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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Game Boy Wars - AAA - 50% (3)
Koi Wa Kakehiki - BBA - 17% (3)
Play Action Football - BGB - 33% (3)
Solar Striker - GGGBGAA - 71% (7)
Sword of Hope - AGA - 67% (3)
Wheel of Fortune - ABBBB - 10% (5)
It's nice that every game this week got at least 3 ratings, especially considering there were 2 imports. In general, the imports have been getting a decent number of ratings, hopefully that continues.
Games for this topic:
Balloon Kid
Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World
Dragon Slayer
Flipull
Janken Man
Paperboy (GB)
We come across yet another of the nuances of the Gameboy library with this topic. A GBC release of Balloon Kid exists (called Balloon Fight GB), but it is virtually identical to Balloon Kid, just colourized and with minor UI changes, so we won't be rating it separately. That means if you have experience with that version, it's fine to rate here. This is not the case with Paperboy, however, where the GBC game of the same name is quite different and will be covered in a future topic. Hopefully you're not too confused yet because it's not going to get easier. Beyond this, I'm curious to try out Dragon Slayer, which is the granddaddy of the Legend of Heroes series.
Balloon Kid - A
ReplyDeleteBoomer's Adventure in Asmik World - B
Dragon Slayer - G
Flipull - A
Janken Man - A
Paperboy (GB) - A
Balloon Kid was one of the favourites of a friend of mine from my youth so I was interested to play it, but it's not quite as good as I hoped. I do like that it acts as kind of an expansion of the original Balloon Fight, but ultimately it still has some of the same problems and ends up getting repetitive pretty fast. IMO, the game's biggest problem is that it's an autoscroller, which severely limits the potential for skillful play since you have to stick with the screen rather than being able to go fast if you've got the skill for it, the autoscroller stages in Super Mario Bros are also always the least fun for precisely this reason. Coupled with the game's generally low level of difficulty, this leaves the game as a fairly leisurely affair with the only real form of skill expression being if you try to get all the balloons. The game gives you the ability to detach from your balloons and run on the ground every now and then, though I'm not really convinced this is a good mechanic either, particularly as you may run out of ground at a moment's notice and have to quickly reinflate your balloons or be tossed off the edge to your doom. The upgraded version of this game that was released in Japan doesn't really remedy any of the game's issues, it's basically the exact same game but with a map screen and colorized. Ultimately, it's an okay and inoffensive game but not one that really grabs me.
Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World is kind of a unique game, but it's also not very fun. The basic gist of the game is it's a maze game where the goal of each level is to find the key and reach the stairs to the next floor. You play as Boomer, a painfully slow dinosaur whose only real form of defense is to very slowly dig holes for enemies to fall into. Digging holes also serves as a way to find items, particularly the key, which is always buried underground, but also weapons like bones and boomerangs and other useful items like the compass as well. The game starts out okay, the basic gist is you get the compass, then use the compass to find the key, but various issues start to appear quickly. For starter, the compass has limited uses, and if you pick up another item it's outright gone. Good luck if you accidentally lose the only compass on a level before you know where the key is. Secondly, there quickly starts to be way too many enemies on the levels. You can kill them with weapons, but they respawn after a few seconds so this barely helps, and they can steal your items or the key. There are also bosses, which are enormously tedious as Boomer is too slow to dodge their attacks effectively. It turns out the key actually always starts in the same spot, so the secret to the game is basically just to know where the key is and then make a beeline for it while ignoring everything else, though an enemy may dig it up and move it before you can get to it (this also seems to mess up the compass). Overall, the game just feels more tedious than fun. I feel like if Boomer moved and dug holes faster or if enemies stayed dead this might have been A.
DeleteDragon Slayer is a much more interesting game than I first thought. It's very unique, so I'll first have to start by describing it. It's sort of a strange cross between an RPG and a puzzle game where you have to explore a maze to defeat a dragon. The maze is made out of blocks, and you can find various items (of which you can only carry one at a time) that let you do various things. The first one you'll probably find is the ring, which lets you push the blocks around and thus reshape the maze. Initially, you'll mainly want to try to do this to open some passages to find other items, especially the sword, which lets you fight enemies, but the degree to which you can reshape the maze to your liking is very extensive. For example, you can open up shortcuts through walls, or block openings so monsters can't reach you. With the sword obtained, you now want to increase your power. Defeating enemies is one way to do this, but this only really increases your HP / defense, to get attack power you have to find power orbs throughout the maze and return them to your house, which grants 2500 attack power per orb. At first, you'll just want to find these and cart them back, but you'll eventually start finding large caches of them that are tedious to drag back one at a time. This is where the second function of the ring comes in - you can also push your house around, so rather than bringing the orbs back to your house, you'll want to bring your house to the orbs. Of course, pushing your house through areas full of enemies can be a dangerous proposition, and the more enemies you kill, the harder the enemies become, but this is where rearranging the map comes into play. You can move blocks around and use crosses (which act like blocks for the enemy, but you can pass through them) to block the enemies in various areas to allow you to loot safely. I eventually found a giant ring of treasure boxes and orbs that I opened with the key, then pushed my house into there and blocked all the entrances so I could loot all the treasure, which was very satisfying. There are also spells you can get by killing enough enemies that make things easier, especially the break spell that lets you destroy blocks and the Map spell, though you don't want to break too many blocks since the enemies will have an easier time getting around too. In many ways, I actually feel like this game feels like a forerunner to survival crafting games like Minecraft, with its focus on gathering, world construction, and moving / establishing your base. It does have one fatal flaw on Gameboy though, which is that it doesn't feature any save feature whatsoever. This is a very long game (I would guess beating the game takes at least 5 hours even if you're pretty efficient), which is an absurdly long time to play on a handheld with no saves. This is obviously a non-issue on emulator, but I could see the argument for dropping the game to A just for this, which is a shame because it's otherwise a very cool game, but I think it's interesting and unique enough to stay as G. After all, Super Gameboy was always an option even back in the old days.
