Asteroids (1991)

Image shamelessly stolen from GameFaqs.

As with many Atari 2600 games during the console's heyday, sadly,

this Asteroids artwork looks way cooler than the actual gameplay. Also,

is it just me, or does that ship look suspiciously like a Hoth snowspeeder?

The name Atari doesn't have a lot of currency today, but between 1977, after the launch of Atari's Video Computer System (aka the Atari 2600), and it's downfall in 1983, the Atari name had a lot of clout and recognition in the entertainment industry.  This is due, in part, to Atari's home video game console and its dominance of the home video game market, but a large part of their fame was the popularity, and ubiquity, of Atari's arcade games.  By now, most everyone knows that Atari's Pong was a sensation in 1972, and in the years that followed, they scored several hits with other titles like Night Driver, Breakout, Lunar Lander, Tempest, Centipede, and of course, Asteroids.  Were it not for the glut of bad console games and consumer burnout in late 1982 and early 1983, Atari would likely have been held in much higher regard than they have been in recent years.  Alas, twas not to be.

I wish I would have had an opportunity to play the Team Play and

Competition Play modes, because that would certainly extend the

life of an aging arcade game like this, far more than single player.

But for a short time, Atari were a dominant force in the arcade scene, as well as the home console market, and many of their early games are venerable classics.  Asteroids, released in 1979, was a vector graphics-based game, which means that, instead of what we normally think of with 2-dimensional video game graphics, with flat images full of color from border to border (raster graphics), these graphics were often simple, single-color affairs that consisted of wire-frame images that were merely outlines.  This made them look quite simple, but the reduced aesthetic allowed for the hardware to focus more on the speed and animation of the simple wire-frame images, so as to provide faster action, as well as smooth scrolling and motion.  Later Atari vector graphics titles, like Tempest and Space Duel, incorporated more color, and more sophisticated gameplay, but at the time of its release, Asteroids was a revolutionary experience, and resulted in it becoming Atari's best selling arcade game of all time.

Why your spaceship is thrown into the middle of a random asteroid

field is never explained. I demand answers! I demand justice!

The gameplay of Asteroids is deceptively simple.  You control a small space craft in the middle of an asteroid field, and your job is to destroy the asteroids and stay alive.  This is easier said than done, of course.  Each time you successfully fire upon one of the large space rocks, it breaks down into 2 smaller boulders, each of which will break down again into their own set of 2 smaller hunks of rock.  The game takes place on a single screen, so when the asteroids go off screen, they simply loop back to the opposite side, in a position relative to the one they exited, and continue to travel in the same direction.  Add to that, the alien ships that sometimes brave the asteroid field to try and take out your craft, and you have multiple objects on screen hurtling toward you to cause your imminent doom.

Your options are to turn your ship left or right, fire your cannon, use your thrusters to move forward in the direction your craft is facing.  Unlike the full vacuum of space, however, there is some gravity, which means using the thrusters doesn't mean you'll continue to move in that direction perpetually.  Learning how to manipulate the thrust feature becomes an essential strategy for dodging oncoming debris, as well as maneuvering your ship to better snipe the UFOs and take out the space rocks.  Finally, you have a "warp" button you can use to jump to a random spot on the play field.  The warp feature is handy as well, though it's best to use that as a last resort, as you can just as easily warp away from one certain death scenario right into another, as the warp feature is unpredictable.

Every time you score 10,000 points, you get an extra ship. To

paraphrase Han Solo: "You're gonna need 'em."

With the Game Boy version of Asteroids, the graphics are given the raster treatment, rather than trying to emulate the vector look of the original.  This was a wise move by Accolade, who ported the game, as the original Game Boy hardware might have had a difficult time replicating the smooth scrolling of the arcade hit.  Instead, we get a small, but well rendered ship, nice looking round asteroids with craters and a sense of depth, and a rather obvious flying saucer-style enemy vessel, that gives the game a classic science fiction feel, and is a nod to the source material.  It's all very utilitarian and sparse, but for what it is, it works.  For this kind of game, it's better to keep things simple and uncluttered, and that's just what took place.  The twinkling stars in the background are a nice touch.

