June 22-29 1990 was a bad week for Game Boy games.
Sokoban 2 / Boxxle 2 (Atelier Double/Pony Canyon) (June 22)
It only took 9 months from the first game’s release for the sequel to arrive, and it is unsurprisingly the first franchise to have two releases on Game Boy. It’s pretty much the same game except that it obviously has different levels, there are a few more levels in total, and there are now Pac-Man-style cutscenes after some levels. It still relies on passwords, and some outlets reported the passwords didn’t always work.
Reviews were largely positive, but for some reason nearly all of the coverage was from German outlets even though it never released in PAL. The Germans and one Finnish outlet loved it, but the few reviews I can find in English and Japanese are much more middling.
Rating: 1.
Burai Senshi Deluxe / Burai Fighter Deluxe (KID/Taito) (June 27)
Another shmup. This one is a port of an NES game that released a few months earlier, and received a GBC version in 1999. It’s unique for allowing you to shoot in any direction and then keep shooting in that direction while moving as long as you held the A button. It also looks great, but the music went for higher notes than was really advisable with Game Boy speakers.
It received some of the highest scores I’ve seen so far from Western critics, which is surprising since to me this just feels like a clunky attempt to be a twin stick on a system with only a D-pad. It seems to have received very little attention at any point in Japan.
Rating: 2. It can have a point for being popular back then.
VOLLEYFIRE (Toei) (June 29)
This game, sometimes called Volley Fire or written without capslock, sucks. It’s basically Spacewar! but far more basic, which is always a good sign for a game released nearly thirty years later. You can only move left and right. A and B are both just the standard shoot button. Both players have three lives and a stupidly huge amount of health. The asteroids in the middle are almost always in the way and are completely indestructible. In short, it’s incredibly easy to not get hit, hard to hit your opponent, and would take forever even if neither of those things were true. There are other stages that might be better, but I couldn’t take even playing through this one.
It received poor reviews from three Western critics and is another one that appears to have been completely ignored in Japan. Probably as a result, it never released anywhere else despite already being entirely written in English.
Rating: 1. I really might have to introduce 0s if there are many more like this.
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