Demakes are my latest obsession. The Retro Gaming community has taken to imagining what popular games would look like if they came out years before on consoles that could only have dreamed of housing them. We’ve seen some amazing ideas coming out recently such as an 8-bit version Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring jumping backward onto the SNES. Still, it’s not often that you get to actually play these demakes, with many clips simply showing what they might look like. It’s even rarer to be able to just click on and play in your browser too, which is why Halo: Combat Devolved is so special!
90s kids like me still yearn for the days of the Game Boy Color. There’s just something about those little character sprites that takes me back, back to the good old days of playing games in the garden and staying up all night playing Oracle Of Seasons. Seeing Master Chief running around as though he was in a Pokémon game (albeit with lots of blood) is amazing, and while it might not look as grand as the original on the Xbox, it’s amazingly fun to play!
I clicked the link in the YouTube video description and was able to play on my Macbook straight away, with Z as my A button and the arrows as my control pad, exploring the world in a top-down fashion just like all the greatest GBC games. So far Crusader Games have made two levels available to play; ‘Pillar of Autumn’ and ‘Halo’, but the fact that you can actually play them as shown in the video from The Duncan Donuts above is amazing!
As it’s effectively a GBC game, there’s nothing too graphically demanding that would cause any janky controls or glitching. Master Chief moves smoothly and the graphics are great. Even firing shots seemingly from your chest with the absence of a physical gun doesn’t matter, it’s still super cool!
The game allows you to save your progress and return to your browser to carry on from the last checkpoint too which is amazing. It’s the perfect game to have open on your computer at work to play while waiting for the emails coming in. Just don’t let your boss catch you, otherwise they’ll bring the full force of The Covenant down on you! So, kick back and enjoy some intergalactic Game Boy Color goodness, you’ve earned it!