Sound design in the game is also very minimalist in nature.  There's a bit of an intro song that plays when the title screen appears, and a little ditty that plays when you lose your last life and get a Game Over screen, but otherwise, it's just basic sounds.  Your ship's fire, the sound of asteroids breaking up, your own ship exploding, and the annoying, high-pitched sounds made when an enemy vessel is flying across the screen are just about the only sound effects in the game, outside of the original game's iconic "heartbeat" thumping that gets progressively faster throughout the level as you take out more asteroids and enemy ships.  It doesn't tax the Game Boy hardware, but it sounds good enough, and does its best to try and replicate the sound design found in the original arcade cabinet.  It gets the job done, and nothing more.

Enemy ships are not immune to the asteroids, as luck would have it.

This UFO is about to meet my friend, "Rocky".

Control is easy, as there are very few options.  You can point the ship by pressing Left or Right on the D-pad, and press Up on the D-pad to use the thrusters to move forward in the direction you're facing.  Hold Up on the D-pad, and your ship progressively gets faster up to a point, so be careful not to hold Up too long, or you'll go careening into one of the many space rocks.  The B button fires your cannon, which is your one and only weapon against the asteroids and enemy spacecraft, and the A button is a "warp" feature, which will send your ship to a random spot in the screen.  There's a definite risk/reward factor to the warp, because you can use it to get out of a sticky situation, but because there's no telling where you'll end up, you could be warping directly to your death.  The Start button pauses the game, and the Select button, as one might expect, does nothing at all.

Because there's no real end to Asteroids, and the game continues to go level after level and just get faster and more frenetic, the whole point of the game is two-fold: survival, and score.  The longer you can stay alive and continue to shoot down the titular asteroids, as well as enemy vessels, the more points you'll score.  For each 10,000 points you amass in this version, you receive an extra life.  The scoring is the same in this version as it is in the arcade original, as near as I can tell.  That means that large asteroids give you 20 points, medium sized rocks are 50 points, and the little pebbles net you 100 points.  The flying saucer enemies give you 200 points, and the tiny ships give you a generous 1,000 points.

Under the right conditions, you'll start seeing smaller, faster enemies

that shoot more accurately and relentlessly at you.  What did I ever

do to them to deserve this kind of maltreatment?

Obviously, shooting down the enemies is where you can earn the most points, but since they don't show up as frequently as the asteroids are plentiful, there's a balance to scoring big points.  One classic strategy is to destroy all but one tiny asteroid, and let it fly around on the screen while you easily dodge it, and pick off enemy ships as they continue to come on screen periodically.  For example, you can score approximately 2,000 points in the first stage by destroying all the asteroids, shooting down a pair of ships, and then maybe picking off a third before you destroy the last rock.  At 200 points per larger flying saucer, if you're patient enough, and skilled enough to avoid both the last asteroid as well as the enemy fire, you can quickly rack up a pretty good score.  Another notable strategy, or perhaps design choice, is that when you fire your cannons, the bullets only reach so far, so you can't just fire away and destroy everything within a few seconds.  However, if you're close to one edge of the screen or another, firing your cannons means those bullets will loop around to the opposite side of the screen, so you can use that to your advantage to destroy rocks as they fly onto the screen from that side.  As you progress, the asteroids begin to fly faster, and there are more of them, so each level gets progressively more difficult and frenetic.  If you want to master Asteroids, the name of the game (literally and figuratively) is practice, and lots of it.

