Tag: platformer

David Crane’s The Rescue of Princess Blobette

The exploratory puzzle-like NES platformer shows up on Game Boy in a massively stripped-down form.

After Burst

A fun idea—a puzzle platform shooter, with robots!—falls short of its potential here thanks to janky programming.

Mr. Chin’s Gourmet Paradise

A curious little platformer packed with muddled racial imagery and decidedly lacking in challenge.

Disney’s DuckTales

A mostly good, if a bit shaky, conversion of the beloved NES platformer.

Skate or Die: Bad ’n Rad

The x-treme skating series gets weird for Game Boy with a… 2D skateboard-based platformer?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan

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.

The Amazing Spider-Man

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,…

Gargoyle’s Quest

At long last, Capcom makes its debut on Game Boy, and that game—an RPG-inspired Ghosts ’N Goblins spin-off—raises the bar for quality on the platform.

Ninja Boy

The first portable entry in Culture Brain’s long-running Chinese Land franchise, Ninja Boy is also the worst entry in the series. Don’t be fooled by those big, appealing…

Batman: The Video Game

Game Boy’s first tie-in to a Western comic (and movie) property came to us in care of the hottest comic and movie property of the time: Tim Burton’s ultra-stylish…

Cyraid

Featuring a profound lack of brick-headed silver space faces and more than enough surreality to make up for it, Cyraid turns out to be a ladder-kicking platform puzzler……

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…

Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear

The first Western-developed game for Game Boy… and the first Game Boy release never to reach Japan… and the first game of the ’90s! Fortress of Fear had…

Castlevania: The Adventure

Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, no series could sell me on a platform like Castlevania. I loved the NES trilogy, and when early screens of sequels…

Hyper Lode Runner: The Labyrinth of Doom

How circular gaming has become. Over the past couple of decades, portable and PC gaming have essentially existed on opposite ends of the medium’s total spectrum; handheld systems…

Motocross Maniacs

To be realistic about it, there were only so many ways you could make a racing game in the days before true 3D graphics came around: Top-down, isometric,…

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…

Super Mario Land

Super Mario Land was the big release for Game Boy’s launch – the can’t-fail hit designed to move systems by the million right as the world was caught in Mario…