Balance has returned to the universe and we’re back to PAL not getting anything new. Historians believe this is the reason that Europe is often referred to as “The Old Continent.”
Reminder: Scores are out of 5 and reflect only how much the game is worth playing today. Egregiously bad games get a 0. I’m sure that won’t be relevant today.
The Blues Brothers (Titus)
The only licensed game of the month was The Blues Brothers, which is mostly the standard licensed platformer that every movie got. The only interesting thing I noticed was that you are incredibly fast, possibly more so than in any other platformer so far, and that makes avoiding enemies unusually difficult. You either need to deliberately move much more slowly than is possible or have lightning reflexes to jump in the handful of frames before you run into an enemy. It also made the unwise decision to have a lot of black backgrounds in a game where the main characters wear all black clothes.
The game reviewed better on Game Boy than on most other systems, but still only managed a 70% average. Most reviews were pretty close to that mark.
Rating: 1
High Stakes Gambling (Sculptured/Electro Brain)
A gambling game where you play against 1930s mobsters who cheat a lot. The player can also purchase cheats and the goal is to beat the mobsters in each of a handful of card games. It has decent graphics and music, although the latter is all public domain stuff like, inevitably, The Entertainer. That means a lot of it is not actually from the right era. It seems decent enough if it’s your kind of game.
MobyGames and Wikipedia have three reviews between them that all came in at almost exactly 70%. It doesn’t seem to be particularly remembered. It’s one of the only non-sports games so far to release exclusively in North America.
Rating: 2
Pit-Fighter (Eastridge/THQ)
Oh boy. For anyone fortunate enough to not be familiar with Pit-Fighter, it has a reputation for being a bit shit. Although the Wikipedia article seems to have been written by its only fan in the world and features almost exclusively positive quotes, its MobyGames page tells a rather different story. It is the 8th worst game on Arcade, 2nd worst on Master System, 50th worst on Atari ST, 24th worst on Genesis, 2nd worst on SNES, and 36th worst of the nearly 2,000 games ranked for DOS. Its 64th place on Lynx almost looks impressive until you see that they are only 64 ranked Lynx games. Even on Amgia, where it avoids a place in the bottom 200, it is only able to manage 1,346th place.
All of which is to say that the Game Boy version could only be a disaster of mythic proportions. And so it is. It’s a rotoscoped fighter with only three playable characters. Rotoscoping means, as usual, that animations look great, but the character models look so impossibly bad that the animations can only do so much. Character hands and feet frequently blend in with the floor, which is less than ideal in a fighting game and contributes to it being very difficult to land attacks. Rotoscoping also means that you don’t get any animation canceling, so it’s extremely stiff on top of everything else. The music can only be described as an attempt to dethrone Crazy Bus. There are no modes except the standard arcade, nor any kind of options menu. But really, the “best” part is that everything gets an absolutely stupid amount of health, so matches take forever. However! You don’t get that health back for the next match. You’re expected to win this crap using only the initial 250 health you start with. Maybe the money you earn after each match can eventually be spent on something, but I never saw the option.
Despite all that, contemporary reviews were bizarrely positive for Game Boy. The 55% score shown on MobyGames is higher than it deserves, but that is heavily influenced by a 2020 review that gave it 20%. All contemporary reviews were between 58% and 70%, with Game Zero inexplicably calling it ‘excellent’ in a 66% review. User reviews are thankfully more sane, with a 2.2/5 score on MobyGames and a genuinely impressive 1.12/5 on GameFAQs.
Rating: 0. I’m really tempted to give this a -1, but I’m going to keep 0 as the floor. If Chibi Maruko-chan 3 was one of the worst games I’ve ever beaten a few entries ago, this is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It is an abomination.
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