the first game that comes to mind when I think "late-era western Game Boy excess" is V.I.P., a tie-in to some Pamela Anderson TV vehicle I only know of via this series of Ubisoft-published games—by the turn of the millennium, publishers were still in the post-Pokemon GB goldrush mindset but weren't willing to invest in big games or original projects, and none of the European microcomputer dorks who'd found a second wind on GB were willing to keep slumming it the way they had for the past decade, so publishers would often compromise by simply giving the devs bigger ROMs to work with, resulting in slop like this game which isn't necessarily any less simplistic or slapdash than the average greyscale game from 1992 or whatever but is able to get by on relatively lavish visuals and a general sense of volume
like, watch this video and note just how many format changes the game goes through before finally introducing the generic platformer section that one would expect to comprise the entire game: there's an overhead driving section, a side-view rollerblading section, a free-scrolling overhead run-and-gun section, an overhead speedboat section and an overhead helicopter shooting section. does the game really benefit from all this Variety? no, none of these sections are particularly fun or fleshed-out (and they of course recycle them all a few times), but I bet whichever bored-ass programmer had to throw this game together in three months had fun dumping all that crap in there. did lil pixel platformer Pam really require all those animation frames? not at all, but Ubisoft gave em a full 1-megabyte ROM to play with and it must have been fun to animate so fuck it, have fun. (Dude went on to work as art director on the likes of Battlefield V, Tony Hawk 1&2 Remaster and Crash Bandicoot 4.) did the hardcore V.I.P. fandom feel this game did justice to the franchise? hell if I know; I feel I'm being generous by assuming they exist, and even then, were they playing Game Boy?
(there are three other Ubisoft games based on this show, btw: a PS2 QTE-fest akin to an old FMV game, only with polygonal graphics; a PS game, which is also riddled with QTEs but gives me the impression it was probably going to be an actual game at some point; and a GBA game that I've not played but looks like every generic runny-shooty Euro console action game circa 1993... which is to say, it might actually be kinda okay?)
