There were five new Game Boy games released from December 27-29, 1991. They include two contenders for the worst fighting game ever made.
Janken Man (Dual/NCS) (December 27th)
The standard Game Boy licensed platformer. In this case, the license of an obscure anime that ran for one season from 1991 to 1992. Wikipedia does not list any licenses outside of Japan except for one by, surprisingly, the Indian branch of Nickelodeon. That said, this does differentiate itself a little bit by having you jump on your enemy’s heads to stun them instead of simply punching them like in most GB games. Apparently it has boss fights in the form of rock, paper, scissors matches. “Janken” is the shortened form on the Japanese word for that game, so that’s not too surprising.
I couldn’t find anything about this except for some brief informational overviews. It probably didn’t review well.
Rating: 1
Peetan (Inter State/Kaneko) (December 27th)
A deeply obscure port of an obscure 1984 MSX game. You’re a chicken and you need to drop eggs on the seesaws to get your chicks up to the top level before a cat can get to them. You can also stun the cat by dropping eggs on it. There’s very little out there about any version of the game, so I don’t have any review scores for it. I can at least say that it has much better graphics on Game Boy despite the lack of color and that it’s possibly named for a Chinese egg dish.
Rating: 1.
Nakajima Satoru F-1 Hero GB World Championship ’91 (Natsu/Varie) (December 27th)
A racing game that used the name of the first Japanese F-1 driver. It’s a pretty standard Outrun/Pole Position-style game. The music is great, but it has fairly basic graphics and the 3-D effect is pretty unconvincing. It also does not have a map, so you either need to drive slowly enough to rely on the turn indicators that come up right before you need them or you need to memorize the tracks.
It continues the streak of games that have nothing written about them. In this case, it may because of a ’92 edition that came out a year later. I had to play it without the green screen.
Rating: 1.
Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh (Tomy) (December 28th)
A licensed anime fighting game. That is rarely a good combination of words even on systems that are not the Game Boy. Even on the Game Boy, it rarely leads to something quite as awful as this. Pressing start results in being immediately dropped into an active match against a robot who can retreat as quickly as you can advance and who spams ranged attacks that you can’t counter. Even if you do catch up, punching doesn’t seem to do anything. The brick wall in the center of the arena is a lie and both characters can just walk through it. It’s also best of 1, so you get immediately sent back to the start screen when you lose.
It will come as no surprise that this is widely considered a kusoge and that reviews of it typically list almost no positives. Atwiki gives it credit for having ‘some’ good music after a negatives section that takes up nearly the entire article. French magazine Joystick gave it an incomprehensible 70% score, and it became only more incomprehensible when I translated the review and found that they said “Despite all that, you can’t enjoy it at all!” and “Let’s just say it: It’s incredibly ugly and monotonous”, which does not seem to track with the giant 70% right below the review text. I discovered that they gave Peetan a 59% even though it’s an all-but-objectively better game, so it’s not just that their scale was weird for GB games.
Rating: 0
Ultraman (Bec) (December 29th)
MobyGames considers the SNES version of this game to be very nearly the worst game on the system out of the 706 they have ranked. If it is anything like this game, it is not hard to see why. This is possibly the slowest fighting game ever made and does not seem to even have a jump button. I got dropped into a match against Bemular and was unable to accomplish anything because its tail attack was as fast as my moves and had significantly better range. Using a shield and hitting it in the brief window before another tails swipe was probably my only chance, but that’s quite an ask. It also has bad music and genuinely awful graphics. I did think it was funny that it opens with a zoom in on a sprite of Ultraman that never gets more detailed, so you just get a face full of pixels.
Despite all that, the game seems to have a decent reputation in Japan. Famitsu gave it a dire 18/40 on release, but Atwiki only classifies it as a game that aged poorly and there are plenty of playthroughs and discussions out there. I even saw positive reviews of the SNES version. There do seem to be special moves you can perform with the right combinations of dpad moves, so it’s possible that there’s some depth if you put the time in. I wouldn’t know. Joystick gave this one a 60%.
Rating: 0
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