And now for the remaining five Game Boy games that debuted in North America in 1991.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters (Nintendo)
This is the rare Nintendo game that did not release in Japan at all. It got a PAL release six months later in May, but didn’t come to Japan in any form until appearing on the 3DS Virtual Console in 2012, and even then it was still in English according to Wikipedia. It’s basically the usual side-scrolling platformer except that you can jump really high and the levels have a lot of doors to explore. The graphics are basic and there are hardly any animations, but it has nice music and smooth movement.
It averaged a 76% from 15 reviews, but no one really disliked it. The lowest contemporary score was still a 67%, and the majority of scores were within a couple points of 70%. This was something of the original 7/10 Game Boy game.
Rating: 2. A point for notability.
Metroid II: Return of Samus (Nintendo)
Nintendo debuted a game in North America twice in one month for some reason. This one doesn’t really need much of an introduction: it’s Metroid. I didn’t play much because I’ve learned that this series is just not for me, but it looks and plays great. The run-and-gun aspect of it is much stronger than any other side scroller I’ve played so far. It’s not quite the best looking game on Game Boy, but it does look nice and has quality music.
Reviews were quite positive. It has a 79% average from 21 Western critics, but retrospective reviews were slightly more negative and the contemporary average is likely in the low 80s. It just makes it into MobyGames’ top 50 GB games with the help of a 3.7/5 user score. It released in Japan a few months later in January and earned a 25/40 from Famitsu and 22/30 from Family Computer.
Rating: 3.
RoboCop 2 (Painting By Numbers/Ocean)
It sure didn’t take long to get another game from this license. It looks pretty good other than the bizarre scale of background items, but enemies have a tendency to blend in to the scenery and the momentum is just bizarre. I’m also not a fan of how many shots some of the grunts take to go down. That said, it’s certainly better than most movie tie-ins, so that’s something.
MobyGames has it at a 76% from 5 critics, but it seems like most critics and players ignored the handheld game in favor of console or home PC versions. Oddly, all the reviews they track are from European outlets despite PAL being the only region that never got this game. Japan, which did get it, ignored it so hard that Japanese Wikipedia forgets to mention it even released on Game Boy. User reviews are quite bad.
Rating: 1.
Turrican (Code Monkeys/Accolade)
A port of a 1990 game that is considered one of the best on a variety of systems like the Amiga, Spectrum, and C64. Alas, the GB port lost something in translation. Its 71% average is about 15 points below the best-scoring systems, and that’s probably down to the compressed screenspace and very limited graphics. While I don’t like that the player character is usually locked slightly off-center to the right, that seems to have been common to all versions. It also did a good job of retaining the speed and music of the originals.
Rating: 2. You can clearly do better with other versions.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Capcom)
The movie released in 1988, but for some reason this was made in 1991. It kind of defies genre description. You’re mostly just walking around an open-world Toontown and trying to find the person or item you need to progress. Enemies spawn on certain screens and will attack you, but you rarely have any way of fighting back. There are apparently boss fights later on, so it’s likely closest to being an action game if you need to put it in a particular bucket. I don’t think the 60% average on MobyGames means much. Two German outlets gave it a 33% each for being a big fetch quest, and while the other reviews are more positive, one of them is from the useless Games-X magazine that gave everything about an 80%. It has a respectable 3.3 average from users on both MobyGames and GameFAQs. The latter also has two guides and a few forum threads proclaiming that it’s great, so there are real fans.
Whether or not it’s any good, the real reason anyone remembers this is that it’s the first real game designed by Shinji Mikami, who of course later worked on basically every famous game Capcom has ever made. I say first ‘real’ game because technically Capcom Quiz was first, but that was just a series of trivia questions. This required some actual design to create.
Rating: 2. It probably isn’t good, but it has some historical significance and is at least unique.
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