The Game Boy games of April 5-12, 1991, are mostly trash, but one of them is a masterpiece.
Parodius (Konami) (April 5th)
Well, I sure didn’t see this one coming. It’s a parody of Gradius and other shmups that is an absolutely wild ride from start to finish. This is the second game in a series that has never released in the US in any form, and that received only sporadic releases in Europe. It has the best music, graphics, and everything else of any Game Boy game so far, and it’s not even close. It genuinely feels like it got time machine’d in from several years later, but this really is a 1991 game. It has unique enemies on nearly every stage, massive bosses with multiple stages and destructible parts, four different playable ships with their own handling, and all sorts of different music that’s much more complex than anything else on the system right now.
Contemporary critics were no less impressed. MobyGames has it with a whopping 86% average from 11 reviews that all scored at least an 80%. It’s the 8th best game on the system by their estimation, and it received a 27/40 and 23.3/30 from Famitsu and Family Computer respectively. It’s still popular today.
Rating: 5. I don’t even care that it’s probably better with colors on SNES or PC-Engine. This is amazing.
Solomon’s Club (Graphic Research/Tecmo) (March 5th)
A port of an arcade game known as Solomon’s Key. It’s yet another puzzle game about finding your way through a maze-like environment full of enemies that you have a limited ability to damage. I don’t like this genre, and Solomon’s Club has not changed my mind.
Contemporary critics liked it more than me. It had a 79% average from a bunch of scores that were basically all the same. There’s a decent amount about it on the modern Japanese internet, including a detailed atwiki review, so it has retained some popularity. Not for me.
Rating: 1.
Final Reverse (Shouei/Toei) (March 12th)
An updated version of Toei’s earlier, crappy, Volleyfire that changes the Spacewar clone to have a bunch of different ship types and limits your movement to a track that you draw during the match. There’s also a bouncing mirror that can reflect shots and sometimes drop powerups. It’s undeniably better than Volleyfire, but that’s a low bar, and it still feels far too simple to be a standalone game.
It did not release outside Japan and seems entirely forgotten everywhere. Japanese results for it amount to a couple of informational posts and some resale sites.
Rating: 1.
World Ice Hockey (Athena) (March 12th)
Hockey is not particularly popular in Japan, but for some reason it got an exclusive hockey game. It looks and sounds great, but the controls are truly terrible. You barely have any ability to turn, face offs consist of mashing A until the puck shoots off in a random direction, and rather than having dedicated shoot and pass buttons, both actions are on A and pressing it creates a sad combination of a shot and pass that will almost certainly not do what you want. Fortunately, the goals are giant and the goalies suck, so your inability to aim doesn’t get in the way of scoring. It does get in the way of it being any fun. I believe this is the first Game Boy game to feature the Soviet Union as a playable nation. It may also be the only one given that the USSR only had nine months left at this point and the writing was very much on the wall.
It received a handful of European reviews that were all quite negative and averaged out to a 55%. I found a few Japanese posts about it, but no reviews. Oddly, it has a Japanese Wikipedia page, but it’s basically just an extremely lengthy explanation of the gameplay. There’s minimal information about the game’s release and nothing about its reception.
Rating: 1.
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