Game Boy Colour Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack

Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo Soundtrack, Manfred Linzner, 2000

One day, historians will determine how many hundreds of licensed platformers were released for the Game Boy and the Game Boy Colour. Then again, we might never know the exact number – the market share of both platforms was so large that even local releases promised commercial success. Case in point: Fix & Foxi – Episode 1: Lupo (and no, there was no second episode, so maybe things didn’t turn out as planned). The game was based on an animated TV series, which in turn was an adaptation of a weekly German comics magazine first published in 1953. The magazine ran for decades and boasted a circulation of several hundred thousand per week at the height of its success. Of course, abroad the two anthropomorphic foxes and their friend Lupo weren’t particularly well-known, so this Game Boy Colour title remained an obscure Germany-only game.

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Sakura Taisen GB Soundtrack

Sakura Taisen GB Soundtrack, Kohei Tanaka, 2000

While seeing Sega franchises appear on Nintendo consoles has become common, back in 2000 – when Sega still had a stake in the console wars – the situation was very different. It was all the more surprising then that Sega decided to port one of its franchises – Sakura Taisen – to the Game Boy Colour (it’s worthwhile mentioning that less than one year earlier, the Neo Geo Pocket Colour had received a Sonic the Hedgehog port). Maybe not surprisingly, Sakura Taisen GB’s developers didn’t attempt to replicate the scale of previous franchise titles on the small handheld console. Instead, the game proceeds more along the lines of a dating-sim, with players controlling a character who spends a month training and living with the Hanagumi group of theatre actors/defenders of the planet.

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Warriors of Might and Magic Soundtrack (GBC)

Warriors of Might and Magic Soundtrack (GBC), Matthew Simmonds, 2000

By the late 1990s, the Might & Magic franchise was going strong, with several successful mainline games and the recent establishment of the Heroes of Might & Magic series. Not surprisingly, publisher The 3DO Company was keen to branch out further, making the most of the valued brand name. Unfortunately, its first attempt to do so in 1999 via 3d-action RPG Crusaders of Might and Magic didn’t cause much excitement. Interestingly enough, The 3DO Company tried again with a similar game concept a year later. However, Warriors of Might and Magic wasn’t met with much more enthusiasm amongst gamers and critics than its predecessor.

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