bit Generations site gives a sneak preview of new GBA micro-titles
It's all Japanese, but the gameplay looks universal
Nintendo has spruced up a micro site dedicated to seven upcoming, mould-breaking 'bit Generations' games for the Game Boy Advance.
We first saw these stylish retro-tasting titles when Nintendo used them to show off the Game Boy micro back at E3 2005. At the end of last year the company confirmed the games were definitely coming to the Game Boy Advance as retail releases (under the name of 'Digiluxe Series' in the West, according to some reports), and from the videos on the new site we think that looks like A Good Thing.
Series one, made up of three bit Generation games, will launch in Japan on 13th July. A second wave of four will arrive there on 27th July.
Certainly, compared to the schlocky licence-based games that faithful GBA owners have to make do with nowadays, the simple colours and mechanics of bit Generation games like Dotstream, Boundish and Dialhex make for a welcome change of tone. And we love the 1980s synth-based music on the website, which we presume is taken from the games.
The snag is the bit Generations website is in Japanese. But hey, it's a slow summer's day at Pocket Gamer, so we've been watching the movies (and this trailer) and taking bets in the office as to what you do in them.
In Dotstream, ZX Spectrum flavoured coloured lines tear along an Atari 2600 style retro-course, leaving linear trails in their wake. In some of the races it appears the lines need to move in formation to enter certain gates.
Boundish sees the ancient game Pong remixed in a variety of ways, including a cool-looking circular court based on a turntable. Nice.
Dialhex sees triangles dropping into a grid of triangular shapes. (Incidentally, what is it about the gods of gaming that they can't stop polygons plunging down the screen? It's like the Old Testament as told by a mathematician.) You can select six shapes at a time and rotate them – hence 'Dialhex' – and we'll bet our grandmother's bottom dollar that you have to match the colours to make them disappear. Or go solid. Or similar.
The second series of releases comprises: Coloris, Digidrive, Orbital and Soundvoyager. All sound like techno bands from the early '90s, but otherwise we've only seen seconds-long glimpses of these four in the trailer
Briefly, Digidrive looks like some sort of steering/sorting game, Coloris like Connect 4 on LSD, Soundvoyager a music-based game like Sony's PlayStation title Frequency and Orbital like nothing we've ever seen before.
All seven games appear as straightforward as apple pie, but at the listed Japanese price of ¥2000 (just under £10) why shouldn't they be? They're surely more exciting than the prospect of running about as a nasty sprite version of a Hollywood handpuppet, which is all you get from most GBA games today.
Indeed, assuming the bit Generations titles play as neatly as they look, we'd like to see mobile game developers also take a leaf out of Nintendo's Less is More design book too.
Click 'Track it!' to be alerted when we hear more official news about the UK release of these intriguing little games.