First: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 1
Previous: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 9 – March 15th-21st, 1990
The remaining 5 games for March came out between the 23rd and the 30th, and whereas the last batch contained only one Japanese exclusive, this one contains only one game that launched overseas. Nonetheless, one of them is quite famous.
Flappy Special (DB-soft/Victor)
Flappy Special relased on March 23rd and is another example of the English internet having mistakes. MobyGames lists it as a port of the 1983 PC-88 Flappy, but it’s actually it’s own game. Flappy was a series of puzzle games that tasked you with pushing a block to a blinking tile at the bottom of the board while dodging enemies. Five different games were released between 1983 and 1987 with exactly the same name, with four being Japanese exclusives and one, truly bizarrely, being a Czech exclusive for the deeply obscure PMD_85 computer manufactured there. Two versions of Flappy Limited in 1985 plus three more ports called Flappy of the NES and PC-88 versions to PC and Wii in the 2000s and 2010s further add to the confusion.
Per Japanese Wikipedia, also the source for all of those versions, the GameBoy port is unique for featuring A and B mode, with A mode being more about puzzles and B mode focusing on combat. Most GB games would have used the same maps for both, but Flappy Special actually made unique levels for both modes, so you get a total of 160 levels between them. Saves work by generating a password every time you beat a level. MobyGames has two European reviews in the 70s, for some reason, but Famitsu and Family Computer Magazine both gave it awful scores in Japan.
Rating: 2. As much as the contemporary reviews were bad, it is unique.
SD Gundam: Sengokuden Kunitori Monogatari (Bandai)
This is part of a spinoff franchise that casts the Gundam characters in the Sengoku period. It released on March 24th and is an odd game that looks like Advance Wars in screenshots, but is actually almost completely realtime. You move a unit around a map and capture territory as you go, with the possibility of recruiting neutral units you find and of getting into fighting game matches with the enemy if you run into them. It’s neat, but requires playing very quickly even on enemy strength 1. I found it largely incomprehensible without having read the manual. It uses a very readable Japanese font, but you’re going to need to be highly proficient if you want to play, because it goes out of its way to use archaic terms alongside the Gundam lingo, and you really don’t have much time to sit there and figure it out.
There’s shockingly little out there about this game considering it’s from the Gundam franchise. Even the Japanese Wikipedia page is pretty threadbare, but I did find a couple of retrospective blog posts that went into great detail about the gameplay. Both posts concluded that it’s still a good game, but I think it’s a very niche product here. I’d imagine the Link Cable multiplayer is a lot more fun than playing against the CPU.
Rating: 3. Undeniably ambitious and unique, but also almost uniquely inaccessible for non-Japanese players. You need to be pretty fluent in general to read as fast as you’ll need to and familiar with both Gundam and Sengoku-era vocab.
Trump Boy (Thinking Rabbit/Pack-In Video)
This game has nothing to do with the association you’re thinking of – playing cards are simply called “trump” (トランプ) in Japanese. It’s a collection of three simple card games that can be played either against the CPU or via Link Cable, and it features a slightly different GameBoy rendition of The Entertainer on every screen.
As usual, there’s not much about this out there. Famitsu apparently gave it a 24/40 and Family Computer Magazine came in at 16.94/30. Not exactly glowing praise.
Rating: 1. Just play these games with real cards.
Penguin Wars (ASCII)
This is a port of a 1985 arcade game. It released on March 30th in Japan and arrived in North America and PAL in July and December respectively. You play one of five animals, who all have slightly different stats, and go up against the other four in sequential best of three matches of something close to dodgeball. Each side starts with five balls and your goal is to either get all 10 on the opponent’s side or to at least have most of them on their side when the timer runs out. If either play is hit by the ball, they’ll be stunned for an amount of time that varies by animal.
This became the first game I’ve actually finished from this series because it’s both incredibly short and incredibly easy. It took about 20 minutes and I won every game by KO with an advanced strategy of basically just mashing A until I won. Despite that, it’s pretty fun. Contemporary reviews were pretty mixed, with Japanese reviews on the low side and a few Western outlets going as high as the 80% range.
Rating: 4. It’s simple and easy, but fun.
Space Invaders (Taito)
Our latest confusing entry is Space Invaders, which released exclusively in Japan on March 30th and is not the same game as the Space Invaders that released everywhere except Japan in 1994. This one is literally just the original game, but portable. It received poor to scathing reviews pretty much everywhere and had a surprising amount of coverage outside Japan for a game from 1990.
Rating: 1. There are many better ways to play this.
Next time: April 13th was busy enough to get the first post for a single day since launch day. April will get two of those.
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