Jisedai Begoma Battle Beyblade (Rokumendo/Hudson, 1999)
I thought I’d escaped from Beyblade hell, but no, there was still at least one more game. This one also fails to achieve the impossible task of making tops interesting, but it does make you wade through about a million text boxes to learn how to use a battle system that’s actually just pressing B a bunch before the launch to make your top go fast.
Jissen ni Yakudatsu Tsumego (Pony Canyon, 2000)
I’m kind of amazed that this is the first Go game so far. There must be a technical reason, possibly screen resolution, why it just wasn’t worth making them on GBC. At any rate, this one is actually a Go puzzle game that starts you in a certain micro-board state and asks you to play out from there.
John Romero’s Daikatana (Will Co Ltd/Kemco, 2000)
I fully expected this game to suck given that the main release of it was one of the biggest flops in gaming at the time. But what I’ve played so far of the GBC release is… actually really good. It’s a Zelda-like with some unsubtle Link’s Awakening and Oracle gameplay inspirations, and there’s great music to go along with it. I will be coming back to this.
Joryuu Janshi ni Chousen GB: Watashitachi ni Chousen Shitene (Culture Brain, 1999)
Yeah, it’s more mahjong. Apparently this is a port of a PS1 game.
JumpStart: Dino Adventure Field Trip (DICE/Knowledge Adventure, 2001)
Yes, that DICE. Before they were making Battlefield and Mirror’s Edge, they apparently took some time to make a dubiously educational game about dinosaurs, although they don’t have it in their list of games. It’s a handful of minigames like the one above, which wants you to bonk dinos with the right hat. I’m not really sure what hat-based violence is meant to teach anyone.
The Jungle Book: Mowgli’s Wild Adventure (Ubisoft, 2000)
Another surprisingly good game. The platforming is more creative than the usual GBC fare, it has detailed animations, and there’s even good music. I’m not going to come back to it because it’s too easy to be very interesting, but you could’ve done worse as a kid back then.
Juukou Senki Bullet Battlers (KCEK/Konami, 1999)
A very long-winded mech combat RPG that has disappointingly standard combat. I thought it might be another one for the list at first, but it seems like it’s banking on the cool factor of big mechs more than anything else.
K.O.: The Pro Boxing (Altron, 2000)
Altron took some time to make a boxing sim in between their train and airplane games, apparently. I didn’t actually get to see any boxing because there were 102 days of training results I was going to have to mash through to get there. As with Altron’s other games, I think you’d have to be really interested in the subject matter to get anything out of it.
Käpt’n Blaubär: Die Verrückte Schatzsuche (Shin’en/Ravensburger, 2001)
German-exclusive GBC games sure did like to be entirely free of German. This one tasks the player with stepping on all the stars and then the life preserver, but you have to plan carefully because the stars turn into impassable holes after you step off them. There were already some clever puzzles in the first few levels, so I’d definitely recommend giving it a look if this is your kind of game. Not something I’d personally play for more than a few minutes, though.
Kaitei Densetsu!! Treasure World (Nexus Interact/Dazz, 2000)
There was a very long explanation I mashed through before arriving at this incomprehensible screen. I think you’re using your four characters to search for treasure in the various squares on the map, but it’s very slow and I couldn’t get anything interesting to happen. It makes an annoying beeping noise every time anyone talks, which is to say that it’s always making an annoying beeping noise.