Spacestation Silicon Valley

Space Station Silicon Valley for Game Boy Color is a 1999 single-player action-platform game developed by Tarantula Studios and published by Take-Two Interactive. It adapts DMA Design's 1998 Nintendo 64 game for Nintendo's handheld, rebuilding its unusual science-fiction adventure as a 2D side-scrolling experience. The game takes place aboard Silicon Valley, a vast space station populated by mechanical animals that has returned on a dangerous course toward Earth.

Players guide Evo, a robot whose body has been reduced to a vulnerable microchip after the expedition arrives at the station. Evo cannot remain exposed for long: his energy drains outside a host, so survival depends on moving into the robot animals encountered throughout each area. This central ability changes both exploration and combat. A creature is more than a character sprite to avoid or defeat; it can become Evo's temporary body and a practical tool for reaching the next objective.

Every available animal has its own movement, attack, or environmental capability, encouraging players to consider which host fits the immediate problem. The game uses these differences for platforming and puzzle-solving rather than treating possession as a one-off trick. A sturdy animal may be needed to smash an obstruction, while another can negotiate a hazard or interact with part of the level. Losing a host means finding another before Evo's remaining power runs out, giving even short stages a careful rhythm of observation, switching, and forward progress.

The Game Boy Color version presents the station from a side-on perspective and retains the larger game's varied mission-based structure. Across its many stages, players work through distinct goals that can involve manipulating machinery, overcoming blocked routes, dealing with hazards, or shepherding robotic animals to the right place. Instead of simply racing to an exit, progress often comes from understanding how the level's creatures, switches, barriers, and objectives connect. That makes the game a platformer with a strong puzzle element, built around experimentation with its mechanical wildlife.

Its setting gives the adventure a deliberately offbeat tone. The collision-threat premise provides the overall purpose, while the station supplies a succession of artificial habitats and strange animal designs for Evo to inhabit. The combination of a tiny exposed robot and larger borrowed bodies lets the game shift its scale from moment to moment: one section may call for careful movement through a dangerous route, and the next may ask for the abilities of a completely different creature. This makes the animal roster central to the game's identity rather than a decorative theme.

Although it shares its story and core possession concept with the Nintendo 64 release, Space Station Silicon Valley on Game Boy Color is specifically a handheld reinterpretation rather than the same game running unchanged on a different system. Tarantula Studios translated the concept into 2D scrolling levels while preserving the need to use robotic animals to solve problems and keep Evo alive. For Game Boy Color players, it stands out as a late-1990s platform-puzzle adventure whose progress is driven by adapting to the bodies and abilities found throughout its endangered space station.