Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Golf - AAAGG - 70% (5)
Power Mission - BAAA - 38% (4)
RoboCop (GB) - BBGAAA - 42% (6)
Space Invaders (Japan) - AAAABB - 33% (6)
Sunsoft Grand Prix - BBAABB - 17% (6)
Tetris - GGGGGGGGGGGG - 100% (12) (3 SR)
It was nice to see Tetris getting a lot of votes and some SRs. As I mentioned in the final results for Saturn, not many SRs were given out in those topics, so I hope we'll see more of them here.
Games for this topic:
Astro Rabby
Boxxle
Final Fantasy Legend
NBA All-Star Challenge
Revenge of the Gator
Shanghai
It's interesting to me to see how many of these early Japanese titles eventually made their way to the US, sometimes years later. On other systems you wouldn't be surprised to see something like Boxxle or Shanghai remain exclusive to Japan, but they both have US releases, the only Japan-exclusive here is Astro Rabby (and it has full english text). I guess the relative simplicity of many GB games probably made them somewhat easier to localize.
Astro Rabby - A
ReplyDeleteBoxxle - G
Final Fantasy Legend - A
NBA All-Star Challenge - B
Revenge of the Gator - G
Shanghai - A
Astro Rabby is a fairly basic action game that heavily resembles Jumping Flash, though it significantly predates it. As in Jumping Flash, it's viewed from a mostly overhead perspective and you have a very high jump which you need to use to land on various blocks. The goal of the game is to find the hidden parts, which will be in one of the question blocks on the level, so you need to jump on all the blocks as the screen scrolls to try to figure out where they're hidden. The contents of the blocks seem to be randomized, so you'll have to check them all to find the parts, though some also contain powerups and other things like that. There are also enemies that you can shoot with a simple blaster, though this can be problematic as on many stages you're pretty limited on where you can walk. Every third stage is a bonus game which plays like concentration, but you have to match audio tones, these are not super great as the tones are very similar to each other, so remembering which ones go where is really hard. It's an okay game, but this is one that's not especially well-optimized to GB, there's no passwords or anything. I guess it is fairly short and maybe the randomization is intended to give it some replay value, but I feel like it gets repetitive pretty quickly.
Boxxle is pretty solid. It's a Sokobon game, so you probably already know the basics, you have to push boxes on to switches without pushing the boxes in such a way that you get stuck. Obviously, as a classic puzzle that doesn't take long to play this is a perfect fit for Gameboy, and it's also a pretty good version of the game as well. For starters, the visuals, while nothing to write home about, are crisp and clear on the GB screen, even for the "half resolution" puzzles. Secondly, the game is surprisingly feature-rich for an early GB title. Besides including passwords, the game also features a rewind feature, which you can use after retrying a puzzle to redo all of your steps from your last attempt, though of course you can stop it at any time if you know where you made a mistake. This alone makes retrying puzzles not nearly as frustrating as it might be otherwise. There's also a puzzle creator, though you can't save your puzzles so this is kind of a throwaway feature (I guess saving it to a password might have been possible, but they probably would have been really long). The other thing this game does pretty well is its level of difficulty. Many games like this get way too hard too fast, but I feel like the learning curve is pretty sensible here, likely because the GB's resolution prevents the puzzles from being too huge. Oh, and the music is a huge earworm, even though I think there's only one track. In any case, another solid early GB title for puzzle fans.