Despite the fact that Asteroids was released in the arcades in 1979, and this conversion was released 12 years later, the ability to truly capture the arcade experience at home hadn't truly been realized yet, and that's especially true of the Game Boy.  This port gives a pretty good approximation of the arcade game, though using raster graphics instead of the original vector approach, despite a few notable differences.  The arcade game can relatively fast paced and frenetic, and because of the vector graphics and low hardware requirements, the movement of your ship and other objects on screen is fast and fluid, and you can pull off some really tricky maneuvers with your craft.  This fluidity doesn't exactly translate to the Game Boy, because the speed of the game can't compare with the original, and with the original DMG model's blurriness happening with any kind of quick motion, it would make the game nigh impossible to truly enjoy if it tried to replicate the speed of the arcade original.  As such, the game feels like the laid back big brother of the original.  He's a bit more stylish, with his 4-shades of green and raster graphics, and slightly more fleshed out aesthetic, but moves slower and isn't in as big a hurry to get somewhere as little brother in the arcade.  On the plus side, the game replicates the "heartbeat" effect, that sort of Jaws-esque harbinger that grows faster and more menacing as more Asteroids are destroyed and more particles fly around on screen, so it really gets that unique element right.  Also, I found the collision detection to be nearly pixel-perfect, so if you get hit by an asteroid flying at you, don't get mad - it was probably your fault.  One odd quirk I found is that, when entering your name on the high score screen, sometimes trying to change the letter using up and down, or choosing a letter with A, or erasing one with B, is less than responsive.  I suspect that may be because of the way the letters are flashing on the screen, and the fact that, perhaps the Game Boy is being taxed a bit, and the commands you're inputting don't always register.  It's a minor issue, but noticeable enough to mention.

If you're a little too happy with the bullets, you'll find yourself totally

overwhelmed by asteroids from all sides. Prepare to die.

At the end of the day, it's somewhat difficult to recommend this port of the game.  Not because it's not functionally a good game, because it is.  It's hard to recommend because, just 4 short years after this cart's release, the game came out again as Arcade Classic No. 1, and that cart contained this conversion of Asteroids, as well as a conversion of the classic Missile Command.  That cart has Super Game Boy compatibility, but also gives a couple notable upgrades to this port of the game: that is, it includes an option to change the button configuration, if you find the default control scheme not to your liking, but more importantly, you can choose to play in the original vector style, though still with the twinkling raster-based stars in the background.  The advantage of this version is both of the 2-player options, so if that's the experience you're looking for, then obviously this 1991 version will be the one to seek out.  For anyone just looking for the single-player experience, the latter release with another game on the cart, including the option for the original vector graphics, would seem to be the no-brainer option.  Either way, you're getting a reasonable facsimile of the original game, but without the ability to have the really fast action that makes the original still attractive to play.  That said, you can do a lot worse for $4 or $5 on the Game Boy, so I'd say if you have any interest in classic arcade games on the go, or Asteroids in general, this might be one to add to your collection.  Tentatively recommended.

Donkey Kong (1994)

Image shamelessly linked from the Super Mario Wiki.

When did Pauline become a brunette in a red dress,

instead of a blonde in a pink one? The Mario canon

is a confusing one, indeed.

Donkey Kong, sometimes referred to as Donkey Kong '94, or Game Boy Donkey Kong, is a re-imagining of the original 1981 arcade smash.  I say a re-imagining because, though the game includes the original 4 levels of the arcade game, it also includes an additional 97 (!) levels beyond that, taking place over the course of 9 "areas", comprising of stages in multiples of 4.  It's an ambitious move for Nintendo, considering that it comes over a decade after the original game's release, and a solid 8 years after the incomplete NES port of the game.  Despite the original titles modest graphics and sound, can that successfully translate to the small Game Boy screen?  More importantly, can Nintendo devise that many levels that are worth playing through?  The answer to both is, unsurprisingly, yes.

It is perhaps poignant that I cover Donkey Kong first, considering that the Game Boy's architect, Gunpei Yokoi, produced the original arcade game, supervising a then young Shigeru Miyamoto.  There was no Mario yet, only Jumpman, a relatively generic protagonist with just enough personality to make him interesting.  The tried and true formula of "man saves damsel in distress" hadn't been overtly done in video game form yet, in part because, until Donkey Kong came around, most game characters were space ships, save for Pac-Man himself.  So while the damsel in distress trope had been widely used in film and television throughout the 20th century, video games were still a burgeoning market, teeming with all manner of untapped potential.  To say that Nintendo invented the "platformer" genre with Donkey Kong is to do them a disservice.  Nintendo revolutionized the gaming industry with the game, and the innovative approach of a semi-realistic human protagonist.

