

It’s when you add color into the mix that things get all screwy. See… when it comes to monochromatic OG Game Boy games, I’m actually 100% fine playing them on a blacklit screen. OG Game Boy is fine not backlit with higher contrast games and less reflective screen, but GBA is hell to get the right lighting and angle.

I also saw this comparison over at the shmups forum, haven’t played CastleVania HoD before so it’s a surprise to me how different it looks:Įither way it is still rough to play them. The DS Lite had a colour gamut of about 73% of sRGB according to the experts at DisplayMate, which was super high for 2006, and would explain the oversaturation given what Nintendo R&D would target back in 2000/2001 for WL4. I played some Wario Land 4 on my Game Boy Micro, N3DS XL (I thought maybe the screen dimming would compensate) and DS Lite and only the Game Boy Micro didn’t turn the sunset a bright yellow - it was orange there. Intentionally muted colours often turned overly vivid (or neon as was the case with green) and I remember it being a annoyance with that display. Some extra info crossposted from the GB thread:īeen reading into the oversaturation of the AGS-101 display (and by extension, the DS Lite display) and it reminds me a lot of the overrated OLED Vita display which oversaturated colours compared with what the monitors the artists would have been working with. I noticed some later games, made with GB Player support in mind, have colour profiles to support other types of displays, for example Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has four different colour profiles to choose from in the main menu.

The AGS-101 has a screen similar to the DS Lite, which while impressive for the time (74% of the sRGB colour gamut is higher than the early generations of smartphones and iPad models) was clearly way too much for earlier games which were designed for older displays with different colour profiles. All the colors are just too much for the scene and the tranquility of the color pallete the game nails is all lost on a modern screen. I can’t help but feel like the bottom images is, overall, very hard on the eyes and everything looks too saturated, making the scene feel much darker. And the bag and ground overall looks brown instead of orange. The rocks look properly gray instead of purple. The water is nice and pastel-colored blue as well rather than the deep, deep blue you’ll see with a backlit. Instead, it looks merely white or off white at most. So, yea, it’s really hard for me to photograph the GBC screen head on without getting some reflection so I had to do it like this, but I think it accurately reflects the colors I see on the screen.Ĭompared to the backlit screenshot of the same scene, you can see the bottom of the screen which shows your items equipped and your hearts is not that stark piss-yellow on a real GBC.
