The Game Boy games of February 8-15, 1991, were mostly exclusive to Japan and mostly innovative in ways that didn’t quite work out.
Onigashima Pachinkoten (Marionette/Coconuts) (February 8th)
Another contender for the most obscure Game Boy game. It’s hard to search for because of a lack of anything in English and because the name means “Onigashima Pachinko Hall”, which of course means search results are dominated by actual pachinko halls with Onigashima in the name if you search in Japanese. Adding “GB” to the search gets you a few Let’s Plays on Youtube and one blog post before returning to real life pachinko.
Despite its obscurity, the game clearly had a lot of effort put in. There’s a story (you’re Momotaro and need to win people’s money back), tons of different pachinko tables, and a surprising variety of music. Figuring out how to actually play pachinko is quite a challenge, though. It seemed to require holding A, B, and right D-pad at the same time. Maybe that’s authentic to how some pachinko tables actually work – I wouldn’t know.
Rating: 2. Impressive effort, but still just a pachinko game.
Ray Thunder (Nichibutsu) (February 8th)
Despite the fighter pilot shown on the box cover, this is a game about moving through a 3D maze. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen a few 3D maze games by this point, so it isn’t getting anything for novelty. The gameplay is fairly slow and there’s a reason that blindly moving through a maze is a dead genre today. It even has boring music, so there’s really nothing to see here beyond the graphics.
It received a 22/40 from Famitsu and an 18.46/30 from Family Computer. English Wikipedia also cites a “Hippon Super!”, who gave it an 8/10. There is virtually nothing about it on the modern internet, and searching for it in Japanese results in tons of false positives thanks to the game’s name. The box clearly wrote out “Ray Thunder” in Roman letters, but its Japanese name is ライサンダー, which is read “rai sandaa” and would typically be a transliteration for Lysander. That, in turn, is the name of a WWII-era British fighter plane and a weapon in the Earth Defense Force series, and results for those dominate the search results. I suspect the devs either intended to name the game Lysander or were going for 雷, a kanji meaning thunder that can be read ‘rai’ and just screwed up the Romanization.
Rating: 1.
Burger Time Deluxe (Data East) (February 15th)
This is actually not a port of the arcade game. It’s an updated version of it with much better background graphics and no color. Otherwise, it seems like pretty much the same game from the arcades. Critic reviews at the time were basically all mediocre, although there were a few outliers who went as high as 90% or as low as the 50s.
Despite being mostly forgotten, it did get a 3DS port and is included in some classics collections on Switch.
Rating: 2.
Mikenoko Holmes no Kishdo (ASK Kodansha) (February 15th)
This is a re-imagining of a book as a point-and-click adventure game. It has pretty nice graphics, but the music is a little ear-piercing. I also find the font difficult to read for some characters.
Reviews were middling. Famitsu gave it a 23/40 and the modern takes I saw on it were similar. Oddly, while there are a lot of walkthrough results and niconico Let’s Plays for the game, I only found a couple of sites offering any kind of written opinion on it. One noted that the game is a bit rare, so that could be why. Someone has a copy on Amazon Japan for $260 right now and the average price according to an aggregator is around 16,000 yen. Not a cheap game to play physically.
Rating: 3. I’ll give it some points for being the first point-and-click we’ve seen. It certainly looks better than the Kemco adventure games.
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