October 16-19, 1990, dropped three more Game Boy games. All three seem like the type to get global releases, but two stayed exclusive to Japan.
Ghostbusters II (HAL) (October 16th)
The rare movie tie-in that actually scored pretty well. It has you playing as two of the Ghostbusters at once, with one responsible for stunning enemies and another following along and trapping them. The following character is CPU-controlled and tries its best to stay behind you and target enemies, but struggles greatly with pathfinding. The music is highly repetitive and the sound emitted when you stun enemies is horrific. Despite all that, it received scores in the 70-90% range from critics outside of Germany. German critics were markedly less impressed for some reason, but even so the game boasts a 76% average on MobyGames.
Despite being made by HAL and still having an active page on their website, it seems highly obscure in Japan. I found two posts on it, one of which was just basic info and the other of which highlighted the same issues I mentioned. Wikipedia makes this game share a page with the NES game New Ghostbusters II, but it’s not the same game.
Rating: 2. A point for having a unique system, even if it doesn’t really work that well.
Monster Truck (Varie) (October 19th)
This one is so obscure that neither Wikipedia nor MobyGames has a page for it, although I submitted one at the latter. It’s a monster truck racing game that, like a lot of arcade games at the time, starts you in last place and has you try catch up and pass a first place racer who is slow but far ahead of you. There are various hazards on the track that you need to angle your monster truck to not crash on, but the controls are awful and crashing into things is basically inevitable. It took me three tries to even pass the fourth place truck without crashing despite it clearly being on the other side of the track.
There are no reviews in English as far as I can tell, and hardly anything in Japanese either. Most Japanese sites only list Varie as being involved in production, but one site that looked suspiciously like an AI review (it has loads of absurdly long game overviews that were made very recently) shares Wikipedia’s claim that it was developed by ‘Another.’ It could be true, but I don’t have a way to verify either way. At any rate, the game sucks and the one post I could find specifically about it agrees.
Rating: 1.
Roadster (Tonkin House/TOSE) (October 19th)
Another racing game, but actually pretty serviceable this time. It’s the second game in this series that I ‘finished’, which in this case means I won the short 5 race tournament. It’s a Micro Machines-like racer without track hazards. Controls consist of pressing left or right to turn 1/8th of a rotation instantly and pressing A or B to go fast or go faster. Your turning is so responsive that there’s no need for slowing down on anything except the two gymkhana tracks, so for the most part you just hold go faster until you win. Annoyingly, crashing into the AI cars will make you spin out but leave them completely unaffected. They’re slower than you, though, so staying in first is pretty trivial once you get there.
It doesn’t seem to have gotten any reviews in the West and I could only find a couple of Japanese blog sites giving it mediocre scores in retrospect. Weirdly, there was a dedicated Mazda MX-5 blog that wrote a long post about it even though it has no official ties to Mazda as far as I can tell. The car on the box certainly does look like an MX-5, though.
Rating: 3. It’s fun, but nothing special.
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