Reviews of Zelda Oracle of Ages, Go Go Tank & how to add light to your Game Boy Color.
Episode 5 of Game Boy Crammer. I’ve got reviews of Zelda, Oracle of Ages, and Go! Go! Tank. Also in the hardware section, I’m gonna take the front light from a Game Boy Advance, and put it inside a Game Boy Color to make a Game Boy Color light.
The Legend of Zelda, Oracle of Ages. This game came out in 2001. It was in February 2001 in Japan, May 2001 in North America, and October 2001 in Europe.
And it came out exclusively for Game Boy Color. You couldn’t play this on an old Game Boy. And it had just a beautiful color palette, and it took advantage of the faster processor in the Game Boy Color. The timing of this was difficult, because this came out just when Game Boy Advance came out. If you play this on the Game Boy Advance, apparently it looks a little different.
I didn’t play it on the Game Boy Advance, so I don’t know. And there’s apparently some different kind of shop available. They wanted to port the original Legend of Zelda to Game Boy Color. Flagship was a subsidiary of Capcom. This company, this was the first time Capcom had made Zelda games, and they were supposed to port the original Legend of Zelda to Game Boy Color.
And then they were going to have a three-game series, which was the original Legend of Zelda and two other games to make like a Triforce, right? Three sides. But they didn’t do the other one, so we have Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages. They came out at the same time, so it was a weird thing, having two games coming out at the same time, and the games have a link system.
So what happens is, you play these games to the end, and then when you get to the end, they give you a special password. A long password. You have to make sure when you get to the end of this game, you write everything down exactly. When you start the next game, you have a chance to put your password in, and when you do that, you get to bring some of the stuff from the previous game.
Your weapons, not all the weapons, you bring some weapons and rings. So rings are the little things that modify your character, so you can have extra strength and healing power and all kinds of stuff. You get to bring those with you. That’s really nice. And it changes the storyline a little bit in the second game.
It doesn’t matter which one you play first. You can play Oracle of Seasons or Oracle of Ages first. They both link together. If you do play Oracle of Ages first, it’s more of a puzzle game. Like, they’re more puzzle elements to the bosses, where Oracle of Seasons is more of an action fighting kind of thing.
Um, not night and day, but it does focus more on puzzles in Oracle of Ages. It gets a little confusing sometimes. There’s some tricky, tricky puzzles you really have to think about. Whereas Oracle of Seasons, you probably won’t have to look up for any help online. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s more of surviving than difficult bosses.
Um, Oracle of Ages, difficulty-wise, it’s a pretty tough Zelda game. It’s not one of the toughest ones I’ve ever played, but the final boss, they always, in these games, sometimes the final bosses are a pushover. This one, it’s not. If you don’t have any rings and you don’t have the special sword, you’re going to have a lot of difficulty.
I’ve played for hours getting, like, one second away from finishing that boss and dying. It’s just, you know, the balance in these games is so well done that it’s really, really hard to beat some of these bosses. There’s no pushovers in this game, except right at the beginning. And as far as the storyline goes, this is a time travel game.
There have been some other ones. But, you know, it’s the kind of thing where there’s two versions of the map. There’s the future and there’s the past. If you move something in the past, it’ll affect the future. So there’s a lot of puzzles where you have to figure out, oh, I can’t climb up on this thing, I’ve got to go on the past, plant a seed, it grows a little tree, and I can climb the tree.
That kind of stuff all over the place. I’ve got the Japanese version. I did have to look up some help online because, you know, even though I can read some Japanese, Zelda games, the characters tend to blab on and on about things that don’t really matter. And then when things do matter, they’re very vague about it, and a little riddle. It’s not straightforward enough.
Like some older RPGs, there was no subtlety. So you can follow along pretty easily. But, you know, my Japanese isn’t good enough to pick up the subtleties of Zelda. So that made it a little more difficult. I got the English version for Oracle of Seasons. There’s not any huge gameplay differences between this and most other 2D Zelda games.
Same kind of weapons, generally the same kind of stuff going on. I don’t think there’s anything really different. But the balance is really good. It’s a top-notch Zelda game. It’s a little bit like the Minish Cap on Game Boy Advance in its polish. And even the graphic design looks very similar. Because, you know, you don’t have to deal with the original Game Boy kind of palette limitations.
