Visual Connection – Raylight Studio’s Blue Roses GBA Tech

September 3rd, 2009

Raylight Studios is a small Italian games developer that unfortunately don’t have many high profile games to their name, besides a sadly woeful GBA port of Gradius III and a specialty in handheld racing games. As someone that enjoys maxed out handheld tech, I’m fascinated by this studio.

Some time after the GBA’s release (2002-ish) Raylight Studios showed off video and screenshots of a 3D game engine for the system, titled Blue Rose. The team had rendered a series of demos based on popular Playstation games such as Resident Evil, Wipeout, Metal Gear Solid as well as a series of others.

This was very exciting at the time as, at least on a surface level, it showed that the GBA was in fact capable of producing 3D graphics on a somewhat similar plane to the PSone. Mammoth potential for the emerging GBA. Background information such as memory constraints were fairly unknown, but it’s still nifty nonetheless. Unfortunately little eventuated from the project and the studio has gone on to product a handful of low-tier portable games, mostly racing games – their forte.

Considering how well the tech holds up in comparison to the DS, I figure it’s worth remembering their endeavours and pondering what might have been. I tried to get in contact with the studio but had no luck, so instead, let’s just look over what we have;

Resident Evil 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htyTk-Ij3M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBHNtTNPzV0

Metal Gear Solid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G27pO38Z3l0

Air Race (ie. Wipeout)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bixb6ZVaxU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Or58GP9Is

SRS: Street Racing Syndicate (appears to be using same tech, actually released)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr_DkfO_Csg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l1KP78HaZc

Screenshots

blue-roses-3d-gba-montage

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