There were three new Game Boy games on December 20th, 1991. We already covered a fourth, Monopoly, in the NA debuts post.
America Oudan Ultra Quiz Part 2 (Wiz/Tomy)
We covered the first American Oudan already, and this one isn’t much different. You are once again a participant in a Japanese game show that had contestants trying to survive yes/no trivia questions in stages that started in Japan and finished in New York City. It once again starts with trivia about the Statue of Liberty, but there’s an easy mode now. “Easy” is still a bit tricky, though, and presumably especially so for Japanese players who had likely never been to New York, and some are poorly worded. Does the Statue of Liberty weight more than a jumbo jet? A 747 could be more than twice as heavy if it was at its maximum takeoff weight, but an empty plane weighs less.
Rating: 1.
Mega Man II (Thinking Rabbit/Capcom)
Mega Man II, not to be confused with Mega Man 2, is a fusion of the original second and third games. It only lets you access four stages at the start, all of which are apparently similar to stages from MM2, then gives you access to four more stages that resemble MM3. I’m still not much of a Mega Man fan and don’t have much to say about it beyond that the backgrounds are blank for some reason and the Game Boy’s sound chip did not do the music any favors.
Wikipedia says that it received ‘average’ reviews, and I will have to believe it. MobyGames only has a bunch of German reviews, EGM, and random websites from two-plus decades later. Wikipedia has the Game Rankings average at 68.83%. The Japanese reviews are more interesting: Famitsu gave it a 22/40, which is bad, but Family Computer readers gave a decent 22.3/30. This might be the first time we’ve seen FC have the higher numeric score, and it’s certainly the closest in value the two have ever been. What does that mean? Absolutely nothing.
Rating: 1, but probably higher if you like Mega Man.
Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird GB (Biox/Irem)
This is a licensed game from an anime that is apparently and inexplicably localized as “The Brave of Sun Fighbird”. A better translation would be something like “Firebird: Hero of the Sun”, but this was 1991 and they’d apparently already trapped themselves into translating “yuusha” as “brave” in another series. The anime is actually the source of the “Is this a [thing]?” meme, so even though no one has ever heard of it, a scene from it has probably been viewed more times than all but a few anime in the West. This game, meanwhile, is a pretty unremarkable shmup. It’s not bad if you turn the sound off, but I can’t imagine why anyone would play it when Sagaia had just come out.
No one bothered to review it in the West, but Japanese reviewers were not very enthused by it. Famitsu gave a remarkably low 17/40 and Family Computer, apparently in a tying mode that day, gave a 17.2/30. I’d call that one remarkably low as well if they hadn’t give the Famicom version of this an even worse 14.9. It actually gets a lot of results on the Japanese internet, but it’s mostly just resale sites, so presumably this had a ton of copies printed and ended up flooding used games stores.
Rating: 1
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