We’ve got enough colors to deal with. They use the colors really well. In the cinematic scenes, they’ve got these beautiful full-color pictures and parallax background stuff. It’s just beautiful. The music is wonderful. It’s repetitive like all Zelda games, but, you know, when you hear that music again, it just brings you right back.
It’s so beautiful. And the sound effects are classic, classic, putery-sounding sound effects. What I like about it is it has that… It still sounds like the original Legend of Zelda, the Super Nintendo version. It has the same kind of bloopy sound effects you just get used to. You know, the sound of opening a treasure chest just sounds right.
There’s nothing in this game I felt like I was annoyed by. The puzzles, there’s no really stupid puzzles I could think of. You know, sometimes there’s a puzzle that you’d never guess in a million years. Yeah, okay, there’s a part where there’s something underwater that you really have to look around for, so you’ll know what I mean when you get there.
It’s like, how would you find this for that little help? But if you do look around in the water at a certain part, you’ll find something important. They’ve got one of these trading games like they have. You’ve seen them in lots of other Zelda games, probably, where you have to take an item and you trade it with someone else, and they’re like, oh, I really need this other item, and you take it to them, and most of them you can kind of figure out on your own.
I did finally get to the upgraded sword, but I had to go and cheat and find out how to do it. It was, and it’s worth it to get just to finish off some of the later bosses. They’re really tough, but the rings really make the biggest difference. So instead of an ocarina in this game to travel through time, you have a harp.
You play this harp, you learn a few different songs. Don’t worry, you don’t have to memorize the songs, and then you can travel through time. Otherwise, you have to use these time portals at fixed locations. So the puzzles get more complicated when you can travel anywhere. This is a game you have to have in your collection.
It’s not that cheap. You will have to replace the battery. This battery is probably going to die any second. I played it actually with the original battery, but I played it in the summer of 2012, so I was pushing my luck. You know, that game is getting pretty old. So you probably want to replace the battery before you start playing, because you don’t want to lose it in the middle of your game.
Go online, see what you can find. It’s not cheap. People know this game is worth something, but it’s not $100 either. Get both while you’re at it, because you’re going to want to play the other one right after you finish it, so you can try all those passwords. You know, I think the most remarkable thing about this game is how few people played it.
Those are kind of the ones people missed. You know, a lot of people who play Zelda, they played everything except these two, just because of the timing. You know, who had a Game Boy Advance in 2001 that wanted to buy new Game Boy Color games. It just didn’t really make sense, right? You wanted to buy Game Boy Advance games at that point.
If you missed it, you really missed out. Go back and play it. Go! Go! Tank. Copia Systems, released in North America by Electro Brain, came out in Japan in 1990, and North America in 1991. It’s kind of an action strategy game and it’s hard! Oh man, it’s hard. It’s not just that it’s hard, just playing one level of this game will leave you exhausted. It’s as fun as trying to thread a needle while riding on bull kind of thing. You’ve got a tank on the ground that’s rolling around that you don’t control, and it can climb over, let’s say, one single block.
Okay, but anything else that’s gonna stop and turn around go the other way, and you need it to get to the right side of the map, this long scrolling map, but you’re flying a plane with a gun and a hook. You hook it onto the pieces, you can grab a block, and then you hit B to let go, so you can drop them. So this way you can move blocks around, so you can help this tank climb up this, you know, make like a set of stairs sometimes to make it climb up. It can drop down, I don’t think you can drop down too far. There’s no damage from the tank from dropping it. Anyway, and then it will keep going, you have to get it to the end of the level. Now, at the end of the level, just to make things worse, there are guns shooting at you. So even the first level is very, very difficult. It’s gonna make you sweat. At least it made me sweat. Oh man, I was, my hand ached at the end of it. I had to restart about five times because it kept crashing into stuff. I mean, you’re flying a plane and shooting and picking up blocks and dropping them with precision, and plus trying to figure out how to solve this level, and then there’s guns shooting at you. That’s just the first level, a plane. Oh, and you can control the speed of the plane by going left and right, or going up and down to descend or descend. Big deal. And then you can fire bombs. Bombs that don’t even go straight, so you have to kind of guess, oh, I’m still traumatized. And then the next level, you’ve got an even more difficult little puzzle, and then after that, you’ve got birds that show up, you’ve got helicopters shooting at you and blimps. Just to make matters, like it’s so hard. It’s so hard as it is, and then like a blimp will just kill you. If your tank ends up hitting stuff too much, it’ll lose health, and then it’s gonna, it’s game over. No more tank. So you have to protect your tank and, you know, keep yourself alive at the same time. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get through this game. It’s, first of all, it’s only 10 levels, so they’ve made the difficulty very high to make those 10 levels last a long time. I doubt if I’ll ever get to level 10. I mean, this, because you can’t just save where you are, I don’t think there’s a level skip. I think you got to play the whole thing to its completion. Oh, and as if I have to mention, your plane only takes one hit. Start with three and it’s over pretty quickly. Maybe you think I’m being a baby and I’m just not good at video games, but look, I could probably get through this one if I really tried, but it’s just stressing me out so much. This is not a relaxing fun game. Go Go Tank. The graphics are really cute. The music is cute. Maybe the rest of the levels are easy. I really doubt it.
