The Game Boy games of July 16-26, 1991, included Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge and Banishing Racer.
Shi Kin Jou (Shoei/Toei) (July 16th)
A sokoban puzzle using mahjong tiles. It has good music, but makes a horrific sound whenever you try to push something that can’t be moved. It’s really not my kind of game, but the limited coverage that exists for it is somewhat positive. It got a bunch of contemporary reviews from German outlets that were all between 60% and 80%. A few Japanese blogs reviewed it later and came way basically saying that it’s good for what it is.
The name is just the Japanese name for the Forbidden City in Beijing, which doesn’t really seem to be involved with the game in any way other than showing up on the title screen.
Rating: 1
Koi wa Kakehiki (Graphic Research/Pony Canyon) (July 21st)
A puzzle game in which the goal is to connect the face in the top right to the face in the bottom left using a path of white squares before the other player can do the same for the other two faces uses black squares. Each turn consists of selecting one of the 16 arrows available to move the given row in that direction by one space. You can’t undo the move made by the last player, so on most turns only 15 of the 16 arrows are actually available. Sometimes you find hidden pieces that say with the kanji for ‘rest’ on them, which allow you to take a second turn before your opponent gets to act. That’s pretty much it.
This is another one with minimal coverage in either language. I found one atwiki review that gave it a kusoge rating primarily for being repetitive and too expensive. That’s true, but feels a little harsh for a game that would be fine if it were cheap enough. There’s nothing wrong with this idea as a minigame, but it is pretty much the same thing after you’ve done it once.
Rating: 1.
Banishing Racer (Jaleco) (July 26th)
A side scrolling platformer where you play as a car. Fittingly for being a car, you have an incredible amount of inertia and momentum management is a big part of the game. It’s also one of the rare GB platformers to follow Mario rules and let you kill enemies by bouncing on them. The plot has you driving from San Francisco to New York via five worlds themed after a particular region and each having three or four levels. Most are pure platforming, but some worlds end with a boss fight and there are a few levels that have the Flappy Bird gameplay from my screenshot.
It never released outside Japan despite the American setting and being in English, but Famitsu gave it a decent 26/40 and there’s a good amount about it in both languages on the internet today. Most blog posts I saw mentioned the high difficulty and noted that there’s a sharp increase towards the end. They’re not wrong, but unfortunately, it’s the unfair kind of difficulty. Early levels are mostly just fun platforming that you can reasonably complete on your first try. World three starts to stretch that with some enemies that behave unpredictably or spawn abruptly, but World four really takes it to a new level with sequences that have ambush enemies, require you to keep your momentum up to make jumps, and have moving platforms that only give you one chance at success. Naturally, there are no checkpoints per level and limited lives. The only bone it throws you is that the timer doesn’t KO you at zero.
Rating: 2. Those first few worlds are quite fun and I thought I might beat this, but alas.
Rockman World (Minakuchi Engineering/Capcom) (July 26th)
I went with the Japanese title for this one to keep the length down, but it was Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge in English markets. I’m not a Mega Man fan and there’s obviously tons out there about this game already, so I don’t have a ton to add to it. This is very much a Mega Man game. It apparently reuses a lot from earlier games and was criticized for being too hard. Wikipedia repeatedly states that it got good reviews, but lists a GameRankings score of 69% and doesn’t list anything all that impressive over than EGM’s 34/40 score. MobyGames has a decent 76% from GameBoy reviews, which is similar to the 3.5 it gets from users on both there and GameFAQs.
Japanese users seem to like it a bit more. It got a 21.6/30 from Family Computer readers and atwiki has a “good game” review of it, although weirdly it’s one that lists far more negatives than positives. Regardless, it sold well enough to get four sequels on Game Boy. Those sequels were seemingly named to maximize confusion.
Rating: It’s a 1 from me, but clearly others like it.
Leave a Reply