Only one Game Boy game debuted in North America in October 1991, but it’s getting a standalone post anyway because I accidentally skipped two NA debuts from July 1990. They get their time now.
The Amazing Spider Man (Rare/LJN) (July 1990)
The first of three Amazing Spider Man games for Game Boy, but the only one made by Rare. It’s a beat ’em up and features a player character who looks absolutely nothing like Spider Man. The music is fine and the backgrounds are very nice for how early this was, but the gameplay is painfully basic. It received mostly middling reviews.
Rating: 1
Paperboy (Eastridge/Mindscape) (July 1990)
One of a ridiculous number of ports of the 1985 arcade game. Since this one features no colors and a tiny screen, it’s just about objectively the worst way to play Paperboy. Unsurprisingly, its 60% average on MobyGames is worse than any other port except the Game Boy Color, which was basically just this again. It takes forever to get back up after you hit something and the limited screen space makes it very hard to see anything coming or to tell where your papers are going.
Rating: 1.
Super R.C. Pro-Am (Rare/Nintendo) (October 1991)
By coincidence, the game that is actually supposed to appear in this post is another Rare title. It’s an RC car racing game that plays a little bit like Micro Machines. Unfortunately, they decided to make the driving physics feel like you’re driving on ice. Your car can turn in any direction almost instantly, but turning barely has an effect on your motion for a good while after the sprite changes. That would be an issue in a lot of driving games, but the tracks are so wide and have such gentle turns that it really doesn’t matter much here. I was able to win every race I played by just holding down the accelerator constantly and turning whenever I saw the warning arrows. I had a massive late start on the first track from not knowing the controls and veered off the edge of the track fairly often, but it never mattered.
Reviews were nonetheless very positive, averaging out to an 82% on MobyGames. The blurbs available unfortunately don’t really make it clear what reviewers were impressed by back then, however. It may just be that racing games with attack options were more novel at a time when Super Mario Kart was still a year away. There’s nothing worth mentioning here today.
Rating: 1.
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