Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 1
It’s time to continue our chronological journey through the GameBoy library with the final three games that released prior to the GB’s American release on August 1st, 1989. Two of these actually released when it was still spring.
Tennis (Intelligent Systems/Nintendo)
Tennis launched on May 29th in Japan and as a launch day title in the US and Europe. Like Baseball, it’s a port of an NES game that was highly successful on its original release and was also ported to basically every other piece of hardware Nintendo has ever made. You could even play it on the e-Reader. There’s very little going on here, and while I can’t find any individual reviews from the time, the archive of GameRankings has it at a 58 from 4 scores. That seems about right.
Rating: 2. Also like Baseball, there’s a little bit of inherent fun to the sport, but there’s absolutely no reason to play this version of any of the others.
Tetris (Nintendo)
The GameBoy’s original killer app arrived in Japan on June 14th, 1989, and was yet another launch title in other regions. Sales for it are obviously inflated by being a bundle game, but even so this was a cultural milestone for games worldwide. There’s even a link cable multiplayer mode. It’s Type-A and Type-B music are still iconic today, even being arranged into entirely new songs about the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the original Japanese release actually had a different, quite bad, track in the Type-A slot, but Wikipedia claims it was only available long enough to sell 25,000 copies.
Rating: 4. I don’t particularly like Tetris and this version specifically doesn’t offer much over the others, but any game with this much historical significance deserves to be experienced at least for a bit. It’s hard to imagine how different handheld gaming would be if the GameBoy hadn’t had such an explosive success right out of the gate.
Shanghai (HAL Laboratory)
The final game released before the GameBoy left Japan was Shanghai, a port of a 1986 mahjong solitaire title that released on July 28th, 1999. This one didn’t arrive in the US until June of 1990 and never released in Europe. Once again, I’m not able to find specific individual reviews for this port, but the original was about as successful in the West as you’d expect for an Asian tabletop game that was 20-30 years from gaining any real traction here. GameRankings has the GameBoy version at a 68 from three reviews. For my part, it seems like a very standard implementation of this sort of game, but with much more readable tiles than I’d have expected. I can imagine it all just looks like indistinct squiggles to most Western players, though.
Rating: 2. I’m giving it a point for having good background music. The gameplay is, once again, standard stuff that you can get in dozens of newer games.
Next time: The first games released after the GB’s international debut.
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