We're squaring off with this handsome fella!

The game starts out simply enough, reprising the original 4 stages that made up the arcade game.  After that, however, rather than reuniting with Pauline, Mario (now obviously the protagonist in this reboot) watches as Donkey Kong scoops her up in his hairy arms and carries her off to the Big City, the first set of levels designed specifically for this title.  Things get interesting very quickly, as Mario is given a limited set of moves and abilities from which to pull.  Mario has a new jumping mechanic he can employ, and can duck to miss some enemies or dangerous obstacles, as well as using a hammer (as in the original), climbing ladders, jumping over barrels and enemies, and so on.  A fall from too great a high results in Mario's death, and touching an enemy results in either temporary paralysis, or instant death, depending on the foe.  During boss battles with Donkey Kong himself, don't get close enough to let him get his hands on you, or Mario will die immediately.

This looks familiar...

The basic goal is to pull levers, jump on platforms, run, and climb to reach a key, found in each level, and then pick up that key Super Mario Bros. 2-style, and carry it back to the locked door to open it and progress to the next level.  Do this 3 times, and you'll face off with Donkey Kong himself in a sort of boss battle.  Some of the boss battles play out like stages from the arcade original, where you simply have to make it to the top without getting hit by flying barrels, enemies, or other obstacles.  Other boss battles give you the opportunity to confront the giant ape by picking up stationary barrels he throws down, and then throwing them at him.  After 3 hits, Donkey Kong retreats with Pauline to the next stage.  These boss encounters are varied and enjoyable, because the tactics change from one encounter to the next, and you won't be using the same strategies throughout the game.

The little "cut scenes" between areas are very cute,

and help keep things light.

Much of the innate complexity of this game revolves around the balance between 2 levels of time management, semi-precise platforming and jump mechanics, and figuring out in what order to do certain things or take certain actions.  For example, you may be in a level that has multiple levers to pull that do things like opening the gate where the key to exit the level exists.  However, pulling that lever activates a hidden platform which blocks the key from the easiest path to reach it.  You may need to find another lever to pull which will open a path to reach the key from another vantage point.  You're always working against the clock, so that's a time management scenario, but then, sometimes you need to employ temporary items like a ladder or floor that can be activated by touching the icon floating on the screen.  Once activated, those only stay on screen for a limited time, so that's time management scenario #2 - figuring out how and where to use those, and do so before their time limit is up.  You'll occasionally find that the time required to complete a task, and the time allotted by the temporary floor/spring/ladder/etc. is nearly equal, so the pressure is on to find the most efficient and expedient way to accomplish a task.

If you're like me, you'll also find that less-than-perfect jumps will result in a lot of untimely death for Mario.  You may burn 10 lives or more on a single stage, before you figure out what sequence of events you need to trigger in order to get the key and make your way to the exit door with key in hands.  Did I mention the key is on a time-limit as well?  Yes, if you drop the key for any reason, it only stays accessible for a short time as well, and then reverts back to where you obtained it from.  If you fall from a platform, and fall too far, you drop the key as well.  Sometimes you'll fall far enough to drop the key and go paralyzed, but not enough to where Mario expires, so you might have enough time to get the key before it disappears, though depending on the stage's layout, you may or may not be able to reach the area you need to.  It's a constant shuffle between managing your time and finding the path that will lead you to the exit door with the key.  Because you cannot climb while holding the key, and because the extended jump mechanics don't work with the key either, you'll be finding creative ways to get from one point to another.

Every four stages and you'll face off against Donkey Kong.

There's a deceptive simplicity in the level design, especially early on.  Some levels can be accomplished in a couple ways, based on what obstacles are in the way.  Most, however, require a fairly concise and specific set of tasks to complete in order to obtain the key, and open the way to reach the exit.  Once you expend a few lives on a given level, you'll start to see the pitfalls and paths form, and some manner of logic to the design will start to appear.  I found myself stumped a couple times, and had to consult a walk-through, though out of nearly 100 levels, that only happened 2 or 3 times total.  The majority of the levels will slowly reveal their solution to you as you play through it and think critically about Mario's abilities, limitations, and especially what you can and cannot do once  you have the key.  You'll find that some levels seem easy at first, because obtaining the key is a snap.  The challenge often presents in getting the key to the exit, rather than obtaining the key itself, and vice versa.  And then sometimes, both things seem nigh-impossible.

