November, 1990, brought 9 new Game Boy games that all released in sets of three on the 9th, 16th, and 30th. That perfect symmetry in Japan was ruined by a stray American debut that, as always, has no known release day.
Bubble Ghost (Pony Canyon) (Unknown)
Bubble Ghost is our ruiner-of-symmetry. It is, like so many Game Boy games, a port of an 80s home computer game. You’re a ghost and need to blow a bubble out of a room without crashing it into any dangerous obstacles. It’s a fun idea, but kind of boring in practice.
Contemporary critic reviews were broadly positive. It received a remake on Steam last year that has since taken most of the attention away from the original.
Rating: 2.
The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Imagineering/Jaleco) (November 9th)
I can’t point to any particular reason why, but A Boy and His Blob has always been extremely unappealing to me. Thus the screenshot taken in the very first room of the game. I have nothing to say about it.
Critic reviews were largely very positive. User reviews, at least on MobyGames, are much less so. I hate that this game is technically called David Crane’s The Rescue of Princess Blobette.
Rating: 1.
F-1 Race (Nintendo) (October 9th)
Yet another Nintendo port of an NES game, although in this case the original was a Japanese exclusive. It’s the origin of the Outrun-style racer that would later become ubiquitous on Game Boy. I’ve also already mentioned it as being responsible for wiping out F-1 Boy/Sunsoft Grand Prix‘s chances, although I honestly think that’s the better game.
F-1 Race is fine. I’m sure it would have been more impressive at the time, but I played a lot of these kinds of racer when I did the GBC series, and the awful sound and narrow tracks here just don’t hold a candle to what later games accomplished. Critic reviews were spread from 43% to 95% in the West, with scores skewed a bit towards the higher end. Wikipedia has it receiving a poor 24/40 from Famitsu and a pretty strong 21.11/30 from Family Computer.
Rating: 2
Trump Boy II (Pack-In Video) (October 9th)
Just like the earlier Trump Boy, this is named for the Japanese word for playing cards, not the species of ogre. Pack-In video only waited six months before releasing a sequel, and they were rewarded with a game that no one cares about enough to write anything about. It has neither an English Wikipedia nor a MobyGames page, and unlike with Monster Truck, I cannot be bothered to add one this time. It does have a Japanese Wikipedia page, but the author basically just described the three card games available and said nothing interesting about the game itself other than that it had four player multiplayer, which was pretty rare on GB.
A couple people have bothered to take pictures of the box cover, which is a badly photoshopped picture of Mt. Rushmore. Some atwiki authors played enough to take screenshots of each mode, but I couldn’t find any reviews at all except for one page that read suspiciously like an AI summary of the Wikipedia entry.
Rating: 1
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