Game Boy Works

They say you have to walk before you can run, and in Game Boy Works, we need to slog through some mediocrity before we get to the good stuff. Neither of these games is terrible by any means; Battle Bull feels like an update to Sega's Pengo or Irem's Kickle Cubicle, while Navy Blue 90 is, y'know, Battleship. However, both end up being let down by some questionable creative choices and frustrating technical issues. Neither lives up to its real potential.

Nintendo publishes a football game, and an arcade hit comes to Game Boy after being filtered through the soupy green monochrome of the Amstrad CPC. They're not great! This is not fulfilling video game content! Let's hurry through and get along to the next. OK, thank you, please drive through.

A portable gaming first—the first-ever handheld basketball game cartridge. Sadly, In Your Face is not precisely the game to lead the charge; it's more of a technical foul than anything else. Happily, the backup entry for this episode, Japan-only puzzler Koro Dice, is a pleasant diversion that makes up for it. Was I complaining about Game Boy puzzlers recently? Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking.

A second Double Dragon release for 1990 lands on Game Boy... except not really. In Japan, Double Dragon II was presented as an expanded remake of the original Renegade—which is to say, Kunio-kun's first adventure. Acclaim and Technos gave it a facelift for western release a year later, turning into a Double Dragon game in name if not in fact. Still, while this "sequel" lacks some fundamental essentials found in the arcade game, it does allow for simultaneous play—so that's something. Also this episode: An equally rocky Japan-exclusive conversion of German board game Scotland Yard.

Ah, Game Boy: The system that ruled the world on the strength of both its portability and its support for multiplayer gaming. Remember Tetris? Remember Pokémon? Remember F-1 Race and its four-player adapter? So naturally, when Taito brought Bubble Bobble—a cooperative arcade game designed to be played (and only fully completed!) with a second player—to Game Boy, naturally they made heavy use of its link capabilities for teaming up with a friend, right? Uh... right? Oh well. At the least the title screen music for this episode's import title rocks hard enough to make you forget your disappointment in Bubble Bobble.

A pair of games that share more in common than they might appear to at first glance. Power Racer traces its history back more than a decade: It's a portable conversion of an arcade dot-gobbler that predates Pac-Man by a year. That might not seem to have much to do with the Japan-only Painter Momopie, a game about a witch with a paint roller, but ultimately both these Game Boy releases belong to the same genre and do a great job of demonstrating the difference a decade made in how a specific type of game concept could be interpreted. These aren't the most beloved or best-known games on the system, but they're worth a look regardless.

The second entry in the Final Fantasy Legend series—or SaGa, if you prefer—amped up the features, narrative, mechanics, and overall design sensibilities of the groundbreaking first game. With new races, an elaborate cosmology, inventive dungeon design, an unconventional death mechanic, and all kinds of poorly explained gameplay systems to grapple with, Final Fantasy Legend II is in some respects a high point of the SaGa series. And with both a SaGa Game Boy compilation and remaster of SaGa Frontier for PlayStation due out in the near future, there's no better time to get acquainted with this sometimes-baffling role-playing series that is well and truly here to stay... whether you like it or not.