2020's been a pretty torrid year by all accounts, but there's some light at the end of the tunnel – for those who love Nintendo's legendary Game Boy, at least.
Indie studio Spacebot Interactive has announced that it will ship a brand-new RPG for the monochrome marvel early next year, and that pre-orders are open now.
Boasting a turn-based combat system, weapon and armour upgrades, plenty of enemies, multiple endings and a 6-to-7 hour runtime, Dragonborne will be available in physical packaging (just like the old days!) and costs $54.73 / £42 / €46.46.
You can order your copy here, but be quick – pre-orders will close on November 30th.
Comments 43
This would be cool, but the margins involved in bringing it to the market put it out of my price range. Hope they can find the people for whom it isn't.
Almost everyone I know got like a year off paid vacation in 2020 so it really wasn't all that bad where I am from, it is all about perspective.
Pretty impressive looking game though.
Who's going to buy this?
FUS RO DAH!!
I wonder about the logistics of something like this.
I'm assuming that this isn't endorsed by Nintendo, and wouldn't appear in a 'complete' gameboy library?
I wish them well, but I don't have quite enough disposable income to be this frivolous. Or enough time for RPGs, unfortunately.
This does look amazing.
That combat looks dull and uninspired even compared to other gameboy games. Final Fantasy Legends looks more polished and enjoyable, and that came out like 8 months after the gameboy launched.
Erm... Zenimax/Bethesda is known to be profoundly, stupidly litigious. Considering their best-selling medieval RPG featured a protagonist known as "the Dragonborn", I wonder how this is going to play out...
The game looks nice. Classic. To be released for other platforms?
They also sell the rom file for a lot cheaper and a cheaper cartridge only physical version
Funny, I'm also planning to make an rpg for the game boy (color), hopefully in a few years the market won't already be saturated. 😂
Going by the 'flash to white' inbetween actions on screen, looks like this was made in GB Studio?
@COVIDberry It depends upon how much Wizards of the Coast wants to get involved. D&D's use of "Dragonborn" predates Bethesda's.
They could just port it to Switch and make even more money. Even better add a GBC, SGB, and GBP filter mode to the game if doing so and I would be impressed.
@retro_player_77, I don't know too much about coding so I can't say for sure, but I would imagine it'd be pretty difficult to port software that was built in an engine coded for the gameboy's hardware. That being said, other companies seemed to have been able to do that just fine with retro collections, so maybe!
Will you all be reviewing?
@COVIDberry The more certain trademark thing, and this is the second indie game I've been informed of in as many games to do it, is that while you can say "For the Nintendo Game Boy system" on the box in plain text, you can't put Nintendo's actual logos on the box (Nintendo, the official Game Boy logo, the Nintendo Seal, nor the Game Boy Game Pak) without Nintendo's permission.
I heard that recent Shantae reprint was careful to remove any official Nintendo trademarks from the boxart.
@Jokerwolf Almost everyone I know either lost their job or had to go to work in the pandemic anyway. So far 2 out of 10 of my company's employees got COVID. America!
Lateral thinking with withered technology
42 POUNDS complete? or £23 for cart only.
I know a lot goes into making the carts etc. But, in €, I'll pass.
Maybe if its on the Eshop I'll pick up a copy for maybe €5
Man if this wasnt as expensive...
I thought it's skyrim lmao
@Jokerwolf same here! For me personally it was a fantastic year! Got paid, stayed at home, family time as much as you can get, empty Supermarkets, gas was cheap af...
But this game is ***** to my ears!
@XBontendo That sucks, Canada may have it's issues but at least they help us out when we need it.
This soundtrack is horrible. Beside that it looks like a mix of Zelda (sprites and dungeons), mystic quest (characters) and pokemon (battle). I would prefer an action rpg on gameboy, but to each their own.
nearly $60? no thanks. looks intresting though.
Oh man if it weren’t for that steep price (and trust me, I get why that is), I’d jump on this.
I’ll keep my eye on it nonetheless. Maybe someday I’ll make a half-witted drunk purchase and have a nice surprise in the mail a few days later.
I guess I'm gonna have to replay Dragonheart on Game Boy, from the movie. Still have it, and played i a lot back in the day.
Seems very reasonably priced to me. A fully packaged indie cartridge for less than Nintendo sell discounted digital copies of their Switch games for even years after release.
Pretty good quality considering it doesn't have Nintendo's Official Seal of Quality
Just placed an order😁
Very cool, "greenboy" studio has a new one called "where is my body" coming for Christmas this year
£42...just like the old da...hang on, pretty sure Gameboy games were £20 back then.
@COVIDberry I mean D&D has a playable race called Dragonborn that existed prior to Skyrim's release. If Bethesda sues, Wizards can sue them.
I don't really understand projects like this. I mean, it's definitely cool, but why invest all that development effort and time into something that'll only be played by a few hundred people at best? From what I've read, developing on the Game Boy was a real pain, too, so it can't have been as smooth as making a game for a modern console.
I dunno, I guess I'm just not the demographic for this.
@SwitchVogel This game is made with GB Studio, which is much easier to use as something like Unity or the Unreal engine. On the other hand there are a lot of limitations, though, as the Game Boy can't display many sprites at once, for example.
And concerning your comment on the niche audience of Game Boy games: it's not too uncommon to work years on a game for current hardware and have near 0 sales. At least the Game Boy market is not saturated these days. 😉
Looks boring! We don't know how many HP are left, nor MP. The guy keeps on using spells to beat the enemies. He uses his sword once or twice for 5 minutes.
Checking the good ol' time great RPG released on Game Boy, could have helped develop something way better than that!
The only good thing is the dragon sprite.
@Luminous117 £42 for a Gameboy game! Christ 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😁
The game looks great, but it looks so much like a re-skin of Pokemon
Price seems pretty ok.
Games can't be as cheap in little Charges.
I’ve been collecting Gameboy games recently and was about to order this, but it was going to cost me $77 USD. Last new game I got was was DMG Deals Damage. I was disappointed with that game not even having a title screen. This looks better to me, but I don’t think I can afford it.
Are you telling me this is a game that will be released in 2021 for a handheld console that has been discontinued 17 years ago (not to mention a backwards-compatible handheld console that was discontinued 10 years ago)?
That being said, if we don't consider Nintendo-licensed games on the Game Boy, that means the Game Boy, which now has a game release life-cycle of 32 years, beats the Atari 2600's game release life-cycle of 31 years, unless there was a brand new Atari 2600 game released after 2008.
Gameboy is so old now this game looks like it would it do better if it was made for the switch or a current console.
@Steel76 If you're into game music or music in general you have to check out another new game called Dimeo's Jukebox. I saw it on Techmoan's video last week. The developer is a musician first and the game is about his album - pretty cool cause you get the album too, I already pre-ordered haha.. This is the review https://youtu.be/_isqd6X-F_Y
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