a regular review of (20) game boy games
chapters XXI-XL: do·mes·ti·ca·tion
So I got a dog. A four-year-old French Bulldog with an underbite and saggy titties called Binky. She has fixed me overnight and I believe the integrity of this project as a cringe personal diary will not recover. I still managed to find the time to play a further twenty games on Nintendo’s Game Boy.
There’s not much I have to say about Arcade Classic No. 4 - Defender & Joust, other than “this logo fucks”. 99% of the Nintendo Presents splash screens on the system use the corporate standard font but look at this fucken shit. That is clean. The Nintendo logo after 6 months on a high protein diet. Look at the tiny dot on the i. Look at how much the t looks like a cunty crucifix. They should switch to this permanently.
So I was about to blow through this as quickly as the others, but the port of Battlezone in Arcade Classics - Battlezone & Super Breakout is actually fucking incredible. The Game Boy screen really lends itself well to the colour scheme of the original, and the size of it if anything makes it even more claustrophobic - feeling like you’re using a tiny external display to parse what you can from scant visual information while you’re locked in a hulking death machine.
It’s legitimately terrifying while simultaneously having a numbing effect, feels like the very first domino that leads to MW4’s Death From Above. Something something detachment, transference, could probably do a trans subtext on this one too but I’m in a good mood today.
i sexually identify as an attack helicopter
Breakout is Breakout.
I feel like Asterix is one of those things that nobody ever really chooses to read. It was something your parents picked you up from the library because it still had pictures but seems vaguely historical. Anyway, somebody probably had this bought for them for similar reasons. It’s fine. It’s - and I know this will shock you - a platformer. Jumping physics are basically fine. Appreciate that whenever you punch a boar it instantly turns into a roasted chunk. I don’t know anything about Roman history because I’m not a 40-year-old libdem with a Cadfael DVD boxset.
addendum - i would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologise to stonehaven library for the copy of asterix and the big fight that my parents never returned in 1996. it wasn’t their fault that i dropped it down the back of a wardrobe that wasn’t moved until 2008.
In Asterix & Obelix, Obelix is present also.
This is just Asteroids. We already have this. You cannot begin to comprehend the almost sensual thrill I will experience when I delete this from my master ROM hard-drive later today.
I was so primed to love Atomic Punk. It has that name and an incredibly cool logo. Then it has you choosing a deck like some sort of RPG.
It’s just a shit Bomberman.
Do you have any idea how many shit Bombermans are on the Game Boy? Nobody needed this.
So Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is based on the cartoon called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes which was based on the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. I’ve seen the movie but I’ve not seen the cartoon so I don’t recognise any of this deep lore. It’s a more markedly abstract licensed platformers than most. The art in the cutscenes is quite good but the actual sprites and readability of the levels are sort of migraine inducing. Very crude, very poor representations of objects and powerups and creatures. Look elsewhere for your handheld platforming thrills this holiday season.
Avenging Spirit is more or less a prototype of Geist for the GameCube, which is the wanky way of saying that it completely fucking rules. It’s a delightful platforming/shooter that opens with you being brutally gunned down by mobsters and coming back as a cartoon ghost mascot.
You flitter about as a smiling casper before possessing more grounded looking mobsters and other NPCs, expunging their souls and using their flesh as a temporary vehicle to shoot other people to death with.
When the flesh is expended, you have a window to float across the terrain in search of other unsuspecting meat-cars to hijack.
A fucking brutal mediation on the impermanence of all things. 8/10.
There actually is a fair bit about B.C. Kid that’s pretty cool. There’s the eponymous Kid - a bald, sassy baby who loves headbutting monsters and using his teeth to climb up walls. This is probably the most legitimately solid platformer we’ve covered here so far. But mostly I just love that fucking island. Look at that. Look at the little waves crashing against the beach. The bone bridge. The hills have eyes. I wish to explore those little caves a great deal. And the waterfall! And the little tent!! Love how much the sharp, black outline makes the whole thing pop.
Whenever I try to draw anything in Aseprite, I always struggle to feel like I have enough room to create discernable details, no matter what resolution I allow myself. Here they’ve made a beautiful, multilevel, multi-biome paradise that has so much to look at - with a single 160x144 pixel image. It’s maddening. It puts a lot of the other stuff we see on this system to shame.
