The Game Boy games of February, 1991, include our first PAL debut. Unlike NA releases, PAL release days have sometimes been recorded, so games that debuted there won’t always need to be in an unknown date post like today’s.
The Game of Harmony (Assembly Line/Accolade)
This is a port of a DOS/home PC game from 1990 in which you control a little ship and need to ram matching orbs so that they collide and disappear. The original game released in the US and Europe, but the Game Boy version only ever had an NA release. Reviews for the PC versions were all quite positive, but those had fancy colors and 3D graphics befitting of the Windows 95 pipes screensaver. The Game Boy obviously couldn’t support any of that, and the game is pretty boring without the graphics to help it along.
MobyGames has the GB port sitting 15-20 points below reviews on any other system. Four of the five tracked reviews are in German, and the last one is from Game Informer and mostly cites poor controls for its 50% score. That feels odd. The game is extremely boring and plain to look at, but it controls just like Asteroids.
Rating: 1.
NBA All-Star Challenge (Beam/LJN)
Unlike the last basketball game, this one had the sense to make the court white so that you can actually see what’s happening. It’s a selection of 1v1 basketball minigames you can play and has one player from every NBA team available. I know nothing about basketball and had only heard of about three of the players available, but searching for all of them confirms that the vast majority of the players were very famous at the time, although some of them were never all stars. They also refer to Hakeem Olajuwon as “Akeem”, so that’s awkward.
The game still suffers from the same flaw as the last basketball game in that there’s really no way to tell if how you’re supposed to shoot. It needed a meter or some kind of aim indicator to not just feel like RNG. MobyGames has it getting a 75% average from four critics, but the reviews are all in German, Portuguese, or Spanish, so I don’t know much about what they said. The Spanish review seems to have called it ‘addictive’ and praised the graphics, the Portuguese review looks like a bunch of objective statements about the features, and one of the German review blurbs begins with ‘Du hast.’ That is relevant, because if you ask if I think you should play this, the answer is ‘Nein!’
Rating: 1
Castelian (Bits Studio/Triffix Entertainment)
Europe’s first debut game was, fittingly, a port of a British game done by another British developer. The original was a tower-climbing game for Amiga and other PCs that received widespread acclaim and makes the top 25 games for Atari ST and Commodore 64 by MobygGame’s estimation. The tower rotates around as you walk, and while some of the effect has definitely been lost to the lack of color, doing 3D revolutions at all is enough to give this a real claim to the best looking Game Boy game so far. I’m not sure it has much else going for it, though. The controls feel stiff and it really could have used a jump button.
Reviews from the time were largely positive, although the English ones were very low quality. Most of the ones MobyGames tracks admit that they barely played it, one spends its entire blurb trying to be edgy, and another calls it ‘superb’ but awards a 60% score. Make of that what you will.
Rating: 3. I don’t think it’s very fun, but the 3D effect really is something to experience in a 1991 Game Boy game.
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