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Last Topic's Ratings:
Amazing Spider-Man, The - BBBBBB - 0% (6)
Bubble Bobble - GGAG - 88% (4)
George Foreman's KO Boxing - BBBB - 0% (4)
Lamborghini American Challenge - GGA - 83% (3)
Lingo - BGGG - 75% (4) (1 SR)
San Goku Shi Game Boy Han - AA - 50% (2)
I don't really have a ton to say here, other than that I'm surprised Bubble Bobble got as few votes as it did, as I would have expected it to be very well known. I guess a lot of people just stuck to the NES version, which segues well into our next topic...
Games for this topic:
Battle Ping Pong
Battle Unit Zeoth
Dexterity
DuckTales
Shounen Ashibe
Rolan's Curse
Battle Unit Zeoth is a game I keep seeing on the gameboy list since it's near the top of the list alphabetically and by release order, so I'm looking forward to seeing what it's about, but no question the big story here is DuckTales. As one of the most popular NES games, I'm quite curious to see how that will help or hurt the reception to the GB game. Rolan's Curse is also a game I remember being popular in the old days.
Battle Ping Pong - B
ReplyDeleteBattle Unit Zeoth - G
Dexterity - A
DuckTales - A
Shounen Ashibe - B
Rolan's Curse - A
Battle Ping Pong looks nice, but it's barely a game. The big issue here is that this game functions like Wii Sports Tennis where the character automatically chases the ball, and you just press the button to hit. This obviously takes away all of the nuance related to reading the trajectory of the ball, which is 90% of the game in games like this. Worse yet, you also cannot direct your shot at all, so you can't even aim for the corners or anything like that. This makes rallies go on far too long and the game becomes totally mind-numbing almost immediately. This is such a bizarre self-own because this game might have been G if they simply let you control the racket. The only reason this control scheme somewhat works for Wii Sports is because the motion control adds some nuance to aiming your shots, but even then it should have been possible to use the nunchuk to move.
Battle Unit Zeoth is all right. This is a horizontal shmup with some interesting ideas. One of the things about this game that stands out is that the game is a horizontal shmup, but you don't move up and down with the dpad, you instead do this by tapping A to ascend and releasing it to fall, as pressing up and down lets you aim your weapon up and down instead. This isn't too important on regular stages, but it plays a crucial role on the game's vertical stages and bosses. After every horizontal stage is a vertical stage. These do not scroll automatically and thus the game plays closer to a platformer here. The cramped spaces make these stages very tough, it's important to proceed slowly and cautiously here, luckily these stages are short. Every stage ends with a boss, and these are probably the highlight of the package, the bosses are huge and have quite complex patterns for Gameboy, after the first boss (who has a safe spot in the top right) the successive fights are very tough. The game is not super long, but it has decent graphics and music and it feels just unique enough to stand out from the pack a little. The only annoying thing is you have a bomb that's activated by pressing shoot twice quickly, this wipes the screen but costs two units of health and is massively unworth it to use, you have to be careful to never do this by accident (likely by just holding fire all the time). This is maybe a bit of a low G but it's drastically better than the Zoids game.
Dexterity is ok. It's a simple action game where the goal is to flip over all the panels. When the player flips a panel, if there is a line between that and another flipped panel, those panels also flip, which is also how you attack enemies. However, the enemies can also themselves flip panels and of course you die if you bump into them. Each stage is also timed and more and more spots will be blocked off as you progress. The core concept is okay for a few rounds, but it has a similar problem to many other similar games that enemies simply don't stay dead long enough once you kill them. This is especially problematic once there starts to be three enemies, as you can never kill more than two at once, making victory extremely tedious to attain. The presentation and such is all right, and it's not quite bad enough for B, but it's not one that I'd really come back to.
