Tag: arcade

Pac-Man

The all-time arcade classic goes portable in a decent enough rendition that leaves room for improvement.

Balloon Kid

The ambitious charming sequel to NES classic Balloon Fight, before the Hello Kitty makeover.

Atomic Punk

Long before the concept of coherent branding existed, Bomberman made a Game Boy appearance… under a different name.

Puzznic

Oh. It’s another puzzle game. This version is distinct from the NES adaptation, and also from the soft-porn arcade versions.

Tasmania Story

Based on a Japan-only movie, with gameplay adapted from a Japan-only MSX game, this clunky and primitive creation is tough to love.

Double Dragon

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…

Paperboy

Atari’s diagonal fling-em-up makes the leap from arcades to the Game Boy with rather less-than-impressive results.

Lock ’N Chase

Data East arrives on Game Boy by dipping back into its vast arcade archives. But this is no rehash—Lock ’N Chase plays more like a sequel than a…

Qix

Nintendo and Minakuchi Engineering take Taito’s arcade classic under their first-party week to embellish it with multiplayer mechanics and Mario dressed as random ethnic stereotypes.

Serpent

A curious sci-fi reimagining of the game more commonly known as Snake, Taxan’s Serpent takes the venerable arcade classic Blockade and adds special attacks (as well as some sort of…

Penguin Wars

A head-to-head competitive dodgeball game featuring cute animals, because why not? This is a two-player port of a single-player arcade game, and also the Penguin-kun Wars series’ sole journey…

Space Invaders

A bare-bones but admirably faithful rendition of the arcade classic. While Taito made some compromises in order to squeeze the game into the tiny handheld, they did so…

Flappy Special

  Another old-school PC conversion. Another Soukoban variant. DB-Soft and Victor definitely were not on a mission to radically change the way we thinking about Game Boy software…

Penguin Land

A real rarity: A Sega game on Game Boy. Pony Canyon converted a computer port of an old Sega arcade game to Game Boy. Sneaky! A fundamentally good game…

Flipull

Game Boy gets a port of Taito’s arcade game Plotting… under a different title for some reason. Popular in Japan and Europe, Flipull only ever came to the…

Quarth

A pretty solid port of Konami’s oddball shooter/puzzle arcade hybrid, which boasts some serious creative talent (seriously, it’s like the entire future Treasure team). Although this conversion loses…

Heiankyo Alien

The oldest game ever to appear on the original Game Boy, Heiankyo Alien faithfully adapts the classic PC trap-’em-up by the same name as well as introducing a visually…

The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle

Nyeah, what’s up, doc? Released in September 1989 in Japan, The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle stands as the Game Boy’s first licensed release (that is, the first to…

Alleyway

You can see the Game Boy’s roots in the Game & Watch series on clear display in Nintendo’s first generation of releases for the system, and nowhere more…