June 1-15, 1990, were an interesting two weeks for Game Boy games. None of these titles are very well known, but they were mostly innovative in their own ways. One of them may even be the originator of a popular gameplay gimmick.
Pitman/Catrap/Power Paws (Kodansha) (June 1st)
Pitman, known as Catrap in the US and Power Paws in PAL, is a shockingly unusual game for something that seems completely forgotten. It’s a puzzle game where you need to reach all the weird kung fu guys in a level, and you do that by carefully pushing blocks and climbing ladders in order to create a path. It originally released for Sharp computers in 1985, and having released that early, it’s a plausible answer for the first game to ever feature a rewind mechanic. You’re able to hold A to rewind your gameplay back to any point, allowing you to correct mistaken actions.
Contemporary reviews were poor-to-mixed, but from the blurbs I’ve seen, it seems to have been down to critics looking down on the lack of violence and cartoony graphics more than having any actual critiques. It received much better scores in circa 2012 when it released on the 3DS eShop.
Rating: 5. This is really neat and deserved more than it got at the time. It’s not my kind of game, but I think someone who is in to this style of puzzle would have a great time. And if it really did invent rewinding, it should get a 5 for that alone.
Cosmo Tank (Atlus) (June 8th)
Atlus’ second game for Game Boy was wildly ambitious, at least in terms of technology. This is a shooter that features both an overhead 8-directional shmup mode and a first person mode that plays a bit like the shooting in the much later Resident Evil for Game Boy Color. It has good music and, particularly in the first person mode, looks pretty amazing compared to a lot of its contemporaries. That said, the first person shooting is basically just strafing back and forth and hoping for the best, and the infinitely respawning enemies in the overhead mode make playing it kind of a chore. Contemporary reviews were largely in the 60% range, with most praising the graphics but not the gameplay.
I can’t find any reviews from any time in Japanese, weirdly. Used carts are very expensive for an obscure Game Boy game there, so it may have had a limited release or something.
Rating: 3. Worth a look for the first person mode, but it’s not very good.
Card Game (Marionette/Coconuts) (June 15th)
Soccer Boy may be the least playable game I’ve tried so far, but I’d argue this is a worse game simply for how utterly bland and lazy it is. It’s a handful of standard card games that can be played endlessly against the CPU or in hotseat multiplayer, plus a pointless fortune teller mode. There is nothing remotely interesting about it, and it wasn’t even the first game to go with this useless title.
Rating: 1, but if I was ever going to expand to include 0s, this would be a strong candidate to get one.
Funny Field / Dexterity (SNK) (June 15th)
This became Dexterity for the NA and PAL releases and is described as a puzzle game, but there’s nothing very puzzly about it. You need to paint all the tiles on the grid black and do so by walking into them and pressing A. It operates by Othello rules, so any tiles between the one you just flipped and an existing black tile will also flip. The monsters move around randomly flipping tiles back to white, and you can briefly stun them if you flip their tile. Touching them results in losing one of your three lives. You were apparently expected to use those lives to beat 30 consecutive levels, because I didn’t see a password save option.
It’s probably more fun in the multiplayer mode. This could have been interesting if it was “win in this many moves” with weirdly shaped boards, but the monsters just feel incongruous with everything else. Their AI also has a tendency to park on the few remaining white tiles, which can result in boards becoming effectively unwinnable if a monster refuses to leave a corner that’s painted white.
Critical reviews at the time were mostly poor. If there were ever Japanese reviews, I can’t find them.
Rating: 2. Unique, but bad.
Zoids Densetsu (Nova Games/Tomy) (June 15th)
I’d always thought that Zoids was a late 90’s/early 2000’s anime, but it actually started in 1983 as a Tomy toy line. This odd shmup is its only appearance on Game Boy. You control a robot that with no animations whatsoever and glide around trying to dodge hazards while the screen scrolls right. Your supposed enemies are actually nowhere near as dangerous as the random crap lying around, like the bush shown above my robot in the screenshot. Enemies are mostly slow and die in one hit, but hazards are indestructible and take up huge portions of the tiny space you’re allowed to move in. Stage two makes it even worse with volcanos that erupt almost constantly and leave you with much less than a second to dash past safely.
It never released outside Japan. I couldn’t find any reviews, but I did find a few Japanese guides that were written much later, so it must have been a least a little popular.
Rating: 2. It’s more fun than the lack of animations would suggest, but the hazards really needed to be smaller. Making you replay the entire stage if you lose a life to the stage boss is also not great.
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