Here at Gaming Reinvented, we’ve seen some truly wild ports and demakes over the years. Whether it’s Super Mario 64 for GBA or SNES, Breath of the Wild for the 3DS or Smash Bros Melee on 3DS, decomps and homebrew communities have advanced so far that almost anything seems to be possible now.
Yet even with that in mind, today’s project is something else entirely. Why?
Because it’s Super Mario Galaxy for the GBA.
Yeah, Game of Tobi actually managed to port a Wii game to the GBA, and have it function mostly like the original title. Take a look:
To say we’re impressed by this might be a bit of an understatement. Indeed, while seeing Super Mario 64 on GBA was crazy enough on its own, it was still well within the realm of possibility. The GBA already had 3D games (including one 3D Asterix platformer), so the idea of a Mario 64 style game was basically just the next level up from that.
Super Mario Galaxy is in another league entirely. Remember, this is a Wii game we’re talking about. A Wii game heavily focused on crazy gravity mechanics and creative level concepts that pushed its own hardware to the limits.
So, this logically should not even be conceivable on a Game Boy Advance. You’re effectively taking a game from 3 console generations later and backporting it to a system that already struggles to run 3D games properly.
The fact it actually works is just out of this world.
Of course, it’s never going to be the best way to play the game. The framerate is better than the 0.01fps speed you may expect a game of this complexity to run at, but it’s still low enough that movement likely feels like walking through mud. And while there is a surprising amount of the game present in this port, it’s still only a subset of the full game for obvious storage related reasons. Hence the following levels are the only ones present here:
- Comet Observatory (hub area)
- Good Egg Galaxy
- Honeyhive Galaxy
- Beach Bowl Galaxy
- Buoy Base Galaxy
- Freezeflame Galaxy
- Deep Dark Galaxy
Still, these levels do have the same structure as their Wii era counterparts, and include many of the same enemies, powerups, bosses and mechanics from that version, so it’s a surprisingly close match nonetheless.
Plus, the game is actually available online to download too. You’ll have to build itself by extracting assets from your own copy of the game, but that process and all the code available for it can be found on GitHub here. So, if you want to actually give it a go, you certainly can.
Regardless, that’s the GBA version of Super Mario Galaxy for you. A crazy technical achievement never even thought possible before, yet now somehow made a reality. But what do you think about it? Are you excited to try it for yourself?
Let us know in the comments below, or on our Discord server today!
Source:
I’m Releasing Mario Galaxy GBA! (Game of Tobi on YouTube)