Game Boy Hero
Game Boy Hero
Ever since Bo Diddley laid down his first riff, the world has been wanting to pretend to be rock stars in the backseat of the car on a road trip down to Florida, no doubt to play the Rolling Stones classic "Are We There Yet?" (I'm not sure that Mick and Keith ever released this song).
Yes, we eventually got Guitar Hero games and Rock Band games, and filled our closets with plastic guitars and drums that you can't actually play music on. But it was never enough, because we were stuck playing on the Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox, inferior systems with full color graphics. Yet, the most technologically advanced system, capable of displaying 4 stunning shades of green, requiring a light and magnifying glass just to see the screen, and running on 4 AA batteries, was not able to let you pretend to be a rock star...
until now! At long last, I give you Game Boy Hero. Finally you can rock out on your Game Boy just like Pete Townshend with some windmill button pressing.
The Story
The year is 1989 and trouble is brewing at Game Boypalooza, all the bands seem to be short a guitarist. You play as KT Tunstall as you help The Beatles, R.E.M., The White Stripes, Nirvana, John Lennon, Bob Marley, and Queen and David Bowie get through their sets. Meanwhile, rock gods Spinal Tap are there to help you make the game go to 11. And if you think that this isn't possible for all these people to be there in 1989, rest assured that Rufus has arrived in his phone booth to ensure that all of this at least kind of makes sense!
How To Play
The game is simple, use left, right, B, and A to play notes as they reach the bottom of the highway. You earn completion points for each correct note you play. Put together a streak to earn completion points faster. When playing a chord, you earn completion points for each button pressed. And don't worry, I know that you can't play both left and right at the same time.
- A streak of less than 10 notes earns you 1 completion point.
- A streak of 10-19 notes earns you 2 completion points.
- A streak of 20-29 notes earns you 3 completion points.
- A streak of 30 or more notes earns you 4 completion points.
You can see how long your streak and how much progress you've made through the song in the upper right corner of the screen. The streak is represented by stars, you earn one star for every ten notes, up to four stars. The amount complete is shown in the pizza and updates when you reach one quarter done, half done, and three quarters done.
You can change the number of completion points needed to complete a song, just go see Spinal Tap in their tent to adjust the length. Available lengths:
- "Lola" (75 completion points - default)
- "Hey Jude" (150 completion points)
- "Karn Evil 9" (250 completion points)
Spinal Tap will also offer you four different speeds to play at:
- Mellow Yellow
- Born To Run (default)
- Highway To Hell
- Go To 11
High scores for both longest streak and percent correct are tracked across all songs for every combination of speed and length. However, high scores are not tracked in Big Bottom mode*.
The Setlist
Enjoy playing the following songs:
- The Beatles - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
- Bob Marley - Stir It Up
- John Lennon - Imagine
- Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
- Queen & David Bowie - Under Pressure
- R.E.M. - Nightswimming
- White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
There's also a few bonus tracks thrown in there for when you're walking around the festival. Select them when you access Big Bottom mode:
- The Doors - Break On Through
- KT Tunstall - Black Horse & The Cherry Tree
- Spinal Tap - Lick My Love Pump (played only in the Spinal Tap tent)
- Stone Temple Pilots - Interstate Love Song
- U2 - New Year's Day
Making of the Game
CSP, Chicago Sports Programming, was started in the mid-90's by The Great Foohachi and a high school friend. Original games made by CSP included Base Guess and Basketball, both for the TI-85. If you went to high school with me, you would know these games. But then 30 years passed and no new games were made... until now!!!
This game was made in GB Studio in about one week. Of course, that week included learning how to use GB Studio. And I would like to thank the members of the GB Studio subreddit for being so helpful! It took probably another week to transcribe all the music into GB Studio, many songs went thru multiple iterations, and some songs were scrapped as I didn't feel they produced a rich enough sound.
Our games will always be available as both a .gb rom and a .pocket file for use on an Analogue Pocket. Our games will also always be FREE for all to enjoy, I do this for fun, I got a day job.
Easter Eggs
* What is Big Bottom mode? Well its a secret, but lets just say I grew up playing Konami games like Contra, wink, wink!
** You know, dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. I sure hope that the members of Spinal Tap don't spontaneously combust, wink, wink, wink!
Download
Install instructions
The .gb file should work on any flash card or in any emulator. The game is designed for the DMG, so it will be playable on GB, GBC, and GBA.
The .pocket file will work on the Analogue Pocket (as will the .gb file if you have cores installed)
Comments
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Hi! This is great work! I was searching for ways on how to make a rhythm based game in GB Studio, as I just discovered it. Do you have a discord, and could maybe give some pointers? I'd really appreciate it!
No discord, never used it. But I recommend checking out my sequel Game Boy Hero II which does a much better job as it actually uses rhythm, unlike this game which just randomly drops notes. This was what I created the first time I ever opened GB Studio, so I still had a lot to learn, and I still can learn a lot more.
As for how to do it, there are two ways. I think the more common approach is to shoot projectiles and "catch" them by moving the player to the location of the button you press. My method is different, I move actors down the screen and if you press a button when the actor is in a certain position it records a hit, if they're elsewhere its a miss, or if they reach the bottom of the screen its a miss. As for when to start moving the actors, this can be done by calling routines (6xx) in the uge file for the music. There are 4 available routines, so it works great if you only use 4 buttons, although you could certainly create more complex code that can do more than 4, but then you have to worry about lag. Getting this to play on the DMG is a real balancing act of how much you can do before the lag slows down the game. You really can't have any lag as it ruins the rhythm, so you got to make compromises. Beyond that, its all just figuring out how the timing works which involved me creating spreadsheets and doing a ton of math.
By the way, I'm hoping in a month or two to have a big update for Game Boy Hero II with more than double the number of songs and an actual tour mode where you can develop a character just like in Guitar Hero and Rock Band games.
So, there's really no visual feedback when playing to tell if I'm missing notes or hitting them. So after playing a couple times on different songs, I only got a streak of 3. Not to toot my own horn but I'm usually pretty decent at rhythm games. As the game is currently, I can't really tell what I need to do to improve and maintain a streak. Cool idea for a game tho.
So the feedback comes in the form of a sound when you miss. In Guitar Hero and Rock Band they’d skip a note when you missed, but you can’t really do that on Game Boy so I instead make a sound which has the same effect of screwing up the music.
Of course if you get a hit, I don’t want any sounds ruining the music. But yes, I can create a visual cue and am planning on making a sequel that will improve on this as well as add a number of other features and improvements.
I only started using GB Studio two weeks ago, but I’m learning a lot, and already have come up with a handful of new ways of doing things.
I would recommend adding the Game Boy and Game Boy ROM tags to make it easier for people to find your game.
Thanks, this is my first time sharing a game so I didn’t know. Will do when I get home from work.