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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
F-1 Race - BBBGG - 40% (5)
Hal Wrestling - BBBG - 25% (4)
Lazlos' Leap - GGAAA - 70% (5)
Nemesis - GGGGGGG - 100% (7) (2 SR)
Ultima: Runes of Virtue - ABAB - 25% (4)
World Beach Volley - GAGG - 88% (4)
A pretty strong showing for sports games on Gameboy so far, which I think is an interesting result. I wonder if it will continue or if we've just hit an unusually strong subset of them so far.
Games for this topic:
Amida
Battleship
Blades of Steel
Catrap
Chibi Maruko-Chan Okozukai Daisakusen
Mega Man
I'm curious to see the board's opinion about Catrap. I remember a lot of people liked it back in the day, but I don't remember too much about it. Also, there's a guide for the Chibi Maruko-Chan game if anyone is having trouble understanding it.
Amida - B
ReplyDeleteBattleship - B
Blades of Steel - B
Catrap - G
Chibi Maruko-Chan Okozukai Daisakusen - B
Mega Man - G
Amida is a very weird game but it's not very good. The basic gist of the game is that you're trying to guide a little round guy from the top of the stage to his house at the bottom. To get there he has to traverse a series of lines with various connections between them, and he will always take a connection when he can. You've probably seen puzzles like this before, for example the spider boss in Megaman X works this way. Rather than simply focusing on selecting the right starting path for him, though, you also have the ability to place a path somewhere on the stage, and you can even move it as he's travelling along. The game's biggest problem is that it can't quite decide whether it wants to be a puzzle game or an action game. At the start of each stage, the character rotates quite fast between all possible drop locations and you have to press start to lock in the right one. In most cases, if chosen properly this will allow him to complete the stage with you simply placing your bridge in one location and not moving it. Annoyingly, if you misstime the starting drop (which is very easy since the cycle is fast) you often get into a situation which either requires multiple quick bridges to escape or may just be guaranteed death because of the death platforms. Another weird mechanic is at the start of the game you select the speed, which is how fast the character moves, with 8 being the slowest. On speed 8, you can almost completely control where he goes using the platform since he moves so slow, whereas on higher speeds you basically can't control him at all, which is a bizarre method of adjusting the difficulty that doesn't feel well thought-out. In general, I think the game would be way better if it was basically just difficulty 4 all the time but you could choose where to start each stage rather than having to time it with the start button, though even then it might be too simple to stay fun for long.
Battleship is a classic game and despite its simplicity it actually remains somewhat enjoyable, but unfortunately this version of the game has a massive flaw that makes it nearly unplayable. I'm sure everyone knows the basics of the game, you place your ships on a board and then take turns shooting missiles at each other to try to destroy the other player's ships. This game adds some special missiles which can be fired from the various ships, assuming they haven't yet been sunk, which adds a tiny bit more strategy to the game, but not much. Unfortunately, the flaw with the game is that it does not accurately copy the ships from the original game. The original game has ships of sizes 5, 4, 3, and 2. This game has ships of sizes 5, 3, 2, and 1. The 1-ship is the one that completely breaks the game, as there is a VERY GOOD reason that the original game does not feature a ship of this size. The strategy of the game is that you can gradually rule out areas of the board as not being able to contain the opponent's ships because they won't fit in those locations, but when you have a 1-ship, this is never possible as it can be literally anywhere and the only way to find it is to hit every single square. This literally just turns every game into "who gets lucky and hits the 1-ship", with many games simply turning into both sides systematically shooting every square until the sub is found by luck by one player. Obviously, this is not fun and robs the game of any strategic depth it might have had. It's unfortunate because if we dumped the 1-ship for another 2-ship this game would probably be at least A.
DeleteBlades of Steel is fairly similar to the NES version, but it's missing enough that it now feels a fair bit worse. For starters, it's worth noting that on NES, Blades of Steel is nowhere near as good as Ice Hockey from a gameplay standpoint, instead it has fairly decent presentation for its time, with fairly detailed skaters and some voice clips, as well as things like the little skating interlude at the beginning and such. All of these are cut on Gameboy, leaving it a vastly plainer affair, and the game boy version is also quite a bit slower, the players no longer really feel like they're skating. With these changes, the simplistic gameplay simply no longer really cuts it. There's basically no strategy to this game, passing barely matters, the entire game is just timing your shot so the arrow is where the goalie isn't, and knowing how to control your own goalie can basically deny almost all scoring attempts from the opponent. There's pretty much nothing else to say about the game beyond this, unlike some of the other, better sports games we've covered it's missing the nuance (like, say, the play selection / counterpicking aspect of Play Action Football) that elevates it above its otherwise simple mechanics. This game really is as simple as it looks and it doesn't stay interesting for very long.