Like Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy Legend is a very ambitious early RPG held back by a lack of mechanical polish. For its time, this is actually quite an impressive game. It's fairly long and has a decently-sized game world, there's actually a somewhat interesting story, and you can also save anywhere. Considering how early this came out it's actually surprising how adept they were with the hardware. However, it also has some pretty serious flaws that can make playing it somewhat annoying. The game features 3 character classes, Humans, Mutants, and Monsters. Humans are the most straightforward. They don't gain strength directly from encounters, instead you have to use money to buy stat boosters for them, but their stats can be raised very high and they are essentially the most "consistent" class. Mutants play like traditional Saga characters, where they randomly gain stats after battles depending on the actions they took. They can also learn spells, which occurs randomly after battle. This mechanic is very irritating as they can randomly replace some of the spells they already have, and some of the abilities they can get are even bad passives like elemental weaknesses, so you could easily lose a good spell and gain a weakness in its place, and the game doesn't even tell you this has happened. The typical advice is to simply check your abilities after every battle and reset if anything bad happened. Saves and resets are fast, but this is still dumb and I prefer to just avoid this class entirely. Monsters instead gain strength by eating meat which randomly drops when defeating enemies. When they eat meat, they will morph into a different form depending on the type of meat they ate. This is deterministic, though you kind of need to use a guide to prevent your monsters from morphing into weak forms. This class is interesting, different forms know different spells and such, but they're generally much weaker than humans overall. I feel like there's definitely some cool ideas here, but the execution of the Mutants and Monsters is lacking enough that you'll probably just want to stick with humans, or maybe add a few monsters if you want a challenge (Mutants are so annoying I can't ever endorse using them). I can definitely see the argument for G if you're very patient with the system (which you might have been willing to be when it came out as it was fairly advanced for its time), but otherwise you might be better served by waiting for the sequel, which irons out most of these issues, or by playing the Wonderswan remake, which has a lot of improvements.
DeleteNBA All-Star Challenge isn't really much of a game. This is essentially kind of a minigame collection, but there's really only 2 minigames and neither of them are good. The first is kind of a Jordan vs Bird clone. It's a one-on-one game that's played near a single basket and you basically just take turns making shots and potentially grabbing rebounds. The big problem here is that there's basically no defense. Blocking shots is basically impossible and although you can steal, it's pretty unreliable and they basically have to be standing still for you to do it. As such, you basically just run up and do a close-range jump shot and they can't really stop you (dunks exist but are super unreliable). Two of the other games are just variations on this where you play alone but have to take shots from certain locations instead, which is even more dull. The last game is a timing challenge based on free throws that is also very basic, and that's the whole game. Something that stands out to me is that the character selection is a line of of all-time greats, like Larry Bird, Carl Malone, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, and even Michael Jordan, but who you pick totally doesn't matter because as far as I can tell they all play the same. It's crazy that they paid what was no doubt a fortune for these likenesses and then slapped them into such a basic product that easily could have worked just as well without any player select at all.
Revenge of the Gator is a simple but charming Pinball game. First thing's first, this is a one-table game. You could easily complain about the volume of content, particularly as many other GB Pinball games like Pinball Dreams and Kirby's Pinball Land do include multiple tables, and it is kinda valid. Luckily, it is a pretty good pinball table. It has 4 layers and some bonus games, and the entire game flows well and feels pretty well-balanced. In particular, I like that it's generally fairly easy to move between levels of the table, save for the fourth which is somewhat hard to get to but is almost a bonus area in its own right. What really stands out about this game though is the presentation. A ton of love went into the design and animations for this game, which are of unusually high quality for such an early GB title. There's all kinds of cute details here, one of my favourites is that when you lose a life, you don't just get some kind of "ball lost, try again" message, you get to see the gator eat your ball, which is quite funny. There's not a ton else to say about it beyond this, you could definitely make the case for A, but I like it. Sometimes a little charm goes a long way.
DeleteShanghai is another classic puzzle game that you'd expect to make a good transition to portable, though this one is actually a bit rougher than you might think. For starters, the loss of colour actually matters quite a lot here. You don't actually realize how critical the colours of the tiles are to the readability of the board until you try playing without it, and the low resolution causes many pieces to look very similar. I found that playing this version actually gave me some degree of eye strain after a while, and my play was also way slower compared to most other versions of the game even though I was still winning most of the time. The other big issue is that this version has only one board layout, the classic Turtle. While Turtle is obviously a good layout, it would have been nice to have at least a couple others, like I feel they easily could have done 3 layouts or something. It is still a classic game and I can see why you might want to have this in portable format, but this wouldn't be my preferred way to play it.