October 23-26, 1990, was a period with four Game Boy games that have nothing to do with each other.
Amida (Sofix/Coconuts) (October 23rd)
Wow, I hate this. It’s a puzzle game where the Kirby-looking guy at the top walks down the ladder structure and needs to get to the home space at the bottom. Kirby’s movement is controlled entirely automatically, and all you can do is move your little face block to create paths that Kirby can take to avoid traps. It’s very boring, the music is terrible, and everything takes forever to happen. A French outlet gave it a 60% and I can’t find much written about it in Japanese. There are loads of Youtube playthroughs, though, so it’s not completely forgotten.
Rating: 1
Radar Mission (Nintendo) (October 23rd)
This is actually two different games. Game-A is just battleship with nice animations and a couple of RNG modifiers that trigger when you shoot certain spaces. Game-B is a submarine simulation where you sail around and shoot at ships. You can only shoot when surfaced, but can also be attacked then, and you can only access your radar when submerged. The radar is also the only way to distinguish friendly ships from enemies, so you have to use it carefully to avoid friendly fire.
Western critic reviews averaged a 63%, but they were distributed pretty evenly between 45% and 93%, with the 3DS re-release further expanded that range a little bit. Famitsu gave it a 25/40, Family Computer an 18.67/30, and there’s plenty out there about it today thanks to being a Nintendo game.
Rating: 2. It’s not very good by modern standards, but the graphics would been so cool back in the day.
After Burst (Klon/NCS) (October 26th)
A sort of puzzle game in which you control a robot with a gun that shoots in an arc depending on how long you charge it. Your goal on each level is to shoot the orb, but various enemies and puzzles will get in the way of that. It seemed fine until I got to the third level and was greeted by incredible slowdown from there being four enemies on screen, which is probably why it got mostly dire review scores. Its average looks okay thanks to a 90% review from French outlet Generation 4, but Famitsu came in at an incredible 17/40 and the German Power Play magazine gave it a 59%. There are a lot of Japanese posts about it today detailing the controls or providing maps of the levels, but I could only find one review. That gave it a 3/5 despite saying that it didn’t have any bad points of note.
Rating: 2. It seemed decently fun if you can get past the slowdown.
Rolan’s Curse (NMK/Sammy)(October 26th)
This one deserves more credit for innovation than it got. It’s the first game that can really be called a Zelda-like that we’ve seen, and it even had full realtime co-op three years before Secret of Mana did it on SNES. There aren’t really dungeons, but you can find various items in the world that let you progress past roadblocks. It even had good music!
Unfortunately, it’s also basically just a big maze full of respawning enemies that gives you no direction about what to do. Enemies don’t react to being hit and can do quite a lot of damage even when it doesn’t seem like they touched you, so combat sucks. It received mostly poor scores at the time outside of a 78% from Nintendo Power, and the modern Japanese reviews I found were unanimous in criticizing it for being too short and simple.
Rating: 3. Even if it’s not good, you have to give it some credit for pulling off co-op in 1990 on the Game Boy.
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