Graphically, the game is solid, with little bits of animation here and there to highlight the action.  When Mario falls and gets paralyzed, you'll often see Mario look dazed and confused, or if he gets squished by something, he'll end up flat and float to the ground like a piece of paper.  The attention to detail, given the platform's limited capabilities, is impressive.  Another thing I noticed is that, while some levels have busy backgrounds or areas, most of the stages have a minimalist approach, where the bulk of the graphics are in the foreground, so as to allow the player to concentrate on the puzzle solving aspects.  This was a smart design decision, because the graphics then enhance the experience, rather than trying to do too much and distract from the player's ability to learn the levels.  Donkey Kong is well animated, and most enemies and obstacles have some subtle animation that works well.  Some of the animation sequences between areas and stages also serve to demonstrate abilities that Mario might have to use in the coming stages, which is a nice touch.

"Stop! Hammer time!"

The sound design in the game deserves some recognition as well.  While many of the background tunes aren't overly memorable, they are fitting to their respective levels, and mostly unobtrusive.  The sound effects, on the other hand, are where this game often shines.  The little Game Boy speaker and sound hardware isn't overly capable, but with the right programmer, can do fun things.  The "voice" of Pauline yelling "Help!" is a nice touch, though after hearing that yell 15 times in a row on the same level can add to the frustration.  Donkey Kong's grunts and growls are nicely approximated on the hardware as well, in similar fashion to the laughs and other voice work in Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! on the NES.  The rest of the sound effects all make sense, and are a nice addition to the game.  I appreciate the nod to the original with the level intro music, and the tune that plays when selecting a stage on the map screen, as well as the sound that plays when you successfully jump over an enemy or obstacle.

I found the difficulty curve to be rather manageable, until toward the end of the 7th area.  Particularly, I struggled a lot with Stage 7-9, and then again with 8-9.  Thankfully, some of the more difficult levels contain 1Up icons to collect, so you can have a few tries to figure them out.  There are also 3 special items you can collect during each level: a hat, an umbrella, and a handbag.  Collect all 3, and you'll get to play a mini game where you can win extra lives.  You'll need them, because some of the levels will require multiple deaths and attempts before you know just what to do to complete them.  I found that many stages could be completed on the first try with little effort, because the way to get the key to the exit was obvious.  Others are real head-scratchers, and make you work your brain to determine how to approach them.  I will say specifically, patience is a virtue with this game.  Don't go in expecting to barrel through (pun intended) a level with your highly refined platforming skills, because it takes more than a mastery of jump mechanics to get the job done.  Take your time, watch the activity in a level to see how and where enemies appear, where moving platforms go, how long it takes for certain things to happen, and you'll be that much farther ahead in being able to plan your next move.

"Slow ride, take it easy."

All in all, the inclusion of the original levels, nods to the original (and Donkey Kong Jr.) throughout the game, and all the level design ingenuity make for a really fun and rewarding experience.  You might feel like launching your Game Boy into the stratosphere a few times after you've lost 12 lives in a row, but keep pressing on and don't let the frustration overtake you; you'll find that once you figure out what is stumping you, there's an overwhelming sense of victory and accomplishment that is the big payoff for taking the time to figure those hard stages out.  Keep in mind, too, that this game has a battery backup to allow you to keep up to 3 consecutive games going at a time.  Burn through all your lives trying to figure out an area?  Just power your Game Boy off and back on to load the save and keep trying.  Add to that the Super Game Boy compatibility, and you have a pretty complete package that should please both fans of the original arcade game, and puzzle platformer fans alike.  I would highly recommend this title to anyone with even a passing interest in Mario, Donkey Kong, or platforming games in general.  Something this well designed and executed should be in any Game Boy collector's library.  Highly recommended!