June 1991 brought another batch of North American Game Boy games with no known release date. PAL’s release drought ended this month, but all the new releases there had debuted somewhere else, so the wait for a new PAL game continues.
Klax (Eastridge/Mindscape)
If you’re thinking, “wait, we already did Klax!”, that was Klax by Hudson and exclusive to Japan. This is a completely different Klax port that was exclusive to North America. Unlike Hudson’s 2D version, this one emulates the appearance of the arcade game very well other than lacking colors. This is very clearly the best version of Klax available on Game Boy, although that’s of limited value since I don’t think anyone cares anymore.
Games-X gave this a 50%. Of the other two reviews tracked on MobyGames, one is for the Japanese version, and the other is a 76% score with no way of knowing which game it’s for. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any other reviews that were clearly for this game, but 50% does seem pretty harsh. Klax is fine.
Rating: 2. It gets a point to make up for the other review.
Mysterium (Maxis/Asmik)
Not to be confused with the highly successful board game, this was a first-person dungeon crawler that was anything but highly successful. It was made by Maxis, who were two years off of making SimCity and seven years from The Sims. This was during their initial period of pre-EA independence, which ended due to bombs like Mysterium.
At any rate, Mysterium is more of a slideshow that a truly 3D game. You can move up and down the barren hallways and shift side-to-side a bit, but it’s barely animated and it’s very obvious that everything is just 2D sprites. Pressing A enters an aim mode that is probably used for combat, and pressing B does basically nothing. Almost all action happens in the select menu, where you can pick up items off the floor and then press up and down millions of times in order to move the cursor to the various verbs you can perform on the actions. Sometimes, just for fun, the game then resets your cursor and makes you press up a million times to get your cursor back to the object you’re trying to interact with.
Critic reviews were actually not that bad at the time. Germany’s Power Play despised it and EGM gave it a 53%, but other reviews were in the vicinity of 70%. It’s nonetheless one of the 30 worst Game Boy games by MobyGames’ tracker thanks to a 1.4/5 score from their users. I didn’t find much about the Japanese reception, but there were a couple of blog reviews that were not very positive.
Rating: 1.
The Punisher: The Ultimate Payback (Beam/Acclaim)
A slightly modified port of the NES Punisher that released in the same year. It’s a rail shooter straight out of the arcades, but it didn’t use the Zapper on NES and obviously didn’t have a light gun option at all on Game Boy. A light gun game with no light gun is already a major setback, but this just wouldn’t be a very good light gun game anyway. Enemies are boring and placed everywhere, the music is dull, and it’s not much to look at. Best of all, the screen scrolls automatically and you can be shot from outside it, so your health just ticks down constantly even if you’re playing perfectly. Brilliant stuff.
MobyGames tracks five reviews averaging a 53%, which is also the score the median review from EGM gave it. Other markets were spared.
Rating: 1
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