It’s 1992. The Soviet Union was officially dissolved last week and Japan’s bubble economy is rapidly bursting. Will any of it show up in Game Boy games? Not these ones.
Kikou Keisatsu Metal Jack (KID/Takara) (January 8th)
A tactics game based on an obscure anime. The Game Boy has had a lot of bizarrely bad tactics games already, and this is another one. Instead of selecting which unit you want to move with a cursor like in every other game ever made in this genre, you pick it from a list. Then you choose where to move without any indication of how far you can move. Then, as in the screenshot, you pick one of several attacks without any indication of what differentiates them. Then you get a ton of very basic animations showing what happens. Playing out a battle in this would take forever. It does have great music.
There was a SNES game released at the same time that was a beat ’em up. That game is remembered for being bad, and it seems to have erased this one from memory. I found nothing except informational posts about it.
Rating: 1
Tokio Senki: Eiyuu Retsuden (Human) (January 10th)
Another strategy game, but this time it’s more of a grand strategy war game. I believe the name means something like “Tokio Warrior: Hero Stories”, with the ‘tokio’ part probably being a pun on how the way Westerners say “Tokyo” sounds a bit like the words for “time” and “king”, so we get a bunch of historical and legendary figures from around the world fighting in Tokyo. (for clarity: “toki” means “time” and “oh”/”ou” is “king”. The “kyo” in “Tokyo” is pronounced as one syllable rather than “ki-yo”)
Like most of these games, it’s pretty much impossible to understand without the manual. The few Japanese sources on it describe it as being relatively simple to learn, but also very hard to play. It apparently limits you to taking particular kinds of actions that correspond to different times of year, so you can only do political actions in one phase and war actions in another. Famitsu gave it a 24/40 and I was not able to find any other scores.
Rating: 2. I love that games like this exist, but it’s not very accessible.
Q*Bert For Game Boy (Realtime/Jaleco) (January 14th)
It’s Q*Bert, but without any colors. Critic reviews were actually mostly decent, but the MobyGames score is only 63% thanks to two savage 30% reviews from French and Swedish outlets. Other critics appreciated the new levels, but some were unimpressed by the lack of improvements to the game and the way isometric movement translated to the D-pad. My favorite is a German review that is basically just a list of English words with umlauts applied followed by German words for ‘no’. Sample: “Extras? Nö. Hifi-Stereosound? Wozu. 256-Farben-Parallax-Scrolling? Schon gar nicht.” EGM also gave it a 63% while saying that “Old games should be better in 1992”, which is very funny to read 34 years later. In Japan, Family Computer readers had apparently gotten sick of nearly mirroring Famitsu’s score and went with an awful 16.3/30 score against Famitsu’s standard Game Boy score of 25/40.
I can’t think of anything to say about it myself. It’s one of seventy billion ways to play Q*Bert, and I would not personally recommend any of them.
Rating: 1
Leave a Reply