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Last Topic's Ratings:
Atomic Punk - AAGGA - 70% (5)
Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly - GAAAAB - 50% (6)
Monster Maker - AGG - 83% (3)
Mortal Kombat - ABBBBBB - 7% (7)
Motocross Maniacs - GGGGB - 80% (5)
Spot: The Video Game - AAGBA - 50% {5}
I was pleased to see the interest in Monster Maker. I posted some information about how to play Japanese games in that thread if anyone is interesting, though we don't have any untranslated JRPGs in this topic. Don't worry, there'll be tons more, gameboy has around 100 of them.
Games for this topic:
Amazing Spider-Man, The
Bubble Bobble
George Foreman's KO Boxing
Lamborghini American Challenge
Lingo
San Goku Shi Game Boy Han
Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. I remember how happy I was when we finished the ROTK games on PS1, thinking "this is the last time I'll have to play one of the NES ROTK games". But no! There's a Gameboy port of ROTK! And it's also totally untranslated! In years past I would have just left this off the list as ROTK is hard enough to play when you can understand it, but I actually think ROTK might be a somewhat decent fit for GB, so I will soldier on. At least all the rest of the games are in English this time.
Amazing Spider-Man, The - B
ReplyDeleteBubble Bobble - G
George Foreman's KO Boxing - B
Lamborghini American Challenge - G
Lingo - G (SR)
San Goku Shi Game Boy Han - A
The Amazing Spider-Man is pretty lousy. It's a basic platformer with extremely stiff controls. Spider-man's main forms of attack are slow punches and kicks that lock you in place, a web shot that takes way too long to come out (you have to hold the button for some reason), and a jump kick, which is the only good attack since you can move while doing it. Probably the most egregiously terrible mechanic is the high jump, which requires you to walk for a few seconds before doing it. This is needed almost all the time, to the extent that they might as well have just made this your normal jump. You can also hang from the ceilings by holding jump when you high jump (I think?) which just like everything else in the game feels pretty lousy to use. Bosses have extremely generous collision hitboxes, making damage almost inevitable while fighting them, and many enemy projectiles like the explosions from the first boss are almost impossible to determine where they actually hit. I also feel like the game's visuals are fairly bad, in particular Spider-Man is kind of only barely recognizable most of the time and the vast majority of enemies are just the same basic thugs. The TMNT game was far better than this.
You might think Bubble Bobble would just be a simple port of the NES game (which would be great as it's one of the best NES games), but it's not, most particularly it has completely distinct levels from the NES game. Unlike on NES, where the levels are all self-contained within 1 screen, in this game the levels are instead 2 screens wide by 2 screens tall. If you know anything about Bubble Bobble, this probably sounds incredibly problematic because it's very important to be able to see the whole stage (and, more importantly, all the enemies) at all times. However, the game implements a slightly clunky but functional workaround for this, which is that at any time you can press select to pause time and look around the stage. While it does slow the game down a bit, it otherwise plays pretty similarly to the NES version and having this on a portable system is pretty cool. About the only other thing to note is that it's a fairly flickery game. The enemies, stage, and your character don't flicker, but everything else flickers constantly, probably as some kind of trick to bypass the sprite limit, but it can be somewhat distracting. Oh, and of course, there's no multiplayer. There's not too much else to say about it. It's still Bubble Bobble, which means it still maintains all the interesting scoring quirks that make the original such an interesting game to play, and it's a fun game to have on the go, especially because it has password support.
George Foreman's KO Boxing is pretty bad. It sort of superficially looks like Punch-Out, and I think they tried to take some inspiration from it, but they didn't understand anything about what made Punch-Out a good game. Like in Punch out, you can dodge left and right and press the buttons to throw punches, but generally speaking regular punches don't matter at all. They do like a pixel's worth of damage at best and you'll have to throw like a hundred of them to down someone. The real purpose of regular punches is to charge your super punch, as periodically when landing them (I'd think it would have to be a counter punch, but it doesn't seem consistent) you'll hear a noise and 1/4th of your bar will charge up, when it's full you can do a super punch which is the only real way to do damage. Enemies also occasionally have strong punches that are more telegraphed that you have to dodge or take a lot of damage, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is just too mind-numbing for this to be fun.
