You could play multiplayer Tetris that way. I think I saw it once in my life.
Me and my brother did it on road trips in the family van. It was awesome.
There‘s also an excellent Gameboy Color romhack of Dr Mario that supports multiplayer. Recently tried that out with my girlfriend and it was a lot of fun.
Edit: this is it for anyone interested. Looks like even the original version for the Gameboy supports multiplayer.
What is multiplayer Tetris?
Well, it’s complicated. See it’s Tetris but with multiple players.
No way, my mind can’t even begin to comprehend
I played multiplayer Tetris frequently.
When you get lines, your opponent’s stack pushes a line with a gap up from below, except when you get a Tetris, which pushes four lines (with the gap aligned, so you could Tetris back and forth).
You had an indicator for the max height of your opponent’s stack next to yours.
Great game.
In 99 we had a sleepover and we’d all trade our best pokemon to one another and pulled the plug out before completion to clone the pokemon.
I have a real job now and do real business deals. Nothing I’ve done professionally has ever felt as official and business like as that one sleepover.
Were there other uses? Yes.
Were they common? Well, just look at the GameBoy pocket. At the time it was designed (it released 7 years after the original GameBoy) there were a lot of people at Nintendo who wanted to get rid of the port entirely because it was barely ever used. They ended up compromising by using a different, smaller, cheaper port that needed an adapter to work with the regular ones.
Which was kind of a pain for some people because the GB Pocket and Pokemon both came out in Japan in 1996 lol.
Multiplayer tetris was fun! Whenever you completed a row, you’d send it to your opponent!
We had even one to connect 4 Gameboys and played “super rc pro am”, oh the nostalgia
Oooooh rc pro am AND micro machines ought to be remade
RC pro am in the big bathroom with 4 stalls, passing the link cable under the dividers. Best way to skip class ever. Only ever managed 4 players a couple times but it was amazing.
IIRC you only needed like one copy of the game, too??
The GBA had a multiplayer Zelda game, and every GBA Mario game came with a multiplayer version of the og Mario Bros. Arcade game.
An even less common connector could be used to connect a GBA to a GameCube. The uses of that one (as far as I’m aware):
- using Pokemon XD to battle two GBA Pokemon games using the GameCube 3D graphics
- a multiplayer Zelda game entirely based around the gimmick of using the GBA as a controller
- using a GBA Metroid to unlock bonus power ups in the GameCube Metroid
I think local multiplayer absolutely peaked with the Nintendo DS. The download games where you could play with one cartridge, multiplayer without wifi, pictochat. Today you have to subscribe to shitty online services or at least play through wifi, which completely annihilates the possibility to play in a car, bus or train without a router.
Nintendo fully panicked over the prospect of child predators and put a ton of barriers up for player interaction.
I think it was more about making money with subscriptions by incentivizing getting Nintendo Online to play against your friends. I bet they profited massively during corona from this business model.
Killing Pictochat, Street Pass, and in-game voice chat has nothing to do with subscriptions.
I thought you meant local multiplayer without wifi
The sweet spot of not needing an adapter for multiplayer, but also only needing one cartridge, and no internet or subscription.
- Traveling to an island in Animal Crossing, where you could bury random items and get sacks of Bells in return, up to 10k for a single item.
That’s how I paid off my house.
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a multiplayer RPG where each player can control their inventory etc. using the GBA.
Only if you had friends.
Wasn’t there a way to link with the IR blasters on the GBCs too? I never tried it but I’ve heard it was possible
I remember trying that over and over, then reverting back to the more reliable link cables.
I’ve only seen that done for the TCG to do trades. Odd how a video game series turned into a franchise with a trading card game got a video game adaption of the trading card game.
I got mine at launch back in '98. Never played Pokemon. I’ll never forgive it for ending the middle school yoyo trend that I was really good at.
Yeah PVP Street Fighter!
I think there was a Bomberman game on the GBA that used the link cable for multiplayer too that I remember playing
Got one for my birthday once and managed to leave on the steps in the breezeway. It was gone inside of ten minutes :(
I had the green Gameboy, but this makes me wish I had chosen yellow. Yellow looks sharp.
Shout out to all my transparent purple homies.
I used that cable for my Gameboy printer more than anything.
the link cable is also pretty nice for midi synching
