First: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 1
Previous: Let’s Play Every Game Boy Game: Part 11 – April 6-13, 1990
April 20th was the last day of the Game Boy’s first year, with it having originally launched on April 21st, 1989. Fittingly, it broke the tie between launch day and April 13th for most releases in one day by dumping five new games on buyers all at once. Unfortunately, they were all terrible.
Blodia (TonkinHouse)
Blodia is a slightly expanded port of a PC-Engine game of the same name. The console version released in North America as Timeball, but the Game Boy version stayed exclusive. It’s a sliding block puzzle game where your goal is to arrange the tiles so that a marble can roll to the end of its track. What I played didn’t have much going on beyond being a sliding block puzzle with a timer, but it does have multiplayer and even the ability to edit levels in multiplayer.
Reviews were mostly poor. The Famitsu version got a couple of good scores here and there, at least.
Rating: 1.
Boken! Pazuru Road (Vic Tokai)
Somehow the Japanese title of this game, which just means “Adventure! Puzzle Road” became the grand Daedalian Opus when it released in North American in July. The game has absolutely nothing to do with mythology and barely has a story, so anyone hoping for that connection would have been very disappointed. It’s just a series of 42 levels of tetronimo puzzles where you have to make increasingly complex shapes. Some sources say that there are only 36 puzzles despite there being 42 levels, but I’m not going to verify that. Notably, it features extremely insecure passwords that are all common four letter words, so you can guess your way to success fairly easily.
Reviews appear to have been mixed. A few outlets gave it very high scores and a few others were pretty low. Japan seems to have forgotten this game almost completely, with no Wikipedia article and only one blog and the usual instruction booklet dump sites covering it. The blog gave it a 3/5.
Rating: 1. I hate tetronimo puzzles, though.
Dead Heat Scramble (Copya Systems)
A racing game in which you drive a vehicle along an incredibly long pipe and have to dodge a bunch of garbage on top of it in order to finish in time. It’s not a terrible idea for a game, but the Game Boy’s extremely limited view and the way the stuff you’re supposed to dodge dances around so much mean it’s more an exercise of memorization and luck than of skill. Playing it for long enough to memorize anything seems pretty miserable with how bad the music is, and the only 42% review I can find seems to agree.
Rating: 1.
Super Chinese Land (Culture Brain)
This one is kind of funny, because the shallow Chinese stereotype that Japan went with became an even shallower Japanese stereotype on the Western release when it was turned into Ninja Boy. The Western game does have different music to be less obviously Chinese, but players might still have wondered why their ninja was wearing a kung fu outfit and throwing punches.
At any rate, it’s a really stiff action game where everyone dies almost instantly. Reviews were poor everywhere.
Rating: 1.
Popeye (Sigma Enterprises)
Popeye needs to walk around mazes to find hearts before a time limit runs out. Enemies will get in your way. It’s very basic and features excruciating music, but I’m not sure it quite deserved the 19% score that it got in the only review I can find. Wikipedia notes that the 2020 Nintendo hack revealed a cancelled plan to bring this out of Japan, but otherwise it seems completely forgotten. There was one Japanese site that had a title suggesting it would have a review, but it turned out to just be some kind of parking website and all the info boxes on the game were either blank or filled with placeholder text. Alas.
Rating: 1.
Next time: The last three games of April can’t be any worse than these were.
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