Lamborghini American Challenge is actually pretty solid. It's basically a more fleshed-out version of Rad Racer with car damage and vehicle upgrading. Rad Racer is a very basic game, but it's also kind of a classic, and adding money / car damage / vehicle upgrades is actually pretty much exactly what was needed to get a little bit more longevity out of the formula. There are more cars on the track (including rival cars that you must pass to win) as well as cop cars as well, the cops in particular will make your life a living hell by speeding up in front of you and then slamming on the brakes, which both risks you getting busted and taking a lot of car damage. I do appreciate that the difficulty is a bit more sensible compared to Rad Racer where you basically have to cheese the game to win on the later stages, with a fair bit of the challenge coming from trying to win without banging up your car too badly so you have to spend most of your money on repairs. The game runs really well on Gameboy too, the visuals are clear and there's no problems with the framerate or flicker or anything, it's actually a pretty decent looking title. Of course, there's also password save. It's definitely a bit repetitive, but I found myself getting sucked into it for longer than I expected for this review.
DeleteYou may not know the name, but Lingo is a game you're probably already familiar with. It's effectively Wordle, but 25 years earlier. The basic idea of the game is the same, there's a 5 letter word you have to guess, and every time you guess a word you're shown which letters are in the right places and which letters are in the word, but not in the right places. The only differences from Wordle are that it's timed, you have only 5 guesses instead of 6, and they give you the first letter to start. This is technically based on a game show of the same name that had the same rules, and as such it's also played against an opponent team, that can either be another player (using the same gameboy), or the computer. Control swaps between teams when either someone fails to make a guess within the time limit or hits the limit of 5 guesses, at which point players alternate guesses until they get it, with the game progressively revealing more letters as a hint. After a round is won, that team draws two balls, with the goal ultimately being to score a bingo (a "lingo" in this case) on a bingo card. That aspect of the game kinda doesn't matter though, it's basically just Wordle for Game Boy. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of the time limit, but the game lets you pause whenever you want, so you can effectively play the game with no time limit if you prefer it that way. There's not too much else to say about it. Entering words is serviceable (the controls are a little slippery, but you can hold B to move the cursor to another position if you make a mistake), and while the music is a bit repetitive, it's nowhere near Wheel of Fortune-level bad. The game's biggest flaw is its dictionary, which has some strange omissions, like for example it did not have PLANT, MANTA, TOWER, or RACER (how do you not have PLANT?!), but at least the words it can choose seem pretty varied, I never saw any duplicates. At any rate, it's a fun time killer with among the best replay value on the platform, which is almost exactly what you want from Gameboy, this would have been a top choice for long car trips. It's really too bad this was only released in Europe because this easily could have been an all-time classic.
I actually spent quite a few hours playing ROTK GB, and even despite the language barrier I was actually kinda getting somewhere. So, despite the fact that ROTK looks obscenely complicated, it's actually a bit simpler than it looks. The most difficult thing about this game is figuring out the economy. To become obscenely wealthy and powerful, you need two things. First, your land needs to be well-developed, and second, your population needs to be loyal to you. Land development costs a bit of money and a turn, while loyalty requires you to bribe the population with a ton of rice (an amount equal to the amount of people you have). No matter how much your land is developed, you will never harvest any amount of rice that actually matters, I was getting like 300 with my land completely maxed out and 4000 people. However, this does not matter, the only resource that actually matters is money. This is because you can buy rice from the merchant, and it's dirt cheap. You can buy like 50000 rice for 800 gold or so, and a profitable province will make thousands of gold per year. Then just give all this rice to the people and raise your loyalty to 100. Now recruit an obscene amount of troops and you're ready to crush anyone who opposes you. One nice addition to the gameboy game is that addition of "Simple" battle mode. Battles in ROTK have always been kinda tedious, and this basically just reduces battle to a simple dice roll where whomever has more troops will basically just win, which does a ton to speed up the game. As you conquer territories, you'll have to move generals around and abandon territories that are not useful, but it's not too hard to wipe out most of the enemies, especially after they attack each other, which will usually deplete their armies and make it easy to mop up whomever's left. The biggest issue is that despite this actually relatively simple gameplay loop, the UI is still kind of obnoxious. One thing I really wish the game had is cursor memory. On a solid 90% of turns, I'm going to want to use the Develop command, but your cursor always starts at the far left so I have to navigate all the way over there every time. I also feel like moving my generals between territories is more complex than it needs to be, I'm never quite sure who I'm moving where and whom I'm leaving in charge, even though it usually works out. It's also kind of annoying that you can't order an allied general to give you resources, you have to move yourself there, then move yourself back with the resources, which often causes the people to lose loyalty in the process. It's also not totally clear what causes the merchant to be available, as sometimes he's not and he's super important. Still, there is some fun to be had here and I appreciate the effort to streamline this game for gameboy, this is easily the most playable this franchise has ever been. It's kinda too bad they didn't localize this one because I feel like if there was ever going to be an entry to get the west interested in this game it probably would have been this one.
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