to hit the market. Golf on the go, and you didn't even need to pay membership fees or risk your access being revoked if you weren't properly dressed, Mario Golf is one of those titles that perfectly showed off what the Game Boy Color was capable of with its eye-catching colors, pick-up-and-play mentality, and tons of extras loaded into the cart memory.

Whether you were teeing off for a hole-in-one or measuring for a precise putt, Mario Golf was easily the best handheld golf game at the time. It was even better with the N64 connectivity that could give more established franchises a run for their money back then.

Serving up some more Mario-themed sports action on the Game Boy Color, Mario Tennis was notable for how sparingly it used its cast of Mushroom kingdom citizens.

While Mario and friends would appear in Exhibition mode and as the final challengers in this tennis showdown, the focus was more on growing your rookie sensation and investing ability points in their growth. The idea worked splendidly, and if you were attached to your tennis hero, you could even transfer them over to the N64 version of Mario Tennis for a more three-dimensional debut on the court.

Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation was one of the defining games of its time for good reason. This port was a surprisingly faithful handheld version of what made the game so successful, only stripped down to its classic roots so that it could work on the Game Boy Color. A perfect example of how a spin-off can and should strive to provide the same level of entertainment as the original title.

The Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid succeeded at providing a quality handheld spin-off experience, throwing an alternate timeline Snake back into action against an Outer Heaven separatist group, each operative having their own specialty and a ludicrous codename that only this series could get away with.

Not just a fun game to practice stealth and espionage tactics inside of, this version of Metal Gear Solid had an impressive story and plenty of bonus VR mission content to experiment with once the end credits had rolled. All that, on a single cartridge. Thankfully, you can grab it for cheap on 3DS Virtual Console these days. New objectives, new modes, new multiplayer mechanics, the ability to play with wonky Luigi physics, even new collectibles inserted into levels — this was a comprehensive overhaul of Super Mario Bros.

No awful voice samples! Toki Tori has gone on to have quite a rich and vibrant existence beyond the boundaries of the Game Boy Color, where it began life to tragic public indifference. A slow-paced but excellent little puzzle platformer, Toki Tori put a cap on the Game Boy's life by revisiting the genre that dominated the system's early years with style and sophistication.

With brilliant puzzle design and shockingly excellent graphics, Toki Tori was an unsung hero of the GBC. Originally designed for the classic Game Boy, Nintendo revisited it with a slightly revamped version when the Game Boy Color launched a year later.

Whichever system you play it on, though, Wario Land DX is one of the most amazing, innovative, inventive platformers ever designed. Throwing out all the rules of the genre — Wario can't die or even take damage — completely changes the nature of the Mario series into a grand puzzle game packed with secrets, alternate routes, and even hidden endings.

A masterpiece. As so often happens with Japanese systems, plenty of great games never quite left the motherland to grace American shores. The good news? Game Boy was a region-free console some retailers even sold Japanese Game Boy software!

Provided you can track them down, of course. While plenty of NES series made their way to Game Boy in various forms, The Battle of Olympus represents one of the rare instances in which a developer attempted to convert an NES game wholesale to the platform something that generally only happened with the more powerful Game Boy Color. Aside from the loss of color, this game is surprisingly faithful to the original version — no downscaled graphics, no streamlined play, just a monochrome NES game.

It's not quite as strong a remake as Capcom's conversion of Duck Tales, suffering from a moderate amount of slowdown, but the fact that it even happened and with such a solid Zelda II clone! There's something tragic about the character Chalvo, the eponymous star of Chalvo Originally slated to appear in a brilliant-looking Virtual Boy action puzzler called Bound High, Chalvo saw his moment in the sun snatched away when Bound High was cancelled due to the Virtual Boy flopping hard.

His creators then put him into a classic Game Boy puzzler called Chalvo 55, which was great and entertaining Poor Chalvo. While it's not exactly import-friendly thanks to its involved storyline, this interesting Japan-only RPG could be seen as laying the groundwork for Link's Awakening. A charming tale of a hapless frog prince trying to rescue a princess before his rival prince beats him to the task, the story doesn't take itself seriously yet has a lot of heart. The game design is interesting, too; rather than boring players with the details of RPG combat, battles play out automatically based on your strength and health versus that of your opponents.

Happily, a fan translation of the game showed up online a couple of years ago, so you do have an avenue available if you want to give it a go. Possibly the most expensive Game Boy release in the world — the Japanese version sells for hundreds of dollars, the European for thousands — Trip World would seem far too unassuming and humble to merit such value.

A curiously non-threatening platformer, it literally is a trip — a journey — through charming cartoon worlds in which few inhabitants are hostile or aggressive. Unless you get hung up on the sometimes tricky boss battles, you can easily complete Trip World in half an hour or so. Yet despite or because of this, the game has a wonderful, unique vibe to it — not to mention great graphics and sound.

While laughable by contemporary standards, X was a technical marvel in A true 3D game running on the humble Game Boy.