Let’s Play Every GameBoy Game: Part 9 – March 15th-21st, 1990

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

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

March was a busy month for Japanese releases, but there were none before the 15th. It was busy in North America as well, but once again exclusively because of ports of games that debuted in Japan.

Baseball Kids (TOSE/Jaleco)

Wikipedia’s coverage of this game is a mess. It released as Baseball Kids in Japan on March 15th and was renamed to Bases Loaded on its American debut in July, which led to them incorrectly labeling it as a port of the 1987 NES game by that name. This is actually its own game and is surprisingly fully-featured for the second baseball game on Gameboy. There are checked swings (press A instead of holding), pitch selection (d-pad after selecting location), and even different cameras for when you’re batting and pitching. The single player mode tasks you with beating sequentially harder CPUs in games of as many innings as you want, but with no way of saving, and it also featured Link Cable multiplayer support.

This would actually be a pretty good baseball game if not for the lack of saves and a couple of presentation issues. Pitches are blisteringly fast despite supposedly only being 70mph, so it’s like playing Mario Baseball with only fireballs. More problematically, the sound effects and graphics do a terrible job of communication how hard a fly ball was hit. I had my pitcher chase what I believed to be a pop up all the way to the center field wall. It turned out to be a home run.

Rating: 2. Really neat for how early it was, but not particularly playable.

Flipull (Taito)

This is a port of an arcade game that released in the US as Plotting, although the GB game was confusingly also called Flipull there when it released in April. The Japanese original released on March 16th and is seemingly accurate to the arcade version other than lacking color. You play a little guy who needs to throw blocks with shapes on them at other blocks. If you get a match, both blocks disappear and your block counter goes down. If you don’t get a match, you have to try again. You can hit the stair pattern in the top left to deflect your block onto any exposed square on the top of the pattern, and you beat the level when your counter reaches 0.

It received some very positive reviews on other systems, but I’m a little lost as to why. What I played was incredibly simple and it’s hard to see how this could ever get very interesting.

Rating: 1

Quarth (Konami)

Quarth is a port of a 1989 arcade game and arrived on March 16th. It has a confusing release history in the West: This version released in December in North America as Block Hole, which was also the Western name in arcades, but Europe only got it as an inclusion in Konami GB Collection Volume 2 in 2000, where it was named Block Game.

At any rate, the game itself really stretches what can be considered a puzzle. You’re a little ship that can move left and right and shoot blocks to fill in shapes descending from above. If you make a rectangle, the shape disappears. Any shapes that reach the bottom cause a game over. There are many levels and many ships, but nothing ever changed except how fast the blocks descended, at least from what I could tell. There’s no gameplay beyond shape recognition and pressing A really fast. Contemporary reviews were actually very positive and described it as ‘gripping’ and ‘a Tetris rip-off’. I’m not seeing it.

Rating: 1

Penguin Land (Sega/Pony Canyon)

Penguin Land released on March 21st and never left Japan. It’s another example of Wikipedia’s list linking the wrong game – this is not a port of the 1987 Master System game that featured 50 levels and an editor, but of the more basic 1985 MSX game known as Doki Doki Penguin Land. You’re a penguin rolling an egg down to the bottom of an ice cave, for some reason, and you get there by carefully digging out specific ice blocks in order to avoid either running into polar bears or breaking the egg.

There’s virtually nothing about this game on either the English or Japanese internet, but MobyGames does have 80% reviews from two German and French outlets that, for some reason, reviewed a deeply obscure Japanese exclusive. The Master System game scored similarly.

Rating: 2. It’s at least unique.

Next time: The remaining 5 games from March, of which only 1 ever left Japan.