The Game Boy games that debuted in North American in March, 1991, mostly didn’t release anywhere else. They also involved a lot of typing on tiny keyboards.
Jeopardy (Data Design Interactive/GameTek)
The first of at least four Game Boy games based on the long-running TV show. This one works like basically every Jeopardy game ever made except that it drops the third player, has really ugly sprites, and features some of the most excruciating sounds ever produced by a speaker. For reasons that are lost to time, the developers decided it would be a good idea to make every round start with ‘music’ that is just holding one extremely high note for several seconds, followed by doing the same thing with equally painful notes several more times.
The game itself is otherwise very standard. I was a little worried about typing in answers quickly enough with Game Boy controls, but you have 60 seconds to do it, so if anything this is probably one of the easiest Jeopardy games ever since you can buzz in and then think for 30 seconds before even starting to type. Oddly, the one review MobyGames has for it awarded a 30% score entirely because you have to type in answers. I assume this person wanted multiple choice, which would have nothing to do with the show. It’s a very harsh score.
Otherwise, the only interesting thing here is that it had both local and GameLink multiplayer. I tried the local variant and wasn’t entirely clear on how it’s supposed to work. It seemed like player 1 just goes until they get a question wrong, but player 2 may be able to buzz in by pressing a different button.
Rating: 1.
Loopz (Audiogenic/Mindscape)
Loopz, a puzzle game similar to Pipe Dream, may not have been a North American Debut. It released in NA at an unspecified time in March and in Japan on specifically March 15th. I’m assuming that the NA date was earlier since its publisher was from the US, but there’s no way to know for sure.
At any rate, the game is about trying to make loops on a small board out of random pieces that you have to place every few seconds. A places the piece and B rotates it, which is a nightmare for someone like me with a habit of mixing up inputs when only two are available. The game reviewed reasonably well on assorted computer systems when it released in 1990, but the 1991 ports to Game Boy and NES scored a bit lower. Wikpedia quotes a reviewer as saying this version “didn’t stand out”, but I can’t offer any more context since the MobyGames reviews are all in German or Polish.
Wikipedia also makes an unsourced claim that this was licensed to Capcom to be made into an arcade release that never materialized. I’d believe that, because even on Game Boy it opens by showing you high score boards for both all time and the current day. This seems made for arcades.
Rating: 1. That reviewer was right that it does not stand out among the flood of Game Boy puzzlers.
Super Scrabble (Imagineering/Milton Bradley)
It’s Scrabble. There’s no music and the graphics are extremely basic. There’s really nothing at all worth mentioning about it except that you can select various CPU difficulty levels. The difficulty level is explicitly just a thinking time slider, however, and even the lowest setting gives it a full minute. In my game, the weakest CPU sat there for 45 seconds before quickly spelling “Taxi” and ending its turn. This was excruciating to sit through, and I can’t imagine spending 3 minutes of precious Game Boy battery life to wait for the hardest CPU to pick a word.
Inexplicably, the game has an 85% average from two critics on MobyGames. One, GamZone, said that it might be “the next Tetris” and the other, Games-X, was impressed that the game had timers and a built-in wordlist. I can’t begin to understand those scores, but Games-X only lasted a year and gave out so many high scores in that period that an 80% may well have been below their average.
Rating: 1.
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