The Game Boy Color version of Wetrix, released only in Europe, is of course a nearly unplayable mess, but I am sincerely impressed by its audacity; it's so clearly a bad, impossible idea that I have genuine respect for the developers who attempted it.

Wetrix is an arcade puzzle game for the N64 and PC about building dams to keep water from flowing out of an area. Assorted terrain manipulation pieces fall, along with water bubbles, bombs, fireballs, and uncontrollable hazards; when too much water drips off the edges or through holes, you lose. It's a strangely compelling game, given how close it stays to its roots as a tech demo for water physics.

So let's stop to appreciate the pure audacity required to take a 3D water physics simulation game and decide it would be a good idea to squeeze it onto a fucking Game Boy. Somehow, some dude looked at a game about realistically simulating water leaking out of arbitrarily-shaped terrain in real time and went "Hey, that looks like a great fit for a 1 MHz off-brand Z80 with 8KB of RAM and a graphics system that not only has no polygon drawing, it has no directly-drawable screen buffer of any sort! This should work totally great on a strictly tile-based rendering pipeline incapable of updating more than a small fraction of its tilesheet every frame. This is definitely a game that will work well on a non-lit 160x144 LCD."

The game is barely playable. The thing about "barely playable" is that it is playable. Sure, sometimes the game pauses for several seconds after dropping a piece to calculate what the terrain should look like now. Sure, it's impossible to see how deep the water actually is in any lake you've built at a granularity more specific than half a unit, so you can't see how close to overflowing your structure is. Sure, the shadows that serve as the only way to show where your piece will actually land (the only clarification between Y and Z axes) do not render accurately enough to rely on as a prediction for what will change from dropping a piece. Sure, some of the hazards were removed. Sure, the bomb's "cone"-shaped explosion is now just a rectangular prism, making it nearly useless for removing excess land. Sure, the fireball no longer acts like a slightly gentler bomb when it does not hit water. Sure, the rain is not implemented. Because even with all of that, at a crude, basic level, the game technically *works.*

It works badly, but it is a technical marvel that it works at all. Water physics have been replaced by a floodfill that looks for gaps and, as far as I can tell, estimates a leak rate. (I haven't decompiled the game to find out.) The same layer-by-layer floodfill is enough to figure out the total volume of water that could be contained in an area, at least enough to roughly figure out how much water fits. The rubber duckie showing a deep water bonus doesn't swim, but it does at least mark the lake. The lake counter works. Fireballs evaporating lakes and acting as your primary score mechanism totally work. Earthquakes work. Less-completed lake structures leak faster, as do deeper structures with more water pressure, and the leak slows down as the pressure reduces. This isometric 3D terrain, in all of its "raised", "flat", "wet", "wall", and "hole" states, is carefully aligned to the 8x8 pixel grid so it can be rendered via the BG tilemap. Somehow, some way, *they made it work.*

It's janky. It's ugly. It feels bad to play because it's hard to control or to see what you're doing. The developers of the PC/N64 version disavowed this port and begged people not to buy it (unfortunately I can't find a version on archive.org that shows this, and I'm going off memory; their frames-based site structure seems not to have gotten captured well). But it is identifiable and, arguably, playable; given the limitations of the device it was shoved onto, I think it is a genuinely impressive feat of software engineering to accomplish even that much.