There were three new Game Boy games from November 1-15, 1991.
Konamic Golf (Konami) (November 1st)
This was Konami Golf in PAL and Ultra Golf in NA. It’s much more of a simulator than the other golf games made so far. You’re able to survey the course from an overhead view before taking your shot, you can adjust your stance before swinging, and there’s very minimal aim assistance. This is one of the only golf games I’ve ever played that doesn’t give you an indication of how hard to swing. You’re told the distance to the hole and how far your club can go at max power, but there’s no indicator on the meter to suggest what you’re aiming for if you need an intermediate value. It only has two courses, but you’re able to play multi-day tournaments and could go against a friend in hot seat mode.
Reviews were pretty positive. It has a 78 average from 8 contemporary reviews on MobyGames and they rank it 57th on Game Boy. Oddly, a lot of the reviews praise it for being uncomplicated despite being more involved than any game I’ve seen on GB or GBC. Maybe they meant that it didn’t bother with tons of modes. I didn’t find much in Japanese about it, but it did get a good review on atwiki.
Rating: 2. It stands out a bit from the other golf games, but not enough to be worth more than a look today.
Nekketsu Koukou Dodgeball-bu (Million/Technos) (November 8th)
The full title is Nekketsu Koukou Dodgeball-Bu Kyouteki! Toukyuu Senshi no Maki. It is the second Game Boy game in the dodgeball club sub-series of the River City IP, but unlike the earlier soccer game, this one is actually about dodgeball. It’s also crap. The screen is zoomed in so that you can hardly see anything, the ball barely moves when you throw it, the music is a cacophony, and they made everything important blink at a rapid pace that just looks awful. My character is invisible in this screenshot because he was blinking off on that frame.
The Retroboy blog covered this one in 2018. It got a 2/5 score there while being criticized for most of what I mentioned above, but also for kicking you back to the start after one loss and for making it hard to change characters. I couldn’t find much else about it, but it did get a 3DS Virtual Console port in 2011. It also had four player Link Cable support if you had enough friends with bad taste.
Rating: 1.
TMNT II: Back from the Sewers (Konami) (November 15th)
The second Konami TMNT game for Game Boy. It’s another beat ’em up and has great backgrounds and music, but some of the stiffest animation I’ve ever seen. Sprites are basically perfectly still except for the parts that must move, so your character has a permanent thousand-mile stare and walks like he has a stick up his butt. Enemies are mostly all the same and you only seem to have two meaningfully different attacks. There could have been more that required complex inputs from the manual, though.
Reviews were generally positive, averaging a 75%. That said, they were also all over the place. The range on MobyGames is a 100% score from GamePro to a 30% score from Games-X, in one of their only negative reviews, and EGM’s four reviews were split 8/6/3/3. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a 22/40.
Rating: 1.
Leave a Reply