I’m sure the difficulty gets even worse as you go along. So basically what I’m saying is, probably skip Go Go Tank. It wasn’t that cheap for me to get. I don’t know, you know, maybe if you do see it for really cheap, pick it up just to have it, but I would save my money and skip this one. The Game Boy Color is, in my opinion, the best Game Boy ever made. They’re more durable than the Game Boy Lite, they can play Game Boy Color games, and even black-and-white Game Boy games appear in color. I don’t know if it’s cheating, I guess it is, but you can see the foreground sprites and the background sprites are different colors, so sometimes you’re playing a platform game and there’s kind of a clue. It’s like one thing’s a slightly different color. I find it to be the most comfortable way to play Game Boy games. I’ve had a Game Boy Pocket in the past. I found them to be, I think, to me they’re the worst quality Game Boys ever made as far as construction goes. It seems like that was a step in the wrong direction. The earlier version didn’t even have any power light, so you couldn’t even tell if your battery was running out. Anyway, Game Boy Color was a big improvement. The Game Boy Color, though, could be improved. I mean, it is nicer to play on a Game Boy Advance SP because you have the backlight, or if you have the earlier version, you have a front light. You can modify your Game Boy Color to have a front light. What you have to do, really doesn’t seem to be any way around it, is you have to take a donor Game Boy Advance SP, preferably one that’s broken, but maybe one that’s really badly bashed and worn out, and you have to remove the front light and then install it on the Game Boy Color. Now, I did this on a Game Boy Color with a clear case. I got the Atomic Purple with a clear case. Maybe not such a great idea because the light kind of shines in your face, but it does look kind of cool. So, but you can use any Game Boy Color to do this. So, you should go online and find very specific instructions because you can really mess things up. There’s a very difficult soldering part in this, which, you know, you need at least some soldering experience to do. There’s a very good chance you’re not going to do this properly, and you’ll end up ruining your Game Boy SP’s front light, which is a very sad situation, because you have to go get another Game Boy SP. Basically, the idea is, you take your Game Boy SP and you’re going to take the front light out of it. The front light is a Fresnel lens, so it’s kind of like those little 3D lenses. There’s an LED on the side mounted to a little silver brace, I guess you’d say, and that shines into the side of the light, and then the light is sort of caught by the lenses and shines down on your screen. It’s not perfect. It’s actually a weird technology that was only around for a couple years. You basically only ever see it in a Game Boy Color. I believe the Game Boy DS first version might have been front light, and then there’s a few camcorders that had it, but it’s a very rare technology. It wasn’t around very long because backlit screens were cheap enough that they wasn’t needed. Game Boy is not about the best hardware. It’s about having the cheapest, most available hardware. If you’ll remember, there were a lot of other handhelds at the time, but there were too expensive. Game Boy was cheap, didn’t use a lot of batteries, and this is one reason the Game Boy Advance SP was relatively cheap. The screens were cheap to make. You basically have to remove this very horrible sticky black goo from the outside of the the Fresnel light, and that is very difficult, and this is where you’re gonna make a mistake. It’s where I made a mistake. You got to be very clean when you take this black gunk off. It’s very easy to get black stuff in the grooves of the the plastic, and then you’re gonna permanently gonna have little weird dark lines on your screen, and you can’t just scrub this stuff off because if you rub too hard on the screen, you’re gonna ruin the little, this kind of a texture to the screen, and if you get dirt in that texture, it’s really hard to get out, and you can’t just put alcohol and cleaner on it because you’ll screw up the plastic, so don’t do what I did. I would put tape over it, some kind of maybe masking tape or painter’s tape or something to protect the screen before attempting this, and you’re gonna have