Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 7 – January, 1990

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

Previous: Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 6 – December, 1989

It’s a new decade and the Japanese property bubble is still going strong. This month saw four more Japanese releases and the very first GameBoy game to debut in North America.

Hero Shugo!! Pinball Party (Jaleco)

This pinball game, whose title means “Heroes Assemble!!” released on January 12th and featured characters from previous Jaleco titles. It has two tables with a decent amount going on, and while there’s not much about it written in English, Japanese Wikipedia has a long article. It seems most notable for the ‘Extra Mode’ having allowed you to mail in passwords in order to have a chance at winning cash cards for pay phones. Famitsu gave it a 20/40, so it’s no great surprise that this never made it overseas.

Rating: 1, unless you can time travel and need a phone card.

World Bowling (Athena)

The screenshot pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this one. It released on January 13th, came to North American in April, and allowed you to play a male or female character from one of six countries. Each character had slight differences in playstyle and you’d need to beat the other five countries in succession with score requirements escalating from 200 to 250. It’s fine for what it is.

Rating: 1. Wii Sports ended the need for any other bowling games.

Heiankyo Alien (Live Planning/Meldac)

This is actually a remaster of a 1979 PC and arcade game that was tremendously successful and influential. It beat Pac-Man to the maze concept and Lode Runner to laying traps, and continued to receive ports all the way through a 2017 Steam remaster. This version gave the GameBoy a 3 day streak by releasing on January 14th, and it featured greatly improved graphics compared to the blocking original. You can actually just about tell that you’re supposed to be defending Heian-era Kyoto from aliens now.

Surprisingly, this not only released in North America in April, but also retained its title. Previous localizations had called it Digger. I don’t see anything about contemporary Western reviews, but Japanese critics all scored it around 50% and Western retrospective reviews landed in the same range. It’s a very slow game, and what was innovative in 1979 was already much less impressive in 1990.

Rating: 1.

Solar Striker (Minakuchi Engineering/Nintendo)

Solar Striker closed the month for Japan on January 26th, made it to North American after just a week, and is notable as the first scrolling shooter on GameBoy (at least, aside from some levels in Super Mario Land) and one of very few such games ever made by Nintendo. It’s pretty functional for being a GameBoy game, but it’s hard to look past the fact that you’d have had a choice between playing this monochrome game with bland backgrounds, few bullets on screen, and only six levels, or going to the arcade and playing the excellent 1941 that released in February. Aside from being portable, there’s really nothing here.

It received a few reviews around 70% from European outlets, but mostly scored in the 50s from contemporary critics in the US and Japan.

Rating: 1

Wizards & Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear (Rare/Acclaim)

There’s surprisingly little out there about this game considering that it has a few historical firsts going for it. It’s the first GameBoy game to debut in North America, the first to not release in Japan, the first handheld game Rare ever made, and even has music by David Wise, who probably doesn’t list this one on his CV. For all that, no one seems to have written down what day it released on, so I’ve just placed it as the last game in January.

It’s the third game in the Wizards & Warriors series, although only the second by Rare. Contemporary reviewers were also confused about the ‘X’ in the title, which doesn’t seem to have ever been explained. It’s a platformer kind of like Ghosts n’ Goblins, and although Wikipedia claims that the response was ‘negative’, the reviews I can find are almost all in the 70% range. Criticisms were largely down to heavy blurring when the game scrolled and the lack of a password system, but most reviewers seem to have enjoyed the core gameplay.

Rating: 2. Retrospective reviews have been pretty harsh, but it gets a point for setting so many firsts.

Next time: A relatively quiet February.