July of 1992 gave us three new games in NA and one in PAL. None of them obviously sound like movie licenses, so maybe we have an unusually strong month of non-Japanese games coming up.
The usual reminder: Scores are out of 5 and only reflect how worth playing a game is today. Most scores are 1s for that reason. Exceptionally bad games get 0s.
Jeep Jamboree: Off Road Adventure (Gremlin/Virgin)
An off road racing game that features what I hope is the most difficult to read options menu on all of Game Boy. Once you navigate that mess and the awful music that plays during it, you’re treated to races that actually look pretty great. It’s hard to capture in a screenshot, but this has a remarkable sense of speed for a Game Boy game and provides a pretty convincing first person view. Still, you can’t escape the limitations of the system. It’s probably running at something like 10 FPS judging by the clock and steering is as much of a mess as you’d expect it to be when using a Dpad.
Combining the contemporary reviews from MobyGames and Wikipedia gives it a 72% average from three reviews. Because 90s reviews were a mess, though, the top review confusingly awarded it an 81% while also describing it as a “travesty.” I don’t know what to make of that, but we will be seeing this game again as part of a compilation release in 1994.
Rating: 2. It’s not good, but it’s worth a look for the graphics.
Prophecy: Viking Child (Imagitec/GameTek)
A port of an Amiga game. It’s mostly standard platformer stuff, but the hit detection is kind of a mess. To make up for that, you have an incredible amount of health. I took something like a dozen hits before finally losing a life, at which point my health just reset to 100 and the life counter went to 0. I didn’t even have to restart the boss fight I was in. It has decent music and some nice background details, plus you get a slightly humorous animation that plays if you fall off too high of a cliff. That makes you expect fall damage, but there isn’t any.
The game is ranked 11th worst on Game Boy by MobyGames, but that ranking is the actual definition of a travesty. It’s driven largely by two absurdly low German scores that criticized it for lacking animations and being ‘soulless’, according to Google Translate. The full review text is not available, but I can only assume they were offended by how basic it is in comparison to the Amiga version, which, well, duh. It’s a Game Boy game. The 2.57/5 score it has from users on GameFAQs is far more fair. This is not a good game, but it is not remarkably bad. Anyone who thinks this is remotely close to the worst the system had to offer needs to be subjected to Pit-Fighter.
Rating: 2. Partly to be petty, partly for the music.
Wave Race (Pax Softonica/Nintendo)
A racing game that is basically just the boat races from Micro Machines. Alternatively, it’s any other top down racing game on Game Boy except with really slippery controls and constantly droning audio. It’s more serviceable than I expected Wave Race to be on Game Boy, but you just can’t get past the fact that you could be playing a different game. Nothing about Game Boy racing is improved by adding water.
Critics averaged around a 70%, which is pretty poor for a Nintendo game. This is another unusual example of a Nintendo title that did not release in Japan, but it’s even more unusual this time since Miyamoto was the producer. Wikipedia speculates that its extremely delayed PAL release was due to doubts about the quality of the game. I imagine that could also be why Nintendo of Japan skipped on it. They didn’t miss much.
Rating: 1
Dr. Franken (MotiveTime/Kemco)
The month’s only PAL debut was an odd one. Despite coming from a developed based in England, it opens with a screen that asks “country?” and then requires you to choose from a list of languages. You apparently play as Franky, who was created by Dr. Frakenbone, so it’s not clear who Dr. Franken is. The soundtrack consists of two songs: a Bach arrangement for the title screen and Moonlight Sonata for everything else, both of which were perhaps a bit ambitious for the Game Boy. Animation looks great and is possibly rotoscoped, but has the same responsiveness issues that rotoscoping always does on Game Boy. Also, you can shoot lightning for some reason. It features one of the only attract sequences on Game Boy if you let the title screen sit, but said sequence is literally just Franky running through levels to the right until he dies.
Critics were bizarrely impressed. It has an impressive 78% average on MobyGames if you exclude the two modern reviews, which is one of the highest we’ve seen. GameZone called it an “instant classic” and Total!! UK stated that it made other platformers look “tragic”, which I assume means they had not played Kirby or Mario Land yet. Whatever those critics were seeing in this, user reviews everywhere have been far more middling. That said, it did get a 10/10 written GameFAQs review from someone in 2003.
Rating: 1. Sometimes I give a game a point for how much others liked it, but I’m just lost on this one. It feels awful to play.
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