The Game Boy games of December 11-13, 1990, were bad. That’s all I’ve got for an introduction.
Spartan X (Irem) (December 11)
This is Kung-Fu Master in the West and is an arcade game that received ports to basically everything in the 80’s and 90’s. The GB version, however, is apparently its own game that’s slightly distinct from all the others. It has really good fighting animations (although the graphics look silly in my screenshot because a dead enemy was bouncing off screen as I took it and overlapped my character), but poor music and bland backgrounds. Enemies come at you in polite lines to be OHKO’d by your punches and kicks. There are bosses and tougher enemies to shake things up, at least, but it’s clearly worse than other brawlers available on GB at the time.
Critic reviews were mostly middling-to-decent, but the overall average on MobyGames is hurt by a 17% score from Mean Machine that noted it only took 15 minutes to beat and threw out a bunch of insults because that’s what gaming reviews were in the 90’s. Famitsu gave it a 23/40, but the NES version seems more fondly remembered.
Rating: 1.
Puripuri Primitive Princess (Sunsoft) (December 12th)
The name of this game is usually rendered “Pri Pri” in English, because that’s what’s written on the box, but it’s pretty clear that Sunsoft was going for the Japanese word meaning “plump, tender” rather than “Pri Pri”, especially since every Japanese source on this game writes that part in kana and the rest in English. At any rate, you’re a caveman and you go through a tower maze because Game Boy. It’s not very interesting.
The only scored review I saw is a 63% from the German Power Play magazine, but I also found a Japanese blog that described the puzzles as uninteresting. Despite seemingly being mostly forgotten, Nintendo has a copy of the Japanese manual available on their .co.jp domain for some reason.
Rating: 1.
Dragon Tail (Bit2/I’Max) (December 13th)
A puzzle platformer where the gimmick is that you can throw nails to defeat enemies and create new platforms. Thus, it was Nail ‘n Scale in the West. There don’t seem to be any other differences between releases and the game is pretty boring. Critic reviews were all around the 6-7 range.
The one interesting thing I found about the game is that its Wikipedia page exists in only two languages: English and Ladin. The second one is not a typo – it’s a language from northeastern Italy with 41,000 remaining speakers, and apparently one of them decided to make a script to generate stub articles for just about every video game ever made. This kind of thing isn’t unheard of and happens in a lot of languages with animals or place names, but Ladin seems to be the only one taking on the challenge of having useless stubs for every game.
Rating: 1
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