http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/balloon+kid

Is this true? Why did Japan get this game in color and we didn't? No fair! :/

Japan got Balloon Fight on the Game Boy Color. America got Balloon Kid on the Game Boy.

Balloon Fight was a Japanese exclusive so it must be because Nintendo America doesn't want to start releasing import games yet, plus they already have a reluctance to release Game Boy Color games right now.

Actually, Japan never got the original black and white Balloon Kid. Instead they got a Famicom game called "Hello Kitty World" which was the same game only with Hello Kitty characters instead of Alice.

So then later they made Balloon Kid GB and released it only in Japan.

Still doesn't sound fair to me. Why is Nintendo reluctant to release GameBoy Color games?! What gives? Wouldn't they want us to be more enticed to buy a product than not? I hope they release something in the near future (and update, perhaps) that allows us to see these games in color (a toggle button) kind of like the GameBoy Color did in the past.

To be fair, there are considerably fewer Game Boy Color games than there are classic Game Boy games - around 500 GBC games to what I think was around 800 GB games - and a lot of those will be licensed games or titles which, for whatever reason, can't be emulated to the Virtual Console. Given that, it's much more sensible of Nintendo to wait a while to start releasing GBC games.

I mean, Japan's got 30 VC games now - about to get its 31st - and only three of those are GBC games. Even then, only Link's Awakening DX ever launched outside Japan.

Go knock on Reggie's door and ask him

Color is more preferable and so if they released GBC games in equal numbers to GB games, people would likely ignore the GB games. I'm guessing they just want to get the b&w GB games out the way first before they move on to GBC, Game Gear, NES, GBA, TurboGrafx etc...

As individual publishers, all but Nintendo have very few games they can release for the b&w Game Boy if we don't count the licensed games. Capcom for example only have Bionic Commando, Street Fighter II and Mega Man II - V left to release in America.

Apparently, colour hurts the eyes of the VC team in Nintendo of Europe and USA. They put Zelda on because everyone wanted it, but now they feel their work is done.

Because Nintendo is Nintendo, who believes we should ALWAYS get the domestic version even if there's a better foreign version.
(aside from the NES Ninja Gaiden oddity, PAL regions the NTSC version of the first game, and then didn't get the second game at all.)

Why don't they let us change the color palettes on the Game Boy games like you could with the Game Boy Color and I'm not talking about changing it from black and white to green I mean like it adds colors.

This.

That would be an amazingly enjoyable idea. Problem is I dont see Nintendo ever bothering to add such a feature.

The Gameboy advance did this if you held certain buttons when you started up Gameboy games it would start up with different color palettes. I really don't know why Nintendo took this cool little feature out. I mean it has stereoscopic 3D, and yet they don't let us play gameboy games in color which was an old welcome feature from past systems.