The background is using only two tones white and light green. The tree branches remain a dark tone to indicate they are themselves a platform, much like the ground extending across the bottom of the screen. The same scene but with the tone shifted to the lighter colors. Before we take a look at those revisions on real hardware, let’s see what Maru’s Mission looks like in its original state for the sake of comparison: I spent some time revising the tones in stage one to provide a higher contrast between platforms and the empty space surrounding those platforms, thereby improving the readability during game play. In Part 1 of this article, we explored Maru’s Mission, an action platformer released in 1990 by Jaleco with some unfortunate readability issues. The fact remains though, if you want a game to be readable on original hardware, the artwork needs to be very carefully considered! And I’d be remiss if I didn’t cover this subject for the purist’s out there who love to play their Game Boy games as they would have originally been presented back in the 80s and 90s.
I saw a new portable Donkey Kong game and, without question, bought it (and loved it), warts and all. But, back in those days, no one was the wiser. These days, we are spoiled with backlit, high resolution screens packed into our portable devices that would have ten year old me weeping with joy. You have to admit, it’s not easy playing that game on un-modded hardware… and it’s considerably worse on the DMG. (A vague suggestion of) Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy Pocket. Even the Game Boy Pocket, with its improved display, also succumbed to the debilitating problem of blurred visuals when anything was in motion. The developer had faithfully translated the artwork of Donkey Kong Country as best they could (minus the color, of course) but that choice made it difficult to see platforms, enemies and even Donkey or Diddy Kong as they moved across the dot matrix screen of the original DMG. When I turned on my Game Boy and began playing stage one however, I was alarmed to find that the large sprites were quite hard to see against the detailed scrolling backgrounds! So much so, that I found myself losing life after life, trying my best to make sense of the muddy tones of green that wildly smeared across the screen as I played. I was a big fan of the SNES version that had exploded onto the market a year earlier, and was excited to see Rareware’s take on Donkey Kong barrel it’s way onto Nintendo’s handheld console.
When I was 10, I remember playing Donkey Kong Land when it was first released back in 1995.
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