Warlocked

A real-time strategy on a handheld with a D-pad and two buttons? Most developers would laugh at such a brief — and yet Warlocked proves it can be done, and surprisingly well at that. It's one of the most underrated technical tours de force of the entire Game Boy Color era.

At its core, Warlocked is a full-fledged RTS in the style of WarCraft II, only squeezed into the palm of your hand. You harvest resources, build a base, recruit and command units, and try to crush your opponent before he crushes you. Anyone who ever played the classic real-time strategies of the '90s will find their footing here instantly — only this time the whole thing plays out on a screen the size of a postcard.

The game's biggest trick is the controls. Commanding armies without a mouse is notoriously difficult, and this is exactly where the developers at Bits Studios, working under Nintendo's banner, did surprisingly elegant work. The cursor, unit selection and order-giving are designed so cleverly that after a short adjustment you command the battle without the frustration one would expect from the genre on a handheld. That's no small thing — it's a genuine engineering victory.

The game doesn't skimp on content: it offers two campaigns, humans and animals, so you don't just get a superficial taste of the mechanics but a proper serving of campaigns with their own progression and distinct units. For the year 2000 and the target platform, it's an unexpectedly rich package that wouldn't have to be ashamed of itself even on a bigger screen.

Even so, Warlocked stayed out of the spotlight — an RTS on a pocket console was such a counterintuitive notion at the time that many players ignored the game before ever giving it a chance. All the more reason it deserves to be discovered today by anyone fascinated by how far you can push hardware that no one built for this genre.

Why play it: For a full-fledged WarCraft-style strategy in the palm of your hand with surprisingly clever controls — an underrated technical gem of the Game Boy Color with two campaigns.