Last week was an exciting moment for the Shantae series - with the release of the original Game Boy Color game (including the enhanced GBA version) on the Nintendo Switch.
Interestingly, the lead developer behind the Switch port turned out to be game developer and YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer. While this was revealed earlier in the month, he's now shared a full in-depth video of how it all went down.
This video explains how the project got off the ground - including MVG's original exchanges with Limited Run Games in 2019 after they saw his video of the original Diablo up and running on the Switch.
He also goes into detail about Game Boy emulation, the testing phases, the removal of the Nintendo and Capcom licenses on boot-up (as these companies are no longer involved), quality of life enhancements and the addition of the GBA version.
It's well worth a look if you recently added this game to your Switch eShop library, or even if you're an aspiring developer.
[source youtu.be]
Comments 17
so maybe more gb/gbc/gba games coming to switch now that it has a engine?
Not familiar with this game (unfortunately) but wouldn't emulating the "GBA" features (considering GBA's GBC support is still hardware emulation) be just acknowledging one byte sent by the console's boot ROM to indicate it's running on a GBA?
The rest of it would be simply emulating code that is already present in the game, wouldn't it?
Still impressive if the game runs well, as I've heard that, being one of the last significant GBC games produced (if one that sadly, many people like me saw a billion times at the game store back in the day and passed up on the assumption it was one of the billion licensed shovelware games that seemed to dominate the GBC's small library), it was one of the more technically demanding.
Oh boy, can't wait for the physical copies to go for just as much as the original GBC cartridge. I'm just glad it has a digital release so I don't have to buy a limited release version of it.
That's pretty cool
@tonyp1987
Maybe. The question is though: which gb/gbc/gba games would those be? Personally can't think of any. Well, any through Limited Run Games that is. You never know what Nintendo itself might do.
Both MVG and LRG have said the plan is to port more Game Boy / Game Boy Color games to Nintendo Switch. Limited Run has already licensed and printed a few physical Game Boy and NES re-releases, mostly from D-tier publishers like Jaleco and Accolade, so I'd say it's likely they'd start there.
Given their growing relationships with bigger publishers like Konami, my hope is we'll some really great Game Boy and GBC games in the months to come.
@tonyp1987 I'd love Donkey Kong 94 on Switch. People don't know how great that game is and that many of Mario's moves in 64 come from it! A remake would be even better.
What MVG doesn’t know about emulation and coding isn’t worth knowing
"So anyway, I started porting"
Seriously though, stellar effort.
@JJtheTexan My hope would be the Mega Man Xtreme games.
Why are some of the quality of life enhancements they did? Just curious.
@Clyde_Radcliffe amazing game. I built a mini bartop arcade just for it out of a broken coleco
I really really love what they did here.
While the first Shantae game may be a technical masterpiece, the gameplay really isn't.
Nevertheless, it made the entire Shantae series complete on the Switch.
@AG_Awesome according to the video, they provided a few save state slots, arranged the controls to be consistent with the rest of the series, and adjusted on-screen control prompts.
@sdelfin Making the buttons look like the Switch's?
@noswitchbutidc that appears to be among the changes. I see a reference to pressing + at the title screen instead of start. I'm not sure if they had to do much else with that, but they also made changes to the menu controls. You can get a better idea of what they did by looking at the video at about the 9:38 mark. It's a quick explanation.
@JJtheTexan I'm suprised they didn't do a second edition of the Castlevania collection. Like god damn, lemme play the GBA/DS/SoTN games
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