December 1990 had four Game Boy games that debuted in North America, and as always the specific release days were either not specified or are lost to time. Normally I would have covered them along with the first Japanese releases of the month, but December 7th was too big of a day already, so I decided to do them in the middle instead.
In Your Face (Jaleco)
MobyGames claims that this is ‘one of the first basketball games released for a portable system’, which is unsourced but presumably true since there were no successful handheld consoles before the Game Boy and this is the first basketball game for it. This game also sucks. It has a 53% average from three reviews and never released outside North America.
Rating: 1.
Play Action Football (TOSE/Nintendo)
MobyGames credits development to Nintendo R&D3 and Wikipedia gives it to TOSE. It’s possible that both are correct given that TOSE apparently refuses credit or creative input in most cases and prefers to just do contract development. Either way, this is a port of an NES football game. Both versions released on in the US and Canada, but the NES screenshots I can see look dramatically better. The Game Boy version is honestly pathetic considering it’s not even the first American football game for the system. It looks absolutely awful, plays at a snails pace, and you can hardly tell what’s happening most of the time.
The GB version somehow has a 71% average on MobyGames. That’s thanks to two German magazines each giving it an 80% somehow, but it’s actually much worse than that. They’ve pulled the wrong review for one of them, and ASM actually gave this game a 96%. I screen translated the review to try to find out why, but it’s cut off before any real justification is given, so I’m left baffled. The other scores include a 66% from Nintendo Power that, obviously, reads like an advertisement, and a Portuguese review that, from what I can make out of it from Spanish knowledge, spends half of its blurb explaining that this isn’t futbol.
I’m not normally one to accuse critics of bias in their reviews, but it’s hard to think of any justification for giving this a passing score other than the Nintendo badge. It’s time to break out the zero rating for some balance.
Rating: 0. Genuinely awful.
Chase H.Q. (Taito)
Despite being a Taito game, this arcade port released in North America about a month before Japan. It’s an Outrun-style game that initially doesn’t seem to add anything to that formula, but apparently turns into a car battler once you catch up to the bad guy. I didn’t get to see that far, however. It’s basically unplayable on Game Boy thanks to how quickly the other vehicles go from being invisible to taking up half the road and how janky the controls are. Avoiding them is nearly impossible even if you go slowly. Critic scores were mostly abysmal, resulting in the Game Boy version have a MobyGames average 30-40 points below various home console releases. Oddly, most of the reviews also complain that the “3D graphics” are “unrealistic”, but I’m not clear what they meant. The draw distance is the problem here. It doesn’t look any worse than other early Game Boy Outrun-likes outside of that.
Rating: 1
Robocop: The Future of Policing (Ocean)
This is a port of the 1988 Commodore 64 Robocop, not the 1988 arcade RoboCop. It’s a side scrolling shooter that’s pretty similar to Contra. It’s fine for what it is, but nothing very interesting or worth remembering. The Game Boy version got mostly average scores with a couple of outliers in either direction.
Rating: 2.
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