a normal review of (20) game boy games
chapters I-XX: al·pha·bet·i·za·tion
I’ve been spending a great deal of time organizing ROMs recently. It’s been a very long time since I’ve enjoyed playing a videogame as much as I enjoy meticulously placing them on SD cards. 656 of my 2,833 ROMs are for Nintendo’s original Game Boy - a system which I used exclusively to play Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition. The pressure to actually play any of those other 655 games has been steadily building for a few years now, along with a general feeling that I need to consume every videogame ever made before I have the right to make one or keep speaking about them. So I decided to play all of them.
One of the very first things I see is a baby (?) riding a skateboard, which is precisely the sort of high concept that videogames were created to facilitate. As that baby shredded ass across Adventure Island, I considered that I could probably stop here and have learned everything that these 20+ year old videogames built with less RAM than the average calculator could possibly teach me.
Then the baby started riding a little dinosaur and I realised I’m a fucking imbecile.
It looks like that at some point during his quest in the previous game, the skateboarding baby got himself a girlfriend. The next ROM opens with the couple sitting contentedly hand-in-hand on a tiny beach, before a UFO abducts her and takes her away. She’s gone before the title screen has even appeared. It’s so sad, man. Already, here in the 8-bit haze of 1993, the demands of the market are ruining lives.
They’ve probably just met, but already I can see the sense of comfort and security writ on their faces. I can see the endless rush of serotonin in their bloodstreams triggered by merely being present for each other. It can take decades to find that, and I could happily sit there and watch them bask on their perfect little island sitting on the placid olive ocean for hours. But someone decided Adventure Island 2 had to exist, so that poor little baby has to do jumping again. I switched it off.
my partner says my pupils still dilate whenever I look at her and I think this is enough to make me a good person
Look at this fucking menu. I’m unsure of the finer points of the frankly overdesigned Adventures of Lolo - a game which is about turning snakes into eggs in a specific order, possibly. It’s charming enough, a little round guy runs up to you and tells you he’s the king, he’s very nice. But my god, this menu. It has all of the main shapes that you like to see. This menu should be in textbooks about the year 1994. It was a time when you just have some shapes and it looked fucking great. I wish there was modern UI that looked exactly like this. Anyway yeah this is a puzzle game.
Aerostar is one of those wretched things where you fly in a direction for a few seconds and then explode. None of these mean anything.
people used to pay thirty bucks for something like this
There’s no way of being certain, but I believe this dishevelled puppet man in a hideous shirt is the titular Agro Soar. I got a lot of time for this guy. He’s been kidnapped by an evil wizard, and he’s trapped in a world that looks more or less identical to Adventure Island. The game itself is like most of the rest of the Game Boy Library - mildly distracting dogshit about jumping onto or over stuff to the right. But I’ve got a lot of time for the man himself.
i take a break to copy a .pkg of resonance of fate hd edition onto a usb stick
The sheer moxie in the face of the unknown, Agro Soar is a guy who knows exactly who he is. Agro Soar has never woken up in the middle of a night in a cold sweat after remembering something embarrassing he said in 2009. Agro Soar never wonders whether he’s doing everything wrong, slipping further and further away from the person he’s meant to be with each passing moment of apathy.
i’m convinced i’ll no longer feel like i’m dying 24/7 if I can just organise the perfect gaming handheld with the perfect library of pirated software, there’s an endpoint to organization, there has to be - where you get to just be instead of build
The soundtrack is quite good.
This game fucking sucks. Aladdin for the Game Boy fucking sucks.
Whenever Alfred Chicken dies he comes back as an egg and when the egg hatches he’s exactly the same. He goes through all of the physical, emotional and social trauma of metamorphosis and emerges utterly unchanged. What an idiot. What a waste of time and energy. He could have came back as anything, if he’d just put in some fucking effort.
The problem is that he wasn’t a person when he he went in - why would he just assume a fully-fledged person would come out? He ran but he didn’t have a fucking idea where he was going. He assumed the big leap was all it took, he never bothered to learn anything new - he never unlearned anything old. He sat and he expected everything to just work out without any other input, and now he dares to feel sorry for himself?
He can jump as much as he wants but until he spends more time imagining his destination it’ll all be wasted.
subtext
Alien Olympics is Track & Field except instead of humans it’s aliens. A noble enough endeavour, but there’s no way in hell I’m mashing my Analogue Pocket’s buttons like that to see what else is going on.
This is called Alien vs Predator: The Last of His Clan and I wish it was the Last of These Games I had to play haha.
Inmates run around in a senseless panic as a tiny beautiful bald woman stomps her way through an eerie, 8-bit labyrinth attempting to evoke the texture and stink of the peerless Alien³. It actually sort of manages it too. A game of memorising layouts of identical corridors, running from creatures that are much stronger than you, crawling through vents, finding keycards. It’s exhausting and stressful and awful and I legitimately sat and finished the entire thing.
This system has a lot of movie tie-ins, and the majority are content to slap a vaguely familiar sprite into a generic platformer and call it a day. To even attempt to make something legitimately scary, that tries to depict the events of it’s source material on a more than aesthetic level - it’s kind of admirable when they could have just shat something like The Last of His Clan out and called it a day.
It’s Alleyway.
It’s All-Star Baseball ‘99. This is the first attempt we’ve seen to realistically render the human body.
and i’d rather not look at that
Altered Space - A 3-D Alien Adventure feels like an impossible prototype from the future. An isometric view, moving conveyor belts. You can pick up a box and take it somewhere else and out it down and then jump on top of it. It’s basically Half-Life 2, really. I also kept dying and I have no capacity to improve so I didn’t really play much of it but still!! Well done all!!!
i have so many thing i need to do and learn and get good at before i can Be and whenever i think about the effort any of it is going to take i immediately die and fall asleep i only have so much air and it’s always leaking
I think the little penguin is the Amazing Penguin. It’s a puzzle game. There are a lot of these. Like the very next game is also a puzzle game called
A-mazing Tater which I can’t even get past the tutorial of because I have the intellectual capacity of a rottweiler.
which makes my decision to attempt to hew a new personhood from my wasted flesh seem sort of foolhardy in retrospect
Now I remember what I said earlier about how frequently tie-in games default to game about jumping to the right, but hear me out - the Animaniacs themselves are fully aware of how rote most of this corporately-mandated shovelware is. That joke might not be enough to carry a game as fundamentally shite as Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard but it’s just about enough to carry this hour long platformer.
Like maybe it’s just because this is the Animaniacs and I have a parasocial obligation as a fellow transsexual to support their endeavours, I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk too much about games about jumping on things. What is there to really say? If we don’t rush through these things sometimes we’d be here forever.
Anyway, didn’t really pay too much attention during the 15 minutes I played this. I saw the anime guy and the numbers and the menus and catalogued it as The Good Shit. It’s probably the first thing here that I would actually play beyond the confines of a cringe quasi-review anthology/live journal. Maybe we’ll come back around to it some time.
after I’ve finished playing every JRPG on my ODE-equipped Sega Saturn in the hopes that it’ll magically make me a legitimate 90s lesbian
Arcade Classic No. 1 - Asteroids & Missile Command is a collection including Asteroids and Missile Command.
Arcade Classic No. 2 - Centipede & Millipede is a collection including Centipede and Millipede.
Arcade Classic No. 3 - Galaga & Galaxian is a collection of Galaga and Galaxian.
Next time we’ll look at twenty more Game Boy games, including three Batmen - which isn’t even all of the Batmen.
