Revisiting Every Game Boy Game: Part 85 – March 1992 North American Debuts

March of 1992 saw only two Game Boy games debut in North America, but it’s at least an improvement in that one of them isn’t a licensed game.

The Flash (Equilibirum/Probe)

A beat ’em up based on a TV show. You move really quickly, so that’s fitting, but there’s very little animation, so it looks like you have to poop. The a button does kicks, b does punches, and you can press up to jump or down to crouch. All reasonably functional, but the graphics are the same as every other licensed game and the music is an abomination.

MobyGames has a 56% average from 5 reviews, but 4 are in languages I can’t read and the fifth is useless. Wikipedia claims that unspecified critics thought it was too fast, but that others liked the level design and soundtrack. I’m not sure I believe that. It’s possible they’re referring to the Master System version, which was much better reviewed and apparently quite rare.

Rating: 1.

Missile Command (Code Monkeys/Accolade)

Another month, another arcade port by these two. It’s hard to believe it took this long to get Missile Command, which has probably been released for multiple toasters at this point. This particular version has slightly better graphics and thematic backgrounds as compared to the original, but you only get two missile pods instead of three. You still get the same number of missiles since each now has 15 instead of 10, but there’s no way around it making an already simple game less interesting.

Reviews were somewhat bizarrely harsh and averaged 58% from seven, which is enough to get it into MobyGames’ 100 worst titles on the system despite a much stronger 3.6/5 user score. The low average is almost entirely due to a bunch of German scores ranging from 30-60%. I pasted these into a translator to see what was up and most of them don’t really seem to be that negative, so it may be a case of a few outlets that were using a scale centered on 5 rather than the more normal 7.

Rating: 1. There’s a base amount of fun to Missile Command, but there’s no reason to play this version anymore.

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