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Last Topic's Ratings:
Alleyway - AGAGGAGA - 75% (8)
Baseball - AGAAAGB - 57% (7)
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle - AAGAAAA - 57% (7)
Master Karateka - ABA - 33% (3)
Super Mario Land - GGGGGGGGAGGGAA - 89% (14) (1 SR)
Wizardry Gaiden: Suffering of the Queen - B - 0% (1)
The turnout for this topic was great, 14 votes for Super Mario Land bodes well for future topics. Well, except for Wizardry, maybe having an untranslated RPG in the first topic was too ambitious. I wish I could help people set up the fan translation, but Gamefaqs literally won't let me. Try to figure that out though because there's loads more Wizardry where that came from.
Games for this topic:
Golf
Power Mission
RoboCop (GB)
Space Invaders (Japan)
Sunsoft Grand Prix
Tetris
And here's our first encounter with one of the biggest annoyances of the Gameboy GAB. There are quite a number of games on Gameboy where there are several different games that have the same name. In this case, we have Robocop and Space Invaders. For Robocop, this is the original Gameboy game by Ocean, not the Gameboy Color game by Titus. Space Invaders is even worse, as there are THREE different games all called Space Invaders, this is the original Japanese-only release from 1990, not the new version that came to the US in 1994, nor the Gameboy Color reimagining of the series. Yeesh. That took so long to explain I almost forgot to mention that Tetris is also in this topic.
Golf - G
ReplyDeletePower Mission - A
RoboCop (GB) - A
Space Invaders (Japan) - B
Sunsoft Grand Prix - B
Tetris - G
Golf is surprisingly good for such an early title. It's a very simple overhead-style Golf game that heavily resembles NES Open Tournament Golf, but it actually might be slightly better than that game. Like NESOTG, this is a purely overhead-style Golf game, which is by far the correct direction to go for these games as the pseudo-3D camera never displayed anything useful. Controls are simple, but cover everything you need. Up and down switches clubs, left / right aims, B shows the course map, and A hits the ball. The game has the classic "three tap" swing, and the meter feels quite good here, it's neither unreasonably fast nor unreasonably slow, in particular I think this is one of the areas where this game has an edge on NES Open Tournament Golf. Probably the game's only real issue is you can't see the power ratings of your clubs. The 1W is about 230y, and you can kinda guess the approximate power of the other clubs based on this, so it's not really too much of a problem, but it would have been nice to display it. For putting, the green shows some fairly basic arrows but they get the job done just fine and putting generally feels pretty good. The game also supports 2 players and has autosave, neither of which I was expecting in such an early title, and there's 2 separate courses with 18 holes each. Make no mistake, this game is quite hard, I did get a few birdies but even getting par is tricky a lot of the time, but it works well and it's pretty fun. You can kinda tell that the later Mario Golf borrows a lot from this game, while that game is obviously better, the groundwork for it is all here.
Power Mission is all right. This is a good example of the power of Gameboy, as this type of game would almost certainly be terrible if it was on console, but because it's a handheld game the developers were forced to keep the game relatively simple and this works greatly to its benefit. The gist of the game is each side gets a fleet of a few different types of ships, which they position on opposite sides of the map. Each turn, you can move each of your ships and optionally attack if there's anything in range. Each ship carries a few weapons, like machine guns and torpedoes, each of which has different ranges and different effectiveness against different enemy types. You cannot initially see the opponent's ships, you can either try to reveal them with radar (which you can only do once per turn) or just by getting close enough to them. The interface is not the greatest, in particular one thing that annoys me is that when you attack the enemy, the damage you deal isn't displayed, in fact you can't tell how much health the enemy has at all except when they sink or get shot down (there's also planes in the game). The game also provides no way to tell which of your units have moved / attacked this turn besides not allowing you to do it if you try to move them again. Still, I appreciate that the game actually lets you cancel your move if you make a mistake, which many games of this age didn't, and the basic gameplay is functional enough even if it is a bit slow (IMO, they probably should have given each side 8 units instead of 10). There's a decent number of stages and password support, and you can also play multiplayer, so it's not a bad overall package for its time.