When it comes to DuckTales on Gameboy, there's something we have to get out of the way first. This is a massive downgrade from the NES version in every way. Control is stiffer, level layouts are greatly simplified, there's quite a lot of slowdown, there's vastly fewer secrets, and more. So the question is instead going to be "is it good for a Gameboy platformer if we ignore the NES version". Certainly, it is kinda still DuckTales, and it probably does compare favourably against some previous games like Gremlins 2 for example. However, I don't think it's quite enough for G. When we look at the NES version, there are three main things that made it such an iconic classic - its immaculate control, its replay value, and its soundtrack. When it comes to the control, it's noticeably worse here. The biggest thing is that Scrooge feels much "heavier" to control, which I believe is because the pogo bounce doesn't go quite as high, but gravity in this version also might be slightly heavier. An even bigger cut is to the replay value. DuckTales on NES is absolutely chock full of hidden diamonds that you can reveal by jumping in various places. There's so many that every time I play it I always discover some I didn't know about. These are almost totally axed on Gameboy, there are still a few, but they're generally in fairly obvious places and I would guess there's at most 10% as many as there are on NES. This is particularly unfortunate because replay value matters even more on Gameboy than it does on NES, so losing that element of the game is a huge blow. At least the soundtrack does make the jump intact, it's clearly still great and one of the better sounding GB games. Overall, it's an okay game but it lost most of the magic of what made DuckTales what it is, at best it can be thought of a DuckTales-esque adventure on the go, but the main thing it'll make you want to do is get back home and get back to the NES version as soon as possible. In particular, comparing Mega Man, which we covered previously, I feel like that game is clearly far superior, not only does it perfectly retain the Megaman control but it's also a distinct game with new stages that doesn't feel derivative of the NES game to the same degree.
DeleteShounen Ashibe is an extremely weird pseudo-RPG, but it's not very good. The basic gist of the game is that you have to complete four chapters that can be done in any order to retrieve four gems, or something along those lines. The first world is a pirate world, the second is a haunted house, and so on. You explore these areas from a top down perspective, RPG style, there are NPCs you can talk to, and there are also random battles. Battles in this game are super weird. When starting each battle, you choose a character to fight the enemy. There are 3 characters per chapter and each has only one attack. I believe certain characters are more effective against certain enemies than others, but it hardly matters, most regular enemies go down in 1-2 hits while bosses take 3-4. There is no HP, exp, or money in this game. Your "health" is represented by a picture of Ashibe, with him getting more concerned as your health gets lower. Battles reward money, but money is only used to pass certain checkpoints, there's no items or shops to use it on. There's also no experience so your characters never get stronger, and very little money is needed, so battles feel fairly pointless and you can run from most of them even though they are very common. The most absurd thing about the game, though, is how you heal. You pick the "Gomachan" command to heal, on either the overworld or in battle, and you get your health back. You can do this as many times as you want, it's totally unlimited. Thus, you can easily heal up to full after every battle, and you can alternate between attack and heal in battle to be invincible, which completely trivializes the gameplay of the game, not that there was ever much to it anyway. The game is kind of cute and the animations of the characters are funny I guess, plus the enemy designs are certainly wacky (many of them are sentient food items for whatever reason), but the gameplay is so basic it's hard to recommend it on any level. If the gameplay had even a little more nuance, like for example if you had to use the money to buy healing items instead of just being able to heal infinitely it might be good enough for A, but as it stands even as a baby's first RPG this still feels too simplistic to have any real appeal.
DeleteRolan's Curse is an interesting game that's kind of hard to describe. It's very frequently compared to the Legend of Zelda, as it is a top-down action game with a similar control interface, but IMO this is kind of a flawed comparison, as Rolan's Curse is much closer to a pure action game than an Action Adventure game like Link's Awakening. For starters, despite the top down perspective, it's pretty much completely linear. Exploration is limited to exploring each screen to find potential chests, which generally contain stat boosters or usable items, the former of which you always want, the latter are more situational, as picking up one will replace whichever one you currently have, which is not always a good thing as there may be items you want to keep for later. Combat in the game is fairly basic, you have a single basic attack with one of two weapon types, which like the items get switched out whenever you pick one up. The sword has little range but hits harder while the rod has some range but has less power, though either are generally usable. Combat generally works okay, but it's stiffer compared to Zelda since your movement in this game is tile-based (or rather, half-tile based) as compared to the free movement from Zelda, though as there's no money or experience avoiding enemies is often a good option unless you need an item that they drop (for example, slimes are easy and drop health so it's often a good idea to hunt them). The game is basically divided into four stages, which consist of traversing a large number of area maps to eventually face a boss. One of the game's biggest issues is its saving system. It has passwords, but they only save your current power level and which stage you're on. Stages 2 and 3 are quite long (Stage 3 in particular is longer than many entire GB games), so having to do those in one sitting is a bit rough, I wish they had had the password save your last-reached town rather than the stage. Presentation and music are both pretty solid for their time, at least. I feel like overall, this game kinda sits somewhere between Ultima Runes of Virtue and Link's Awakening in terms of quality, it's certainly better than Ultima, but nowhere near as good as Awakening. IMO it's probably around high A territory, notably the sequel makes a fair number of improvements that make it a more worthy competitor to Zelda.
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