Let’s Play Every Game Boy Game: Part 11 – April 6-13, 1990

First: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 1

Previous: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 10 – March 23-30, 1990

I said that this post would be for April 13th, but I missed a release on April 6th. So we get five games, but four of them came out on the same day.

Kakomunja (Dual/Naxat Soft)

This is a snake clone that innovates by having two snakes competing and by making the controls A/B/Left/Down instead of just using the D-pad. It released on April 6th and received mostly scathing reviews, which were entirely justified. This control scheme is garbage. It did receive a North American version as Serpent in November, for some reason.

Rating: 1.

Batman (Sunsoft)

This launched on April 13th and arrived as Batman: The Video Game in June in North America. It’s a fairly standard Game Boy platformer where Batman has finally decided that guns are more efficient and runs around shooting every bad guy he sees. This received very positive reviews at the time, and it’s easy to see why. It has great music, good graphics for what it is, and the controls have a respectable sense of momentum. It isn’t as good of a platformer as Super Mario Land, but it sure beats everything else that was available at the time. That said, the levels repeat background sprites a lot and it was already resorting to spamming waves of the same enemy by stage 1-3, so it’s far from a masterpiece by modern standards.

Rating: 3. It’s fun for a bit. It probably helps to not be a Batman fan since it’s playing very loose with the license.

Bakuretsu Senshi Warrior (Sakata SAS/Epoch)

This is a puzzle game released as Cyraid in North America in 1991. You play one of two identical characters and need to smash all the E blocks in each stage in order to reach the next room. You don’t seem to have any attacks despite supposedly being a warrior, so you just have to dodge the enemies while using your kick to move ladders into place. It’s slow and extremely boring. Contemporary critics seem to have agreed.

The music sounds weirdly like the Jurassic Park theme at times.

Rating: 1.

Qix (Nintendo)

A port of the 1981 Taito arcade game in which you need to draw lines to enclose spaces totaling a certain percentage of the screen without running into either the sparks running along the edges or the trippy waveform creature in the middle of the screen. The arcade version was much more colorful, but this does a reasonable job of capturing the gameplay and sound considering its limitations. Reviews were mostly positive.

Rating: 2. It’s not bad, but it’s nothing special and there are many better ways of playing Qix if you want to.

SD Lupin Sansei: Kinko Yaburi Daisakusen (Nova/Banpresto)

The last April 13th game is a contender for the most obscure game so far. It’s a Lupin the Third spinoff with a name meaning something like “The Great Vault Breaching Operation” and has you running around grids to collect items and dodge enemies. You don’t have an attack, but you can use A to jump and B to slam the ground and either raise the tile (allowing you to jump over adjacent walls) or press a switch. Collecting all the treasure in a level lets you move on to the next one.

I’d love to talk about how it was received, but this one is sparsely covered even to games I’ve previously said have almost nothing about them. MobyGames has a brief overview and some box shots, Japanese Wikipedia and a few other wikis have essentially summarized the manual, and one Japanese Youtuber has uploaded a playthrough of the final level and ending. I didn’t find any reviews, but I can say that I found the first level really boring.

Rating 1. If you do beat it, though, you’ll have a rare accomplishment.

Next: April 20th, which got four games to celebrate the Game Boy’s one year anniversary in Japan.