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Gamefaqs Link
Games for this topic:
Alleyway
Baseball
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
Master Karateka
Super Mario Land
Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen
As always, we start off with a few launch titles and other early games. You might not be familiar with Wizardry Gaiden, but there's a fan translation available for it. I haven't always been the biggest fan of the series, but I'm curious to see how it made the transition to GB because it seems like it could work well on the platform. In general, I'm looking forward to seeing how developers adapted to the Game Boy hardware and the idea of portable gaming in these early titles.
Alleyway - A
ReplyDeleteBaseball - A
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle - G
Master Karateka - B
Super Mario Land - A
Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen - B
Alleyway is a simple breakout-style game. It's very basic, there's not really any gimmicks beyond the basic ball and bat gameplay, in particular there are no powerups and the block types are also very simple, with only regular blocks and hard blocks. The game actually does feature a surprisingly large number of levels, there's 24, which comprise 8 different block patterns that are played 3 times each. First the pattern is done normally, then the pattern horizontally scrolls across the screen, then the screen gradually pushes down from the top. After completing all three stages you do a bonus stage and move on to the next set. The presentation is similarly very simple, but I appreciate how visually clear it is, even on Gameboy's tiny screen it's very visually readable, which is important. The game is very easy, as the ball always moves fairly slow, and this is probably its biggest flaw, between this and the repeated stages it can get kind of dull after a while. About the only wrinkle to the gameplay is that if you hit the top of the screen your paddle shrinks (this is not possible on the first set of stages due to the unbreakable blocks at the top), which is kind of a weird punishment, but since the ball is so slow it's still pretty manageable. Overall, it's not bad for a launch title, but its appeal wears thin fairly fast.
Similarly, Baseball is an extremely simple Baseball game. There's very little content here, don't expect any kind of a season mode or anything, there aren't even teams, about the only thing you can do is choose if you want to bat or pitch first and then you play a single exhibition game and that's it. The basics of classic-style baseball are all present here, batting and offense feel fine, fielding is a bit weak as the fielders move slow and they sometimes throw extremely slowly, effectively allowing you to take another base for free a lot of the time, but catching fly balls is mostly fine and it's still manageable. Visuals and sound are very basic, but it's nice that at least there is background music. There's not much else to say about this, it's serviceable for a launch title and it still plays okay, but there's not much that would bring you back to it today.
Funny story, I wasn't expecting a lot from Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, because I owned one of the games in the series and wasn't particularly impressed by it, but it's actually quite good. It's a sidescrolling maze game where the goal is to collect carrots and avoid other Looney Tunes characters. You have some defenses at your disposal, you can pick up and fire boxing gloves, and there are anvils and other things on the ground that you can kick into the enemies to get rid of them, but a lot of the time you just have to avoid them using a mixture of stairs, pipes, and doors. For starters, despite being a fairly early game, this is a lot more advanced than the other games we just covered, not just in terms of visuals and presentation, but also in that it has a password feature and a ton of levels. It's also a pretty fun game, it's very fast-paced, but it also has a fair bit of depth to it, you have to make a lot of split second decisions on how to outmanuever the various enemies or lure them into spots where you can get rid of them, which feels pretty rewarding. Going back to the Crazy Castle I owned, it's very easy to see where it falters. Crazy Castle 2 and 3 added doors that you can enter to get a key (with keys being the items you need to collect in that game). Most maps have 5-6 of these doors, but the thing is, there's nothing inside the doors but a key. Despite that, you have to go through the door opening animation and grab the key every time, which drastically slows down the gameplay. This game is just all action all the time and it's so much better for it. Easily one of the best early gameboy games.
Master Karateka is a pretty poor game. It sort of reminds me of a way worse version of Kung-Fu, it has a similar side scrolling look to it, but everything that made that game kind of playable is missing here. First of all, the fighting engine here is super simple. You have punches, but they are useless and you will never use them, which leaves only the kick. The straight kick has the most range and thus it is the only move you'll ever use, which works fine on most standard enemies that don't block. However, some enemies do block and they block everything you do in 1 frame. You can also trivially block their moves (they never attack high so low block will block everything), but attacks are too fast to be punishable in this game so blocking is basically worthless, all you can do is move back and then try to kick and sometimes they don't block, but it's very annoying. The most notable thing about the game is that you can assign statpoints before the game, but if you don't put a couple points into speed you basically can't move at all even while running, so you don't really have too many options. There's not too much else to say about the game than that, it's extremely simple and repetitive and has basically nothing going for it.
