April 26th, 1991, brought five new Game Boy games, making it the biggest day for new releases of 1991 so far.
Mini-Putt (A-Wave)
A port of a 1987 Accolade game for Commodore 64. For some reason, Wikipedia decided that the link for this game should go to the page for miniature golf rather than the page they have for this game, although that page doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the GB game at all anyway. The game is basically the usual power meter golf gameplay except on a mini golf course, with the only notable addition being that you can select a specific spot on the course to aim for. The holes also don’t take your speed into account at all, so you can blast the ball into them at full power and still score.
It has four player multiplayer for standard mini golf and a two player “gamble” mode where you win money on each hole. The game only released in Japan on Game Boy, but got five European reviews that were all clustered around 70%. I few posts I could find about it in Japanese were all generally positive.
Rating: 2. A point for being first to mini golf.
Nintendo World Cup (Technos)
What a weird one. This is Nekketsu Koukou Soccer-bu World Cup-hen in Japan, or “Hot- Blooded High School Soccer Club: Word Cup Edition”, and is part of the River City/Kunio-kun series that always has Nekketsu in the Japanese titles. It released on numerous systems and had a different Japanese title on basically every one of them, some of which confusingly refer to a dodgeball club (in reference to an earlier Kunio-kun title) before adding “soccer edition”. To make it all even more confusing, it was localized as simply a World Cup game in the West, with Nintendo sticking their name on as the publisher. In this version, you still play as Kunio and friends, but their names are changed to fit whichever country you’re playing as and the sprites are slightly recolored to fit a cliche of that country.
The gameplay is pretty awful. There are basically no rules and the ball carrier is so slow that the other team, whether you or the CPU, can easily catch them and punch (yes) them to get the ball. Shooting and passing both feel horrible. Game Boy reviews were quite poor and have a 58% average on MobyGames.
At first glance, the game appears to have been barely better received on NES, but it turns out that the 63% average is masking an incredible range of scores from 16% to 100%. Japanese fans seem to have largely been on the higher end of that range, which means most results for the game today are positive posts about the Famicom game. The posts I found about this version were largely informational.
Rating: 1.
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 (Kemco)
Before Kemco released lots of identikit JRPGs, they released lots of identikit licensed games. This is just like the other Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle games on Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and not worth talking about for the millionth time. Just like before, it was originally Mickey Mouse in Japan and retained that license in parts of Europe. In other parts, it was based on the Danish cartoon Hugo. Reviews were mostly poor.
Rating: 1.
Spanky’s Quest (Natsume)
Originally Lucky Monkey. It’s a puzzle game about a monkey who attacks by throwing a ball. For some reason, the ball gets bigger and stronger if you bounce it on your head a few times. The music is great, but otherwise there’s nothing interesting here. Reviews were largely poor outside of one French outlet that gave it a 79%.
Rating: 1.
Sumo Fighter (KID/I’max)
A standard GB platformer except that you’re playing as a sumo wrestler. It was Sumo Fighter: Tokaido Basho in Japan. The music and backgrounds are pretty good, but my favorite part is definitely that you kill enemies by stunning them and then chucking them off screen in comical fashion. It’s not clear why the enemies appear to just be random craftsmen and villagers, though. I tried to capture the throwing animation in my screenshot and managed to time it perfectly so that the enemy being hurled looks like he’s just standing on a platform.
MobyGames has two reviews that both gave it about 50%. I didn’t see any contemporary Japanese reviews, but I did find a long atwiki review that classified it as a bakage, or stupid game. The long section devoted to “idiotic points” included that it’s written entirely in English despite the Edo period setting, that it has little to do with sumo, the same observation I made about the strange choice of enemies, that the cover shows a ripped guy with a six pack instead of a sumo build (fixed on the American box), and much more. Despite saying that it has ‘the surreal atmosphere of a game made by a foreigner confused about Japan’, that review came away positive. KID is based in Tokyo and went on to primarily make bishoujo games, eventually becoming 5pb and later merging with MAGES.
Rating: 2.
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