July 27-31 1990’s Game Boy games offered a lot for puzzle fans and very little for everyone else.
Dr. Mario (Nintendo) (July 27)
The NES game is certainly the best-known version, but this released on the same day and plays about as well if you can ignore all the green. Even the music carries over very well. The GB game is the best version by some review aggregator’s estimations, and that’s despite a few very low scores that bizarrely accused it of being a Tetris ripoff. Famitsu even broke a 30/40 score for what may be the first time on GB.
Rating: 3.
Tasmania Story (Pony Canyon) (July 27)
Some sources say that this is called Tasmania Monogatari in Japan, which is the Japanese name of the movie it’s allegedly based on, but the title screen says “Story” in all versions. I also did not get any sound when playing on GB or GBA, so it may not have any. It’s apparently a remake of Pony Canyon’s 1984 Fruit Panic, and gameplay involves trying to kill the monsters with bombs. You can only place one bomb, cannot jump except on trampolines, and the bomb takes forever to explode, so it’s pretty miserable to play. Reviews were dire, but, depending on whether you count Batman: The Video Game, it may be the first GB game to explicitly be a movie tie-in. That’s something.
Rating 1. Another one advancing the case for 0s.
Ranma 1/2 (Banpresto) (July 28th)
This one is sufficiently obscure that MobyGames does not have a page for it. Wikipedia describes it as similar to Adventures of Lolo since you’re moving around a maze and smashing blocks. I didn’t look for Japanese reviews of it since the 1/2 is a pain to type and this has multiple possible names, but the game is pretty boring and it’s probably safe to assume it didn’t do very well.
Rating: 1.
Puzznic (Taito) (July 31st)
Another Taito arcade port. This time it’s a matching game where you can drag blocks around to make them fall down. Any time there’s a continuous shape of matching blocks, all of them will disappear, and your goal is to clear all blocks. The puzzles escalate pretty quickly and there are 128, so it would likely take a good while to complete all the way.
The GB version is pretty obscure thanks to being a Japanese exclusive, but it received positive reviews in the usual German magazines and has good Western user scores today. I found a few Japanese blogs that mentioned it was difficult, but seemed to enjoy it. Those blogs also pointed out that there are six images of anime girls that pop up as you keep playing. The images are just smiling faces and thumbs-up poses, but maybe that’s why it never released anywhere else despite having no text to translate.
Rating: 3. Provided you want a hard matching puzzle, this seems like a good one.
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