January 1992 brought six new Game Boy games to North America, which were mostly awful licensed platformers.
The Addams Family (Ocean)
Another month, another Ocean movie license. There’s not really anything interesting about it. You have a throwing knife with limited ammo (the bar in the bottom right) instead of the usual punch. The main character has no animation whatsoever. Beyond that, the music and graphics are fine.
MobyGames has a 64% average. Most critics complained about high difficulty in later stages and the lack of innovation.
Rating: 1
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (Equilibrium/THQ)
And another movie license. The graphics and sound are awful, as are the controls. The camera randomly starts auto-scrolling at times. All you can really give it credit for is that the main character has a bunch of decently animated martial arts moves.
Reviews were bad, but being 58th-worst on Game Boy is a lot better than 44th-worst of the larger NES library, which its big brother game accomplished.
Rating: 1
Beetlejuice (Rare/LJN)
Oh, hey, it’s the 54th worst game on Game Boy. This is apparently based on an animated TV show rather than a movie, but it still sucks. Rare’s involvement at least gives it better music and graphics than the average licensed game. Walking up and down MC Escher staircases is somewhat innovative, but any fun is canceled out by obnoxious enemy placement.
Rating: 1
Days of Thunder (Argonaut/Mindscape)
Days of Thunder is one of the very worst games on DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and NES by MobyGames’ tracker, but is nearly in the top third of Game Boy games that have a score. It’s basically Race Drvin’ on a NASCAR track, but a truly 3D driving game is still pretty impressive for the time. It also has a detailed pit stop minigame that you can practice to get your time down and is seemingly one of the more serious sims on the system. Not what you’d expect from yet another movie license.
Reviews were all in the 60-80% range and mostly praised the graphics, as you’d expect. That said, while I’m sure this was amazing for the time, it is genuinely awful to play today. I’m not sure any racing game has ever had less sense of speed than this one, with it’s tiny draw distance and single-digit frames per second.
Rating: 1
Prince of Persia (Broderbund/Virgin)
We interrupt this broadcast of licensed games for a port of Prince of Persia. The original game is widely considered a landmark achievement for its innovative rotoscoped animation and, for the time, impressive storytelling. It’s in MobyGames’ top 100 games for nearly every platform it released on prior to 2000, and in the top 25 or even top 10 of many of those. On Game Boy, it came in at 20th with an impressive 80% average. It was widely praised for being an essentially perfect port that contained all the original content without compromising on graphics or sound.
In Japan, Famitsu gave it a 22/40 and Family Computer readers a 20.2/30. Japanese Wikipedia includes a table showing a 14.1/(30?) review in the Game Boy section that would normally be their Family Computer score, but since that was a 20.2, it’s unclear what this is. Prince of Persia seems to have been enjoyed mostly as a home PC game in Japan.
Rating: 3. I don’t think PoP has aged well, but the animations are worth a look on Game Boy.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Bits/LJN)
A licensed run-and-gun game with confusing design. Most hazards and enemies do meaningless amounts of damage to you, so you can just run through the first level and ignore them all. Then there’s a little whiff of smoke at the end that one-shots you if you touch it. There are no lives, so that sends you all the way back to the startup splash screen. It does at least have decent graphics and sound, but everything is so dark that it’s a little hard to tell what’s happening.
Critic reviews were decently positive and averaged 71%. It sounds like the gameplay changes up significantly in later levels, but I wouldn’t know. I played the first level a few times and got Game Overs either from the smoke wisp or from apparently shooting enemies in the wrong order. Maybe the incredibly slow text crawl at the beginning would have told me what to do if I had waited for it, but I’m not sitting through that for a 34 year old licensed game.
Rating: 1
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