Hello to everyone, fellows from Hive Gaming, I hope you are all doing well, welcome to my post about one classic that has received a Homebrew demake, and this classic is nothing less than our beloved Halo.
Technical note: For this blog I'd been using the emulator Visual Boy Advance M-64.
Halo Combat Devolved - GBC (Synopsis).
This is a Homebrew video game (unofficial software) of Halo Combat Evolved, which in this case being a Demake (video game deliberately created in a retro style), the developers decided to call it: Halo Combat Devolved. This game was developed by the indie game developers Crusader Games, and was released for emulation or play on the Game Boy Color in 2022, in a demo version.
Currently it is still in development, and is available in its v2.31 version for the Game Boy Color, even with versions to play directly in web browser (HTML5) and also Crusader Games plans to release in later versions some physical copies of Halo Combat Devolved, which is a homebrew action videogame that has an impressive art style, which emulates very well the retro style so characteristic of the GBC.
The Master Chief Campaign Begins
As you can see the guys from Crusader Games have designed the game's menus in great detail, in the style of Halo, but with the kind of retro art that is so characteristic of Game Boy games. It really feels like a job done by a professional company developing for Nintendo.
A crewman initiates the Master Chief activation process, which is a complex and step-by-step process. The game describes in great detail how they begin to activate the Master Chief and how the crew orders him out of his maintenance capsule.
After we have been activated, the scientific crewman begins to give us a series of basic instructions including the meaning of each value displayed in our hud. For example, the blue bar at the top right of the screen indicates Master Chief's health status and the state of his rechargeable protective shield
Suddenly we start to feel some strong tremors inside the ship, which is why the ship's captain, Cpt Keyes orders us to meet him immediately on the bridge of the ship. Our crewman asks us to follow him, but as we exit to the next section of the ship a series of explosions hit him, and he perishes.
It is not long before we encounter the first enemies to board the ship, and these are none other than the troops of the Covenant, an alien theocratic empire made up of various alien races that are unfriendly to humans.
These Covenant shock troops are made up of grunts and elites, the grunts being the little yellow ones and the elites being the blue ones. We can see the crewmen fighting the Covenant troops, but we can't help them at the moment, because we've got no weapons.
Later on we find a not very pleasant scene: a marine pleading for help due to heavy wounds caused by the Covenant troops. After unsuccessfully trying to help the soldier, we continued our way to the bridge of the ship to meet Cpt. Keyes.
Note: For a GBC game, it's actually pretty bloody.
We finally reached the bridge of the ship and met with Cpt. Keyes, who briefs us on the boarding of the ship by Covenant troops and how they managed to disable all the ship's defence systems. He also introduces us to Cortana, who is the artificial intelligence that controls the ship's systems, and who is also in charge of storing sensitive intelligence information about the human race, so it is vital that Cortana does not fall into the hands of the Covenant, due to the sensitivity of this information for the human alliance.
We then took Cortana with us at the request of Cpt. Keyes, to prepare to leave the ship and secure the sensitive information stored in the Cortana AI.
Cpt Keyes gave us his Magnun, but it was out of ammunition, so we had to leave the bridge and go and get ammunition for the Magnun. Just after we got the ammo we had to shoot at the first grunts of the covenants, which although they don't have a very high damage resistance, they are a bit difficult to take down because they move so fast.
Let the Rock & Roll begin, for we've got the assault rifle, the Master Chief's natural weapon ha ha ha. The great thing about the assault rifle is that if we press B continuously we can shoot with very fast lateral movements, giving us greater mobility and a chance of taking less damage during combat, because something I haven't mentioned so far is that the covenant troops are very accurate when shooting at us.
Look at this elite Covenant soldier, these Mfuc~#.ers are very dangerous because they are very good at shooting, they can shoot in any direction. On more than one occasion they have put me in danger by using their energy weapons to drain my rechargeable shield so quickly.
From now on, Cortana will tell us a lot of things, basically becoming a kind of artificial intelligence personal assistant. Here, for example, she explains how the health packs will help us restore Master Chief's base health points, and that even though our shield is rechargeable, it turns out that Master Chief's base health points are not.
So, long live to Cortana AI... :D
Further into the ship, in search of an escape route, we encountered more numerous covenant troops whose AI was better at attacking us, so we assume that as we progress through the game the difficulty is progressive, as at the start of the campaign there is no option to select the difficulty of the campaign.
We get an Overshield, which is indicated when we take it with the pink colour in our Hud, and while this Overshield is active we will be invincible, so when we find an overshield it is best to move as quickly as possible to take advantage of the ephemeral invincibility that it gives us.
It's really impressive the level of detail that the guys from Crusader Games have applied in the level design of this Halo demake, for example, watch in the GIF above how they make that effect of lights that turn on and off while we have to pass through them shooting against the covenants grunts that lurk in the shadows :) ... awesome!
Graphically, everything has been thought out in great detail, for example in the image above you can see how our Master Chief glows when we are shot or damaged, indicating that our rechargeable shield is working and absorbing some of the damage. And as we can also see, during our escape we come across many crew members who have been killed by our alien enemies :/.
It turns out that the ship is huge, so for the moment we reach another area of the ship marked as 32, but we go steadily in search of the escape POD to flee with Cortana from this decaying ship.
Well, that brings us to the end of this first Halo Combat Devolved blog for the Game Boy Color. I hope you enjoyed this first blog, mates, and thank you as always for your attention if you made it this far. I'll be bringing more blogs of This amazing demake - homebrew for our beloved Halo as soon as possible ;)
Credits
Credits to Bungie, 343 Industries & the guys from Crusader Games for the development of this cool demake of Halo for the GBC, as well as to all the creators of the concept art of the Halo Saga.
You Can Play & Download this Game from Here:
All the screenshots are taken from my PC - Screen & Emulator.
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