Flipull is a fairly basic puzzle game that kind of reminds me of Zoop. There's a stack of blocks on the left and your character is on the right, holding a block. When you throw your block into the stack, it will clear all matching blocks until it finds a block it can't match, which is then returned to you and becomes the next block you need to throw. Unlike Zoop, this is not an action-based game, but instead a more puzzle-oriented affair where the goal is to avoid trapping yourself with a block you can't match. This forces you to think several moves ahead as you obviously don't want to clear some blocks only to end up with a block you can't use. Should this happen, you get an S block, which will match anything, and you can continue playing, until you run out of S blocks and have to use a continue (you also start every stage with an S block). You beat each stage when you eliminate enough blocks that the remaining stack is smaller than the goal. I've mentioned before that I like puzzle games that make you think in a unique way and this game does generally achieve that, it's certainly significantly better than Zoop because it at least does require thought, the biggest issue is that it gets repetitive after a while. I blame a lot of the issue on the fact that your remaining S blocks carry over between stages. If you got 2 per stage, you could be more aggressive with them and focus on setting up long chains (which earn bonus points) even if you know they might trap you, but the need to be super careful not to trap yourself forces you to just go for safe matches and small clears at the expense of points (I'm also not totally convinced that every stage has a solution that uses only 1 S block as the stages are randomized). The game does eventually start to introduce a few special pieces but in general I feel like it gets repetitive fairly quickly, even if the core idea isn't too bad.
DeleteJanken Man is a very simplistic and easy platformer. The first thing to note about this game is that you almost can't die. There are enemies, but being hit by them simply stuns you for a second, the only way to actually lose is to run out of time and the timer is extremely generous. There are items you can pick up on the stage and most of them increase your time or make you fast, but a couple take away time and should be avoided. You can find doors, inside which you can challenge an old man to rock paper scissors. Beating him awards bonus time, though you can just try again if you lose (obviously though as time keeps going during the minigame you gradually lose time if you lose a lot). At the end of the stage you have to fight a boss, whom you must get to a +5 win differential to beat. You cannot lose by losing repeatedly, though obviously this wastes time and you could in theory run out, but the game is very easy so this is unlikely. There does seem to be some logic to the way the AI plays Rock Paper Scissors, I found a good way to win was to keep picking rock until you win one, then switch to Scissors, then switch back to Rock and keep repeating that (Paper is for suckers). After you beat the boss the stage is cleared and you can move on, there's 5 stages total. Probably the best thing about the game is that it keeps track of your best time and score on each stage, though obviously it doesn't save this. Still, it gives the game a tiny bit of replay value.
Paperboy (GB) is a fairly faithful port of the NES game, which is obviously fantastic, but a couple minor problems hold it back from being as good as the NES port. If you don't know the basics, Paperboy casts you as a sociopathic menace on a bicycle who hurls rolled up newspapers into people's faces, at dogs, at cars, through windows, and occasionally right into a subscriber's mailbox. Unsurprisingly, absolutely everyone on the street is trying to kill you, but this is fine because you clearly deserve it. In short, it's hilarious and always a great time, at least on NES, most other ports of the game aren't nearly as good. One of the main things that sells this game on NES is fantastic sound design. The game has hilarious sound effects for all the various things you can hit with your papers, in particular the noise for breaking someone's window has to be the single most satisfying sound effect on NES. Unfortunately, while the visuals are mostly intact on GB, the sound takes a big hit and this definitely diminishes the experience to some degree. The other problem is a more major one, which is that the game does not actually color the subscriber houses differently from the non-subscribers. This is kind of a huge issue, as you kinda need to know which houses you should be destroying and which ones you shouldn't. Although you can simply try to remember which ones they are or look at the colour of the mailbox (the only indicator of subscriber status), they absolutely should have inverted the colour palette for non-subscribers. These two issues definitely make this version quite inferior to the NES version, though it's still kind of cool to have this game portable even if it is a big downgrade. At least it's much better than the Gameboy Color version, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
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