The Game Boy games of May 10-17, 1991, are all pretty obscure. One of them is decent and one of them is not a game at all.
Kitchen Panic (Bits Lab/Coconuts Japan) (May 10th)
This has nothing to do with the PS1 Kitchen Panic you’ll find by searching that title. It’s deeply obscure even in Japan, with search results switching to the PS1 game by the end of the first page even with “GB” appended on. You play an extremely small boy who needs to clear a kitchen of bugs. You get three lives and need to beat a certain number of bugs in each nearly-identical level, but after that a door appears somewhere in the level and you can move on even if many bugs are still alive. There is no way to save, and running out of lives kicks you all the way back. Sometimes blocks drop when you beat bugs and there’s some kind of bonus system based on the symbols they stop on.
The blog posts I found on it were quite negative. atwiki’s post ends by asking “who would buy such a bad game?”. One site that reviews games primarily on their difficulty level at least gave it four stars for that, but also gave only one star for its (lack of a) save system.
Rating: 1
Sanrio Carnival (Scitron/Character Soft) (May 11th)
A port of a Famicom game from 1990. It’s Panel de Pon with Sanrio characters. The only notable feature for Game Boy is Link Cable multiplayer. The music is kind of nice, but otherwise there’s really nothing to say about it. And indeed, hardly anyone has said anything about it on the internet. There are a few Let’s Plays and some soundtrack uploads, but I didn’t see any reviews.
Rating: 1.
Rubble Saver (A-Wave/King Records) (May 17th)
An action platformer that’s a bit like Ghosts ‘n Goblins. You play as a girl who was abducted by aliens along with her brother. Luckily, you’re dropped off next to a friendly power suit and can use it to try and rescue your brother. You lose the power suit and any upgrades you’d found for it whenever you take damage, but enemies frequently drop suit respawns and more upgrades, so getting it back isn’t too hard. You lose a life if you take damage without the suit.
Taito published the game in the West and apparently felt that we couldn’t handle playing as a girl. The roles are reversed in this version. Wikipedia and MobyGames describe different plots, which I’m guessing is a difference between the PAL and NA manuals. There’s no real story in the game itself, so I don’t have a way to tell.
It got a 62% from five critics, but nearly all of them are in German and EGM didn’t write anything useful. I found one blog review in Japanese that gave it a 3/5 while praising the sound, graphics, and replayability.
Rating: 3
Ippatsu Gyakuten DX Bakenou (Graphic Research/ASMIK) (May 17th)
I’ve already said that a few games may be the least talked about game on Game Boy, but this one sets a nearly unbeatable mark for that title. I found one site with anything useful written about it in either English or Japanese. Of course, this title comes with an asterisk: this is not a game. It’s horse racing software that lets you enter a bunch of basic information about a race in order to have it produce suggested bets. It’s also completely useless now because Japanese horse racing has changed since then and this is the first of many releases.
I did think it was funny that a Youtube channel with almost no subscribers uploaded a four minute ‘longplay’ of this a month ago.
Rating: 0. My last zero was for being offensively low quality, but even if this was useful back in the day, it’s hard to think of anything less worth playing today than a horse race predictor that almost certainly never worked and doesn’t even have the right format now.
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