February of 1992 was a busy month for North American debut Game Boy games. The long drought of PAL debuts continued, however.
Asteroids (Code Monkeys/Accolade)
It’s Asteroids. There’s not really anything new here other than the graphics and some good music on the startup screen. Everyone has played Asteroids before.
Critics gave it a 64% average, with the main complaint being that it was expensive for a largely unmodified port of a game that was already over a decade old.
Rating: 2. It’s still a bit of fun.
Boggle Plus (Sculptured Software/Parker Bros)
A Game Boy implementation of the Boggle board game. I’ve never played that game, so I can’t comment on how well it captures the feel. There are a good variety of settings to choose from at startup, plus you can play solo or against human and CPU players. That said, there’s no music during the game.
MobyGames only has one contemporary review, a 40% score from EGM. The blurb unhelpfully says that the game “isn’t spectacular” but has some unspecified good qualities.
Rating: 1. This probably cost more than just buying a copy of the game.
Jordan vs. Bird: One on One (Imagineering/EA)
Wikipedia and MobyGames disagree on whether this was developed by EA or Imagineering, but the opening copyrights make it clear that the latter is correct and EA only published the game. In what would surely be the only time that EA would ever damage any legendary names, Jordan vs. Bird was poorly reviewed on all of its original systems in 1988 and 1989. It was then further ported to GB and Genesis in 1992 for some reason. It has good graphics, at least, but all the usual limitations of representing basketball on Game Boy and almost no sound to speak of.
The game averaged 68%, meaning it actually fared second best of all versions of Jordan vs. Bird. Critics largely said the same things I did: It looks good, but the sound budget was $0 and it all feels a little simple.
Rating: 1
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Visual Concepts/Ultra)
The PC game by the same name actually got great reviews, but the same cannot be said of the Game Boy version. It apparently features a variety of space and planet missions as well as a final boss. I wouldn’t know, because I ended up in an asteroid field to start out. This level provided absolutely no challenge whatsoever, but you can see from the screenshot that my little ship was maybe 10% of the way through the level after a minute or two of playing. I think I’d rather have actual asteroids thrown at me than sit through this bland, silent game for 10-20 minutes just to get through one level of a large map.
Reviews were awful, and its 54% average from critics and 2.2/5 from users are good enough to be MobyGames’ 17th worst GB game and just barely outside their 2,000 worst games ever. Even that is largely thanks to an outlier 80% review from the ever-useless Games-X, without which this would have had a 49% average and possibly made the GB bottom 10.
Rating: 1
Tiny Toons: Bab’s Big Break (Konami)
I played either this or the DX version for GBC for a bit as a kid. I don’t remember ever doing much more than the first few screens, though. It’s an extremely standard GB platformer that features Tiny Toons characters and a lot of generic music that it uses too much. Enemy placement is occasionally unfair, although for the most part it doesn’t go for cheap deaths. Instead, it has boss fights that go on for up to 12(!!) cycles, which is entirely too long.
For reasons that are completely beyond me, it is ranked 22nd of all GB titles on MobyGames thanks to an 85% average critic score and decent user reviews. I’m pretty lost. I beat this to see if I eventually experience a revelation, but no. I didn’t see anything interesting about it other than it being a licensed game that isn’t complete garbage. A lot of reviews praise the music, but most of that is public domain or licensed as well.
Rating: 2. You could do worse, but there is just nothing here that you can’t get in better games.
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