DeleteSuper Mario Land is a hard game to rate. It's essentially a fairly decent game with a single massive flaw. You probably don't need me to describe the gameplay much, it plays very similarly to SMB1, save for the replacement of the fireballs from the fire flower with a strange bouncy ball of which there can only be one onscreen, but it can hit flying enemies easier and collect coins. There are also some shmup-style stages (2-3 and 4-3) which are fine, they put kind of an interesting twist on the formula and help make this game feel a bit more distinct from other titles in the series. In terms of presentation, it's not bad. The visuals are very basic and don't have quite as much charm as you'd expect from the franchise, but the music is quite good, I particularly think the 1-1 main theme is underrated. So what is the single massive flaw that holds this game back? Its length. This game has only 3 stages per world, and has only 4 worlds, for a paltry 12 stages. This is less than half the number of stages in the original SMB1, and it results in a game that's extremely short and easy. I actually beat it the first time I ever played it, and when the credits rolled on 4-3 I literally said "wait, it's over?" as I thought I was only halfway done the game. This tends to result in the game having lesser replay value and thus being more forgettable than other games in the series, it really would have benefited greatly from at least two more worlds. It's still not a bad time or anything, I would still probably recommend playing through it for Mario fans, but there's no question it drastically pales to Super Mario Land 2 and many of the better platformers on the platform.
Wizardy Gaiden 1 is tough to rate. In many ways, I feel like this kind of title is actually a really good fit for Gameboy, but a number of flaws in the game's design and interface prevent it from working well as a portable game or being as fun as it could be. If you don't know much about Wizardry, it's a very old dungeon crawler series. You'll create a party of typical fantasy characters (or use the prebuilt one if you prefer), then journey into the dungeon in search of loot and experience. Dungeon crawling is handled exclusively from a first-person perspective, and this is easily one of the game's biggest flaws. Due to Gameboy's limited graphical capabilities, every wall and floor in the dungeon looks completely identical, making it virtually impossible to know where you are. There are no meaningful landmarks and floors are quite big, so you're not going to get anywhere without a map. Thankfully, a map does exist, and it even keeps track of where you've been, but annoyingly you have to cast a spell to access it, so all of your mage's level 1 spell points throughout the entire game are going to go to the map spell (though all of the other level 1 spells suck so I guess this isn't a huge loss). Unfortunately, you don't get many of these so these will severely limit how much you can explore and generally this mechanic sucks. I feel like this game would have been a full letter grade higher if they had simply put the map on Select and let you use it whenever you want, or heck, just cut out the middleman and axe the first-person gameplay altogether and make this map screen the main dungeon screen, as it's vastly more useful than the zero detail first-person view. Obviously, besides dungeon exploration, there are also battles. Battles are not bad, they're done in fairly standard RPG style, they're reasonably quick and the difficulty level of the game is reasonable. It's obviously fairly grindy, but levelling up doesn't take too long and you also earn decent money. The encounter rate also generally feels reasonable, encounters are quite common when going through doors but not so much the rest of the time so walking about the dungeon isn't too awful. You also have to frequently return to town to buy and sell stuff or heal, and this process is also not bad but has a few issues. The party setup and the inn work pretty well, no issues there. The shop is a bit more of a mixed bag. One big annoyance is whenever you find gear it's unidentified, and you have to pay to identify it as there's no spell that does this. Identifying any item costs half its buy price, which is also the exact same as their sell price, so you can never make any money by finding items as the shop won't buy them unidentified. So essentially, rather than finding an item you're finding a coupon that lets you buy that item at half price. Buying and equipping items sucks too, because you can't see their stats before you buy them, and for weapons you can't ever see their damage values ingame. Obviously, the main answer for all of these issues is simply to use a guide, and with a guide this game is playable, but this also totally defeats the purpose of the game being portable as you're not constantly going to have a guide with you. It's a shame that they didn't try to make the game a little more convenient to play as this concept absolutely could work, and a few small changes could have made this into a pretty good title, but it seems like they were still too stuck in the design of the PC game. Still, there are 8 games in the series on Gameboy, so perhaps they'll improve over time.
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