The Game Boy games of February 26-28, 1991, were Fortified Zone, Racing Damashii, and F-1 Spirit.
Fortified Zone (Jaleco) (February 26th)
My third completion of this series. It’s a top down shooter somewhat similar to the original Metal Gear that has you exploring maze-like compounds and solving basic puzzles. It’s pretty easy outside of some wonky hitboxes and reuses a lot of enemies, but I had fun with it. It’s certainly one of the best games I’ve seen so far.
Contemporary reception was broadly positive in the West, and retrospective reviews after the 3DS re-release dropped a little to be more neutral. Japan was not as impressed. Famitsu gave a 23/40 and Family Computer an 18.54/30. I didn’t find a lot about it from modern posts there, but there was a positive atwiki review and it was recently added to NSO.
Rating: 5.
Racing Damashii (Irem) (February 28th)
A motorcycle racing game that never left Japan despite already being fully in English. It’s another Outrun-style game, although it has a little more complexity thanks to having body/tire condition trackers and requiring you to shift gears occasionally. I liked the way the backgrounds rotated as you took corners and, at least for the track I saw, were relevant to the real-life location of the track.
I can’t find any contemporary reviews, but it seems well-liked among the limited number of modern players. That said, there are hardly any written perspectives and I’m going entirely off of Youtube Let’s Play descriptions that include a rating. Most of those are from English channels, so I’m guessing this had a limited print run and that’s why no one talks about it. That, or it was overshadowed by the PC-Engine release a few months later.
Rating: 3.
F-1 Spirit (Konami) (February 28th)
A top-down F-1 simulator that featured three different race classes and a ton of tracks. It sounds like it could get pretty demanding if you played a whole season on the F-1 setting, but the initial track was very basic on Formula 3. It only seemed to play one music track that got repetitive quickly and I couldn’t find a way to return to the menu other than resetting the game.
Contemporary Western reviews were largely positive. The two modern reviews I found in Japanese both gave it a 3/5. The home console versions of this seem much better remembered there, and you can apparently get copies of this for as little as 100 yen.
Rating: 2
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