Speaking of simplicity, we have Catrap. Back in the day, pretty much everyone I knew who had a gameboy had this game and loved it. However, coming back to the game, it's not immediately so clear what's so special about it. The gist of the game is it's a relatively simple puzzle game where you have to wipe out all the monsters on each stage, generally by pushing blocks and removing dirt in specific ways. It sort of reminds me of a side scrolling version of Boxxle, but it's a little easier. It has 100 levels, a puzzle editor, and password save, so that's a pretty decent feature set, but still, a lot of puzzle games have that, what made this one so remarkable? Well, it became more clear as I played it for a while. For starters, it's quite cute. The characters in the game are quite nicely animated for a gameboy game, the two different characters have distinct animations rather than just being palette swaps of each other, and each also has their own music, which helps give it some more personality than it might otherwise have. The game also features a pretty well-balanced difficulty curve where it ramps up at a nice rate and doesn't just immediately overwhelm you with hard puzzles. And perhaps best of all, there's a rewind feature where you can hold A to back up as many moves as you want, with no penalty on its usage. If you get to the end of a stage, then make some mistake and you're like "oh, now I see what I was supposed to do", you can just hold A to back up a couple moves, do it correctly, then be on you way (should you need to, you can also quickly restart the stage). This really helps make the game feel more convenient to play. Overall, it's just a solid package that's fun to play and clearly had a fair bit of love and care put into it, which is enough to make it stand out among its many competitors.
Chibi Maruko-Chan is a weird game. It's not an RPG, despite somewhat looking like one, it's really more of a gambling adventure game. The plot of the game is that Maruko wants to buy a bunch of toys for herself but has no money, so she sets out to swindle all her friends and family out of their money instead. Initially, the only game she can challenge people to is Rock Paper Scissors. Winning this increases your energy (and possibly grants special cards, more on them in a bit), which allows Maruko to challenge people to various gambling games to make money. The gambling games are heavily skewed in your favour, you only have to pay 10 yen to play but can win hundreds of yen, but each person will only play against you once before wising up to how they're being ripped off. As mentioned before, you can win cards by defeating people in rock paper scissors, which have varying effects, from increasing the amount of money you can carry to giving you more strength to gamble. The absolute most important one will reset every NPC so you can challenge them again, though there's also a bad card which will steal half your money when you interact with the piggy bank. People are only willing to play you in Rock Paper Scissors once as well, win or lose, but they seemingly sometimes reset, probably to prevent you from getting stuck by running out. Still, you can lose the game if you run completely out of money. The bigger issue is that it can just take a really long time to get things done, especially because of the card that steals half your money that you can randomly acquire any time you get a card, and your mother can also steal your money on hand when you go home as well, unless you won the lottery prize. The game is sort of borderline between A and B, undeniably its biggest issue is that nothing in the game really requires any skill. All of the games you can play except to some extent the slot machine are just pure luck, and even if the odds are in your favour the fact that there's not much you can really do to increase your chances to win does tend to make them a bit dull. The game is also very long and you can't save in any way. The biggest issue, though, is the card that steals half your money, which is incredibly lame, especially towards the end of the game. If that card wasn't present I think it would probably be A, I do like the sort of general gist of the game and it is kinda funny, but I think it'd be too tedious to play without using an emulator.
DeleteMega Man is one of those games where it's clearly good and I don't have a lot to say about it. First of all, this is not simply a port of the NES game. Although it features the same bosses as Mega Man 1 on NES, it has completely unique stages. Your biggest concern would probably be "can gameboy handle Mega Man's gameplay?", and the good news is that it can. The classic Mega Man gameplay everyone loves is totally intact here, and it doesn't suffer inordinately from the loss of colour. About the only other thing you might note about it is that it's quite hard, noticeably moreso than the other Mega Man games on Gameboy. Health pickups are slim and the stages are long and feature pretty difficult patterns. It's certainly still doable if you're good at the series and I don't think it detracts from the experience too much, but don't be surprised if you run into some trouble. The only other thing I want to note is that the game's presentation is surprisingly solid for how early of a game it was. The music is mostly arrangements of the songs from MM1 NES, but they sound good on GB's soundchip, and there's also some pretty nice visual effects here and there. I've sometimes chastised games for sticking too close to the formulas set down on NES as handheld games are a fundamentally different beast, but here it still works well, probably due to these games inherently being decently replayable and having password support.