November 1991 was an exceptionally busy month for North American Game Boy game debuts, so it’s getting multiple posts. PAL still didn’t have anything new.
Bart Simpson’s Escape from Camp Deadly (Imagineering/Acclaim)
I have nothing nice to say about this game. It’s incredibly ugly, has awful gameplay, features the worst rendition of the theme ever made, and even crammed in garbage voice samples that would have made Chessmaster cry. Reviews were somehow mostly 6s or 8s in the West, but Famitsu gave it a deserved 19/40.
Rating: 1.
Battletoads (Rare/Tradewest)
Rare was really pumping out Game Boy games in 1991. They later made a port of the Battletoads most people know, but this is actually a new game with the same name. It has better beat-em-up mechanics in terms of the animations and variety than most other options so far, but the graphics and hit boxes are pretty rough.
Critics came in with a 77% average, but it was divisive and ranged from 58% to 94% by individual outlets. It didn’t make it to Japan until 1994, when Famitsu gave it a dire 18/40. That was probably not helped by it releasing on the same day and with the same cover art as an unrelated Super Famicom Battletoads there.
Rating: 1.
Brain Bender (Gremlin Graphics/Electro Brain)
This sounds like it would be the grandparent of Brain Age, but it’s actually just that one mirror puzzle from every game ever. The music is nice, but who makes an entire game out of this? Unsurprisingly, it received middling reviews has been completely forgotten. Gremlin Graphics, however, would go on to rename themselves Infogrames in 2000 and did plenty well.
The game appears to be a reimplementation of their earlier Mindbender for Amiga, but this is so forgotten that nobody mentions that.
Rating: 1.
Home Alone (Imagineering/THQ)
You can tell Imagineering put a lot of resources into this since it was their second release of the month. MobyGames considers it the 19th worst game on Game Boy, which is largely driven by its 55% average score from 14 critics. Ouch. Most negative reviews were in French or German, so I’m not entirely sure what they hated about it, but I hate that there’s just one piece of bad music that loops every few seconds. You also get a gun that takes a million shots to disable the thieves for all of two seconds, which is even more unhelpful when they somehow manage to be on every screen all the time.
Rating: 1.
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