Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 8 – February, 1990

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

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

February would have looked like a very busy month to North American players at the time, but all of those games were actually localizations of earlier Japanese releases. There were only three truly new games.

Othello (Kawada)

This is a port of the 1986 NES game made by HAL Labs. It released on February 9th and, along with the NES original, is the only game Kawada was ever credited on. They’re mostly a toy manufacturer. The game is pretty much what you’d expect from an Othello GB game. It has four CPU difficulty levels, turn timers, and hotseat multiplayer. Wikipedia claims that there’s a hidden slot machine game in the main menu, but that wasn’t present in my version.

Othello eventually launched in PAL regions in October 1991 and received largely poor reviews except for one 92% score from a UK magazine. It never reached North America even though the US was about as successful as it would ever be in the Othello world championships around this time. Japan (where this variant of Reversi was invented) has generally dominated and has won every team championship since 2005 and all but 9 of the individual championships since 1977.

Rating: 1. The only advantage this has over modern games is that 8×8 Othello was solved in 2023 (it’s a draw), so you don’t have to worry about the computer playing perfectly here.

Nemesis (Konami)

Solar Striker‘s release on January 23rd may have marked the first GameBoy shmup, but it only took another month to get one that was popular. This is a Gradius game, which would have been clear to Japanese buyers thanks to the classic box art. North American and European buyers got art in the same style, but otherwise there was nothing except the gameplay to make it clear that this belonged to a larger franchise. I assume that had something to do with the publisher being UltraGames outside of Japan. They were established to circumvent Nintendo of America’s restriction of 5 third party NES games per company, so they may have intentionally hidden any association with Konami or Gradius in Western marketing. It received a sequel a year later with both the Gradius and Konami names on the Western box, so who knows.

Anyway, this has all the gameplay you’d expect from the series, just small and at a really low framerate. It’s notable for letting you select any stage to start from as well as any number of lives from 0 to 99. Contemporary reviews were generally quite positive, with MobyGames giving it an 82% average.

Rating: 2. It’s quite impressive for an early GameBoy game, but that qualifier is doing a lot of work. The monochrome graphics and low FPS make it clearly worse than console versions from the same era, let alone contemporary arcade shmups.

Taikyoku Renju (Salio/Towa Chiki)

Gomoku is a game played on a go board in which you try to get five of your pieces in a row. Renju is a variant designed to even out the advantage the first player has. Taikyoku Renju is a GameBoy game released on February 23rd. It allows you to play renju against a couple different CPUs or by Link Cable, or you could just solve some puzzle games instead. You were also able to chose whether the background music was off, Rock, Jazz, Pops, or Enka. The Rock and Jazz tracks are banned by the Geneva Convention, but the other two are decent.

Shockingly, Taikyoku Renju is historically notable as the very first GameBoy game with language selection. Even though it was obviously never going to leave Japan, you’re able to select English or Japanese at the main menu. It may even be the first handheld game on any system to have multiple languages, but verifying that would require access to a half dozen very rare systems that and the handful of deeply obscure games released for them.

Rating: 1. Just play browser gomoku.

Next: March was a very busy month, so probably just a day or two of it.