After what feels like a centuries long gap, we finally have some more games that debuted in PAL.
As a reminder, all ratings are on a scale of 1-5 based on how much fun they are to play right now. A game that was great thirty years ago can get a 1 if it sucks now. I will give out a 0 for truly awful games. Most Game Boy games are not at all worth playing in 2026, so most scores are 1.
Jack Nicklaus Golf (Sculptured Software/Tradewest)
A golf game that is much more of a sim than previous entries. Rather than playing on a single course, the default mode has you just play a set of what were apparently Jack Nicklaus’ favorite holes at various courses. Each session opens with a weather report that almost feels like it should be from a flight sim. Otherwise, the main notable feature is that the course is rendered in 3D in real time. That presumably means it’s much more realistic than competing games, but also requires waiting a few seconds before each shot as the game draws in your view from left to right. Pretty neat for a Game Boy game.
Critics gave it a 72%, although MobyGames mostly has German scores and I don’t know how big golf is there. The one score in English was an 85%. Oddly, despite how many golf games were made there, this did not release in Japan. The Jack Nicklaus Golf series ran from 1988-1999, but this was the only one on Game Boy.
Rating: 2. Not by any means the best golf game available, but the rendering is worth a look.
NBA All-Star Challenge 2 (Beam/LJN)
This is basically the same game as before but with slightly nicer background graphics. The animations are maybe also a little smoother. Still, it continues to feel like it’s mostly just RNG whether you score or not. I imagine that it likely updated some of the players to reflect who was famous in 1992.
Critics were largely unimpressed, with an average score of 64%. This are mostly European reviews as usual. Someone wrote a guide for it on GameFAQs in 2012, though, so it must have earned at least a couple of fans.
Rating: 1.
Turn and Burn: The F-14 Dogfight Simulator (Imagineering/Absolute Entertainment)
Look, I love me a flight sim. I spent a ton of time with F-14 Tomcat for GBA as a kid and loved it despite all the limitations inherent to that system. I am in awe at the ambition of making a flight sim for the original Game Boy, and all the more so for the fact that it technically works. It doesn’t do much more than that, though. You have a functional altimeter, artificial horizon, and heading compass, and you’re going to need all of them because the sky is featureless, the ocean barely less so, and there’s no radar. Most of the game is just watching nothing happen while half the screen is shaded and the other half isn’t. There was apparently an enemy somewhere on this first map that I was supposed to shoot down, but I never found them. At least the music is pretty good.
The German magazine Play Time liked it quite a bit, but everyone else gave poor scores. Its 57% average is just about good enough to make the bottom 50 GB games on MobyGames. Not even a dedicated GameFAQs fan can save this one, as its page is basically blank except for four written user reviews that all award a 1/10. Ouch.
Rating: 1
Mr. Do! (Ocean)
A PAL debut! This released in NA in November and never came to Japan even though the arcade original was pretty successful there. It has the digging system from Dig-Dug and you’re supposed to go around the level and collect all the fruit. Attacks work with this weird orbiting ball that’s really hard to use on a Game Boy screen. Enemies can also spawn on top of pickups and be difficult to see. All in all, it’s pretty bad except for the music.
It was quite popular as an arcade game and on some consoles, but the Game Boy version never seems to have gotten much attention. Most sources ignore it and MobyGames only has two reviews that fall on opposite sides of a 70%.
Rating: 1
Cool Ball (Bit Managers/Infogrames)
An almost offensively basic game that consists entirely of bouncing a ball on different platforms. You can tilt the platforms left or right to make the ball go in that direction, and you can make the ball jump to go a bit higher. It’s very boring. I do like the music, though. The game is a port of a poorly reviewed 1990 DOS game, which makes you wonder why they bothered to revive it two years later. It is also the day’s second PAL debut, as this did not appear in NA until 1994 and, despite the big TAKARA on the startup screen, never made it to Japan on any system.
Critics averaged 62%, although 3 of the 5 tracked are actually higher than that. Germany’s Play Time gets a second mention of the day for their 38% score that murdered the average. In this case, I agree with them. There is nothing cool about this ball.
Rating: 1
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