Anyway, turns out there was also a B.C. Kid 2 -
Bro what the fuck happened at the end of the last game?
Baby T-Rex turns out to the primary source for a quartet of cheap reskins, which includes the previously covered Agro Soar. Whereas Agro Soar approached the situation of being transported to a pre-historic island by an evil wizard with a sort of big dick aggressiveness, this little guy seems more or less down to clown. He loves skateboarding as much as the other guy, because, to reiterate - these games are functionally identical to each other.
Personally, I vibe more with Agro Soar. He’s kinda ugly and unlikable but he makes it work for him though sheer moxie.
why are there so many goddamn jumping babies on this console
Balloon Kid is just kinda nice! A lot of these platformers are bullshit hard to make up for the fact that they have about 90 minutes of content, but this is actually sorta chill. Basically a little Flappy Bird thing about dodging stuff as you float along collecting balloons and admiring the weird scenery. Nice! A nice game!
still has more babies though
Bamse is the third entry of the Baby T-Rex quartet. I had to do some Googling here but apparently Bamse is some sort of extremely based socialist teddy bear with a 50 year publishing history in Sweden. He is the “world’s strongest bear” but also “the kindest”. Honestly, good for him. Sounds like he deserves a videogame. I mean, he probably deserves a better videogame than this asset flip anyway.
He’s not kidnapped by the same evil wizard as the other two, instead being menaced by some sort of evil twink fox. Rest of the game looks and plays identically though. This is the last we’ll see of the extended Baby T-Rex universe for a while, the final entry being ‘We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story’.
my hometown has a statue dedicated to a heroic norwegian wwii dog called bamse who was famous for killing dog hitler
Barbie - Game Girl is not, unfortunately, about an eGirl Barbie. This Barbie jumps to the right over various platforms in another shovelware platformer designed to ruin your kid’s Christmas.
what was it made for
In the generic 4/10 licensed platformer Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly, something has happened to Bart.
Something has happened to Bart.
Something has happened to Bart.
Something has happened to Bart.
It may amuse you to know that of the 3000 baseball videogames for the Game Boy, the one named Baseball is not in fact the most normal, vanilla baseball offering. It’s actually a completely wacky experience in which the beloved shitpipe brothers Mario and Luigi are team captains, supported by other beloved Mushroom Kingdom characters such as Randy and Paul.
I can’t tell you whether or not it’s a good baseball game because I’m cool and not a weird sporting pervert.
As far as I can tell, Bases Loaded for Game Boy is basically a reskin of the previous Baseball game, or vice versa. Except here, rather than siding with one of the famous jumping twins - players are forced to swear allegiance to one of the superpowers on either side of the Iron Curtain.
Baseball is fucking weird.
Batman - Return of the Joker is the first part of our Batman trilogy. I think this is based on the Burton Batman. You can wall jump, which whips ass. You can deploy the grapple and swing about, which also whips ass. The whole thing sort of whips ass honestly. The most interesting thing I find about these games is how much visual variance is possible within the same considerable technical limitations. This Batman and the following Batman both feature Batman in a sewer, and the atmospheres are completely different.
This game sort of evokes the same sort of Fritz Lang-ass production design as the Burton films, and Batman’s stocky build and hunching shoulders hints at the Frank Miller Batman. The whole thing is very grimy, very dirty.
I’m not going to talk too much about the actual game of Batman - The Animated Series here. It’s basically as much of a competent platforming beat-em-up as the previous one. But the opening cinematic. Hoo boy the opening cinematic.
The mad bastards actually tried to recreate the incredible opening sequence of the TV show, using four colours and 8-bit sound - and they more or less pulled it off. They take the same approach as the show of drawing on black backgrounds instead of white backgrounds, and it looks amazing on the Game Boy screen. They hit most of the same beats and camera movements - save for the sequence of Batman punching out the bank thieves on the roof, which, fair enough.
It’s a real testament to what the system is capable of when used by people who give a shit, who genuinely love the source material they’re working with, who understand visual design and the creation of atmosphere in such a small space. It singlehandedly rejuvenated my love for the Game Boy - just as all of the bad, ugly platformers made as cynical cash grabs had nearly killed it.
In Batman - The Video Game, Batman has a gun.