Robocop is a fairly basic sidescrolling action game. You can jump and shoot your pistol, and with the DPad you can aim your shots in the 8 cardinal directions. There are tons of enemies who come at you from the edges of the screen and need to be gunned down, with most of them taking many shots, but you can fire pretty fast and have a lot of shots on screen at once. You can sometimes pick up different weapons, generally a shotgun and a piercing shot, but these get limited shots before you're back to the basic pistol. Robocop has a lot of health, but you can take damage pretty fast, so you have to be fairly precise. One of the most notable things about the game is that Robocop is quite slow, so it's important to begin firing before enemies come onscreen or they can overwhelm you. The stages in the game have decent variety, later on the game starts introducing things like elevators and turrets that force you to play a bit more cautiously. An interesting thing in the game is that after every main action stage, there's a minigame of sorts, of these the most inspired are the shooting gallery and a minigame where you have to copy a drawing of the suspect. There's an annoying boss battle after the 5th stage which is hard only because you have to do it unarmed (even then it's still not that hard), you also face this thing again at the end of the game but you can use your gun which makes it way easier and it's kind of satisfying to blow that thing to pieces after the trouble it gave you earlier (though the final stage is extremely long and hard and has no health pickups). One of the most fun parts of the game is there's a unique enemy on the last stage that drops a supergun that one-shots any enemy and pierces, unfortunately you can only use it that one time but it's definitely the highlight of the action stages. Overall, it's not terrible, I guess it's decently long for this kind of game, but there's also a lot of cheap shots towards the end and it doesn't really have any replay value, it's probably somewhere on the low side of A but it's nowhere near bad enough for B.
DeleteSpace Invaders is difficult to rate. Being a port of a Gen 2 game, it's much more simple than almost all other games on Gameboy. It is fairly accurate to the arcade game, but at the same time there's very little content here. Even among Gen 2 games, Space Invaders doesn't have a lot going for it, like if you compare Pac-Man, the Ghost's behaviour changes every few levels, and Donkey Kong has multiple different level layouts. By comparison, Space Invaders is the exact same thing stage after stage, and it just doesn't stay interesting that long. I think you could make the case for A simply because it is fairly arcade-accurate, but the US version also exists, which is an upgrade in almost every way. It especially sounds way better, but it also controls smoother and lasers are thinner which results in fewer annoying laser collisions, so I feel like that version does feel a fair bit more fun to play. It seems a bit harsh, but this version simply doesn't even really hold a candle to something like Robocop. I feel like the core idea behind this game has some appeal but it just needs a bit more content than this, which is probably why all later versions of the game add a bunch of extra stuff to it.
Sunsoft Grand Prix sucks. This is probably the worst game we've covered so far, it's a super simplistic top-down racer that is saddled with such a terrible racing engine that it pretty much can't be fun. Essentially, your car always faces upwards in this game, when you hold the turning button you turn diagonally, but the second you release it you snap back to facing upwards. This essentially removes all nuance from the game, to take the sharpest turns you just hold the direction (since you literally cannot turn any sharper than a certain angle) and for less sharp turns you have to tap it repeatedly, letting it snap back a little at a time, which looks and feels stupid. The game is very easy as you can just pick one of the faster cars since handling doesn't matter and every track feels the exact same. I can't believe I'm saying this, but this would have been better if they just stuck to the "Pole Position" style gameplay. Avoid this one.
DeleteThere's not too much to say about Tetris. I imagine for many, this is THE Game Boy game. This was essentially the perfect title to launch the system with, it's a fantastic fit for the platform and also a great conversion. It looks perfect on Gameboy's screen, quite notably compared to many other puzzle games Tetris does not rely on colour in any way so it remains clear and readable on GB. The music is also great, it has the iconic Tetris Music A which I'm sure you know by heart, or if you don't it will be permanently ingrained in your brain after the first 5 minutes. As with all old versions of Tetris, the "Bag Algorithm" is nowhere to be found, so it remains dynamic and interesting for a pretty long time, certainly when compared to something like Space Invaders the difference is night and day. To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of Tetris, I have long preferred most of the other major puzzle franchises like Puyo Puyo and Bust a Move, but it's impossible to deny how good of a fit this game was for GB and how integral it was to its early success.