If a videogame system exists, Capcom will find a way to port Resident Evil to it. Nothing illustrates that point better than the aborted Resident Evil remake for the Game Boy Color. Crazy as it sounds, Capcom put some serious effort into porting their 32-bit survival horror classic over to the basically 8-bit Gameboy, and while they never actually released the game at retail, you can now download a mostly complete ROM of Capcom’s bizarre experiment.
An anonymous source managed to attain a copy of the game and promised to release a ROM onto the internet if a ransom of $2000 was raised and deposited into a Paypal account. Hardcore Resident Evil fans quickly gathered up the money, and now everyone with an emulator can play the previously unreleased port.
The game is nothing more than a curio at this point, but despite coming out almost a decade after the Game Boy Color was discontinued, the Gameboy version of Resident Evil is still kind of a technical marvel: the game more or less manages to recreate the gameplay of the original PS1/Saturn Resident Evil fairly accurately, and while the graphics obviously aren’t as good as the polygons and the pre-rendered backdrops of the console versions, it’s still a pretty impressive looking game when you consider that the GBC was basically on par with the NES in terms of horsepower.
Still, despite the ambition and technical prowess on display in the GBC Resident Evil, it’s understandable why Capcom never released it: Resident Evil is a game meant to be played in long stretches, and the GBC version still uses the archaic ink-ribbon based save system; while this worked fine on the PS1, it really isn’t suited to the handheld environment (especially on a handheld not equipped with a sleep mode.) Still, if you’ve ever wondered what 8-bit Resident Evil would look and play like, you can now find out.
Source: Game Informer
Rian Quenlin
BRB downloading VBA again. There was actually a gaiden title on the GBC that was a pretty decent game, but the gameplay was quite lacking, especially when you consider how hard it was to actually shoot the zombies. It was a solid game but it was just way too difficult to master, it takes a lot of practice.
Still, this is an impressive piece of work. Some ROMhacking team should get on it, clean it up, complete it etc…
Is the gameplay really that slow or is the guy recording it with a ham sandwich as a processo- WHAT DID THEY DO TO THE DINING ROOM!? That’s not a dining room! It’s empty!