a perfectly clean little front light. Mine’s been a little bit flawed. It’s fine, but it could have been better, and then what you have to do, the one really hard part is once you get this thing off, you end up destroying the other Game Boy. You can use it for parts, the Game Boy Advance SP. Of course, make sure you use the front lit version. There’s a backlit version. You’ll see a 0-0-1 on the serial number, or the model number. That means it’s backlit. Another clue is you didn’t pay a fortune for it because the backlit ones are very expensive, so the front lit screen versions are pretty easy to find. They’re the most common ones. I got one for about 30 bucks. Pretty banged up. It still worked, unfortunately. I hated to kill a system, but I really needed it because I love the Game Boy Color so much. And then the really hard part is there’s a very, very thin piece of film that connects the LED. Now that piece of film has to be soldered to a wire of some sort. You want to get a fairly thin wire. I used kind of thick wire I shouldn’t have because it was a little hard to work with. You probably want to… the kind of wire you use for like a hard drive cable, if you strip one of those down. You know those big ribbon cables for hard drives? You can probably strip a piece of that and get a good enough chunk. And you need quite a bit of slack because you have to wire it around. And while you’re at it, grab the speaker because it’s pretty easy to replace the speaker. I think if you just kind of… if you’re… you can find instructions online, but it’s pretty common sense, I think, if you look at the old speaker. It’s not quite the same dimensions, but the speaker in the Game Boy Advance SP is nicer than the one… it does have a nicer sound than the one in the Game Boy. It won’t blow you away, but it’s one of those things. Hey, while you’re at it, why not? It takes an extra 15 minutes of work to cut away a little bit of plastic and mount it in the case of the Game Boy Color. You have to solder a couple of wires onto this thing, and it is very difficult. It’s tough. I mean, because you’re soldering onto a piece of ribbon cable. It’s a piece of flat plastic with a really, really thin trace on it. So, I mean, you have to heat it up really quick and hope for the best. If you have temperature control on your soldering iron, good for you. I don’t. My soldering iron is this Weller, and it’s super hot, so I had to do it very fast, and luckily I didn’t get a cold solder joint. You’re also gonna need a resistor. Go look online to get the right resistor. I didn’t get exactly the right resistor, but I think it’s fine. It seems to be okay. If you don’t put a resistor, it’ll still work, but your light won’t last very long. That LED is not made to handle a full voltage, which I think is three volts. That’s too much. You’re basically hooking up directly to the power supply. Some people put switches. I just figure I’ll always want to have it on, so I didn’t bother putting a switch. I just wired it directly. And to mount it in the case, you have to cut away big chunks of plastic. It’s quite a pain. Now, one disadvantage to having a clear case is you’re gonna see all the tape and stuff like that, so you’re gonna have to use clear tape to mount it, because you have to do a little bit of modification in there to mount the screen, because it doesn’t quite fit exactly like the old one. If you use clear tape, it’s gonna look great. Anyway, I have pictures on my website. You can go to plywood747.com, and I’ll post a picture on the show notes site or something. You’ll find it. Anyway, I highly recommend it. I mean, once you have it done, it’s so good. You might need help from a friend who knows how to solder, because there are people who sell them online, but they’re pretty expensive, but I think it’s definitely worth it. I mean, it’s so comfortable in your hands to play compared to the SP. I don’t like playing the SP. I always accidentally hit the shoulder button, which changes the screen ratio, and it looks stupid, sticking out, because the Game Boy cartridges don’t really fit right. So, you know, it’s up to you, but this could be like a long-term project, you know, something to think about, and definitely keep an eye out for a used Game Boy Advance SP, especially a broken one. Ask around for broken ones, because, you know, they’re great for parts, and get that screen. Go do it.