We continue with the the three April 27-28, 1990 Game Boy games, all of which launched in Japan. I also realized that there was a North American launch after all, and I’m arbitrarily including it in this post since it seems like the exact launch day of NA releases have been lost time time in basically every case. That will be fun going forward.
NFL Football (Konami)
No one will be surprised that this was a North American exclusive, releasing ambiguously sometime in April. Despite the screenshot, it did not magically invent colors or non-green displays years before handhelds were capable of producing either. It wouldn’t boot on Game Boy, so I had to play it on GBA instead.
The game is surprisingly advanced for the time in that it features a full playbook and every NFL team, but it controls terribly with so many sprites on screen at once. Player movement is about as natural as it would be on an old Tiger Electronics handheld, and distinguishing teams is nearly impossible when the uniforms are so similar and everyone is close together. MobyGames tracks four reviews, two surprisingly from Germany, and all were very poor.
Rating: 1
Mercenary Force (Lenar/Meldac)
Originally released as Tenjin Kaisen on April 27th, this is an odd shmup where you recruit four characters in any combination of four classes using a budget of 10,000 yen. Each class has its own stats, attack pattern, and cost. Once you’ve picked your characters, your party proceeds through the level in either a tight square formation or spread out in a cross shape. Pressing B will change your formation, and pressing A makes every character shoot once. There are rocks and other obstacles throughout that will cause your formation to deform as your non-leader characters automatically move around them.
It’s a really interesting idea and has impressively complex graphics and sound for this point on the Game Boy. My screenshot captured some tearing as enemies moved across the screen, but unlike NFL Football, you really don’t notice that in real time. It’s a little frustrating that damage is often unavoidable because enemies are shooting in a way that leaves no room to completely dodge, but I think this would have been pretty fun at the time. It received mixed-to-positive scores in the West. Japanese critics were harsher.
Of course, the Western average is reduced a good bit by a 54% score from Total!! UK, who said it “doesn’t really cut the sushi.” I’m not sure that guy knows what sushi is or how to eat it.
Rating: 3. Unique enough to be worth a look.
Soccer Mania (Kitty Group/Sony)
Not to be confused with the unrelated Soccer Mania released for Amiga in 1990, or the one released for GBA in 2002, or the quite fun Lego game also from 2002 for Windows and PS2. This one released on April 27th as Soccer Boy in Japan and had its named changed for its 1992 American release. It never got a PAL version, which seems odd until you realize that it achieved an incredible 33% average from the 5 reviews MobyGames tracks, and even that is misleading thanks to one 70% score. By their estimation, it is the single worst game on Game Boy (at least of those with enough reviews to include), and one of the 700 worst games ever made for any system. I can’t find any scored reviews from Japan, but I did learn that there was a highly successful race horse by the same name whose last title came just two years before this. I suspect it was named to take advantage of that.
The game itself is just really zoomed in soccer with very slow movement and incredibly unresponsive controls. You absolutely must press A to change control to the character nearest to the ball at every opportunity, because your players have no chance of catching up once they’re passed and the AI is so bad that it will actively run away from the ball if you let it do anything. Some writeups say that you could pick which country you played as, but at least in the US version, the player seemed locked into playing the US team. Possibly team selection worked in multiplayer or in the Japanese release.
Rating: 2. It gets a point for being so bad that it’s actually worth experiencing for a bit.
Snoopy’s Magic Show (Kemco)
A puzzle game released on April 28th. Your goal was to get to the four Woodstocks spread around the map before either running out of time or being hit by the ball doing its best imitation of the DVD screensaver. It starts out really simple, but has 120 levels and apparently starts including more complex elements like slide panels and push puzzles as you keep going. Western critics were mostly positive, including a perfect score in the How to Win at Game Boy Games book, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention in Japan. The one review I can find gave it a 3/5 while noting that it wasn’t worth the 2,980 yen list price.
Rating: 2. I was bored after two levels, but it’s another example of a puzzle game that’s at least reasonably innovative.
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