2018 April 22: Celebrating four years (!) of Game Boy Works with posts for Battle Ping Pong and Roadster.
Another mediocre Game Boy release based on an anime. It’s a shame; Patlabor was great, and deserved a much nicer interactive adaptation.
Is it “Power Mission” or “Power Missiøn”? This forgotten release provided a pretty decent portable war gaming experience. It would be eclipsed by better-known games within a matter of months.
A seminal action RPG comes to Game Boy, despite some original design choices making it terribly ill-suited for the platform.
Another game of matching mahjong tiles. It has a twist, but the only interesting thing about it is its backstory.
A clumsy, primitive, first-person maze shooter. It’s not very fun. But man, that box art is something else, huh?
A charming little puzzler that stands out from the system’s glut of puzzlers thanks to its fast-paced, addictive gameplay.
Based on a thoroughly Japanese manga, this thoroughly mediocre fighting game remained stranded in its homeland.
The inevitable arrival of the juggernaut Ninja Turtles franchise didn’t quite live up to Konami’s usual standards, with repetitive play and cheap enemies.
An adaptation of a Macintosh board game involving matching tiles, slightly compromised by Game Boy’s lack of color and overabundance of puzzlers.
Oh. It’s another puzzle game. This version is distinct from the NES adaptation, and also from the soft-porn arcade versions.
A tolerable action-puzzle adaptation of Ranma 1/2, seemingly built on the skeleton of SD Lupin III.
Nintendo had huge success with Tetris, so rather than wait for another hit to come across their desk they rolled their own. It’s OK… but it’s no Tetris.
Based on a Japan-only movie, with gameplay adapted from a Japan-only MSX game, this clunky and primitive creation is tough to love.
A loose adaptation of the NES game, which in turn loosely adapted the arcade original. Nearly a brilliant rendition but for one critical flaw: Its absolutely wretched difficulty…
Atari’s diagonal fling-em-up makes the leap from arcades to the Game Boy with rather less-than-impressive results.
Irem makes its Game Boy debut with this adaptation of Tamtex’s arcade Shaghai variant, losing the original version’s color (and its smut) in translation to the portable.
An interesting counterpoint to the remarkably similar Blodia from a few months prior. Where that game featured structured puzzles, Pipe Dream features a Tetris-like randomness… and an ease of…
Lousy licensed Game Boy games are just as likely to come from western studios as Japanese! The Amazing Spider-Man is every bit as awful as Gundam or Zoids. Sorry,…
A promising premise for a game — two players go head-to-head in a shooting match — crumbles beneath lousy programming. A throwback to an older time, in a bad…
The fast-paced NES shoot-em-up comes to Game Boy with most of its content and mechanics intact, almost day and date with its console sibling. Pretty impressive!
The Game Boy’s first sequel builds on its most imitated game to date: Boxxle. Can basic box-pushing stand up to the fancier variants we’ve seen since? (Not really.)