Whenever people go to the effort of naming the best-looking Amiga titles, Shadow of the Beast is usually never far from the top of the list.
Developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis, the sidescrolling action game stunned players back when it was first released in 1989, thanks to its colourful visuals, high framerate, and 12 levels of parallax scrolling. It went on to sell a ton of copies, becoming a major hit for the platform, and later unsurprisingly led to several ports for other machines, including the often-criticized Atari ST port and a version of the Atari Lynx handheld. However, one machine that never ended up getting its own version of the game was the Game Boy Color.
Recently, though, the Game Boy developer Shane McCafferty, the individual behind titles like Hoonigans and Nitro, has gone to the effort of showing what that might have looked like, publishing a brief 25-second video of Shadow of the Beast running on the retro handheld.
According to McCafferty, the demo contains 14 layers of parallax and was a fun coding experiment now that his upcoming Game Boy Color game Cave Dave has gone gold. It was built using the Game Boy development kit and looks mightily impressive from what we can see, even if it does feature a fairly slower framerate and lacks David Whittaker's iconic music.
We're not sure whether McCafferty intends to continue porting the game, but we'd certainly be interested to see what he could pull off with a handheld version of the game.
Here's some footage of the original Amiga version, for reference: