6 Impressive GBA Homebrew Demakes!
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Video contents:
00:00 Intro
01:41 Turok
03:17 Virtua Fighter
04:54 Celeste
06:15 Flappy Bird
07:37 Super Meat Boy (Pocket Meat)
08:48 Resident Evil 2
10:46 Conclusion
Music used:
https://lightshift.bandcamp.com/track/roads-beneath-the-snow
Turok
this is a playable prototype of a cancelled Turok game, it looks to be an attempt at a port of the N64 classic… Developed by Similis. In 2009, the website Hidden Palace managed to get the rooms and now they are available to play online and see what could have been for yourself!
Even though this is clearly a very early demo, it’s pretty impressive to see it running on the system, it’s an interesting glimpse of what could have been!
There’s actually three slightly different versions of the demo. The standard demo, and one called Bright version, which was made to compensate for the lack of a backlight on the original GBA system, and one with a logo and a slightly earlier version of the demo.
https://www.unseen64.net/2009/05/30/turok-gba-prototype/
It was cancelled in favour of the 2D Turok game we ended up with on the GBA, which was clearly much easier for the developers to make on the system.
Virtua Fighter
This one was coded by the famous Jim Bagley, who made many classic C64 and Spectrum games!
He’s a very talent developer, and has actually released a few other GBA home-brew games which I might cover in a future episode!

https://www.gbadev.org/developers.php?author=105
Celeste
As well as this amazing GBA remake, the original Pico-8 version of the game (Which believe it or not I actually prefer over the 2017 release), is actually fully playable on the GBA too thanks to another talented programmer!
https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-celeste-classic-gba-port.544992/
Meat Boy
Made by BomberDev, this is a really good version of the classic indie game Super Meat Boy. I was expecting it to be the same as the original Flash game, but this is actually closer to the more modern version! Unfortunately there’s only a few levels in this version so far, but it controls really well and if the developer makes more levels I can see this becoming very popular in the home-brew community!
https://bomberdev.itch.io/pocket-meat
Flappy Bird
A very faithful port of the IOS and Android game, this one actually seems like it got a physical release back when it was first made in 2014!
http://jayvanhutten.com/flappy/
Flappy Bird for Game Boy Advance / SP / Micro
Resident Evil 2
Tech demo made by Daylight studio, an Italian company to pitch their Blue Roses engine. By this point in time Capcom had lost interest in the viability of GameBoy ports, and the pitch was rejected.
The blue roses engine is actually really impressive. There’s a lot of other tech demos from the company but unfortunately I couldn’t find any other rooms, just pre recorded videos. Even so, what’s being shown is incredible for the GBA! It’s just a shame not much came of it…
https://hiddenpalace.org/Resident_Evil_2_(GBA_Tech_Demo)
Thank you for watching, I’ll be taking a look at some home-brew games soon, if you know any good ones you’d like to talk about, please let me know in the comments!
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