This was an oddly busy day for Japanese Game Boy releases considering that it was the middle of the summer. In addition to the two games below, which would both have been notable releases, this was also the day that Prince of Persia made its way overseas after debuting in North American six months earlier.
The usual reminder: Scores are out of 5 and reflect only how worth playing a game is today. Most games get 1s. Exceptionally bad games get 0s.
Bionic Commando (Minakuchi/Capcom)
An adaptation of the NES game that moves its setting to the future. The GBC version of Bionic Commando was one of the surprise hits of the system when I played through that library previously, but I don’t think it was quite ready for the move to handheld in 1992. Although it has nice music, the graphics are difficult to read in motion and the grapple controls just don’t feel good. It all feels too stiff.
MobyGames tracks a 73% average. It did reasonably well with English language reviewers for the most part, with the notable exception of Digitiser’s 55% score, but German outlets largely came in below the average. The positive reviews seem to have felt it was a successful translation of the NES game. Maybe it’s more worthwhile if you particularly enjoyed that game.
Rating: 1.
Downtown Nekketsu Koshinkyoku: Dokodemo Daiundokai (Million/Technos)
A River City/Kunio-kun game that ditches the usual beat ’em up or sports formula to instead of a combination of the two. This is an obstacle course race where punching and kicking are important enough that they got dedicated buttons in A and B. It has great music and graphics, but you might notice that that doesn’t leave a button for jumping. Yes, despite being an obstacle course game, there is no dedicated jump button. You instead have to push A and B simultaneously in order to jump, which is just as reliable as it sounds. That ruins the whole game.
Famitsu scored the game notably lower than on other systems with an 18/40. Family Computer readers, however, were clearly less bothered by the controls and gave a pretty strong 22.3/30. I don’t have context for either score, but I do have an Atwiki page that awards the SNES version the coveted ‘good game’ title, but marks the Game Boy version as having aged poorly. Most of their complaints are about missing features compared to other versions, but they do also call out the awful jumping controls and overly harsh penalties for falling down. If anyone is nonetheless inspired to give this a try, it is available on all versions of the NSO Game Boy library.
Rating: 1
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