4-in-1 FunPak (1992)

Box art shamelessly stolen from GameFAQs. I don't think this box

leaves any room for interpretation as to what kind of game this is.

If it's not obvious by now, I love games.  Not just video games, but board games and card games as well.  I grew up playing a lot of card and board games with my family, so even though I don't get to play them as much today, I still enjoy them.  Certain games stick with you, even if it has been years since you've played them.  I can sit down and play certain games any time, and it doesn't take long to get back into the groove.  However, some of the board games I grew up with are much harder to go back to, because I was never very good at them.  Such is the case with much of this collection.

If the front cover art wasn't convincing enough, the title screen tells

you quite specifically what games you'll be playing on this cart.

To be fair, I never much played Chess, Checkers, or Reversi competitively.  As for Backgammon, I never played it as a kid.  I was always kind of fascinated with the idea of Backgammon, but it looked too complicated.  I also don't recall any of my friends who played it.  My parents had a game table that had a game called Carrom, and it had space for Backgammon, checkers, and other games, but we never played it.  Regardless, I haven't played the other 3 games in years, and it shows.

I really like this feature of this cart, that you can play 2 players without

needing a 2nd Game Boy. It was very nice of Beam Software to do so.

The 4-in-1 Fun Pak consists of portable video game versions of Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and Reversi.  There are 1-player versions of each game, and 2 modes for 2 different players.  The first mode allows 2 players to use the same Game Boy, and just pass it back and forth.  The second is for players who have 2 Game Boys, and 2 copies of the game, like most "Game Link" supported carts.  Even without having played the game yet, I was pleasantly surprised with the inclusion of the first 2-player mode, as it's not often that a game maker can, or is willing, to include such a thing.  Kudos to Beam Software and Interplay for including this feature, as I'm sure it helped keep the peace amidst a few long car rides back in its day.

This screen makes Checkers look A LOT more exciting than it really is.

I'm not going to go into the rules of each game, as they're all pretty common games that most anyone who has ever played a board game should at least be familiar with in name, if not having played at least one of them.  Checkers is pretty widely known, and though Reversi may not be as common, but it's also known as "Go" (with slightly different rules, I believe), and was marketed in the US as Othello by Mattel.  Backgammon is pretty much the same game all over, though depending on the layout of the board, can play slightly different, from what I understand.  And of course there's the age old game of Chess, here using one of the oldest chess software engines out there, known as "Sargon".  It was written as early as 1977/1978, and was apparently used in a handful of famous chess matches against other chess engines, and against real chess champions to test the engine's algorithms.

One assumes the name "Sargon" is a reference to the Akkadian king.

With games of this type, it's almost guaranteed that the graphics are going to be extremely basic, and totally utilitarian.  If you were thinking that would be the case, you would be right.  The checkerboard for Checkers and Chess looks like you would expect - black and white alternating spaces (or light green and dark green, if you're playing on the original DMG model), and the game pieces look as good (or not) as you would expect them to.  The pieces in Reversi and Backgammon are as basic as they come, but they serve their function just fine.  There's very little animation going on, so for playing on the original hardware, this is actually a prime game to play without having to worry about screen blur.  Aside from that, there's very little here to attract you to the game, but then, if you're playing board games on a tiny 160x144 pixel screen, you're hopefully not going to expect anything too fancy.

I was playing randomly here just to grab screenshots. One more move

and I suffered a checkmate. That happened within 5 moves.

Sound is a mixed bag.  The sounds that play when you select and move pieces are pretty basic beeps, which aren't too obtrusive and sound fine.  The sound that plays when you make a mistake is super annoying - it's that kind of minor chord, mid-tone sound that you'd expect from the Atari 2600 or similar early 8-bit console.  What's worse, it plays constantly until you either press the A or B button, or press a direction on the D-pad.  If you've selected music to play, it plays over top of that as well, creating a terrible cacophony until you press a button to stop the grating sound from playing.  Speaking of music, there are 2 themes you can choose from by pressing the Select button during play, choosing the "MUSIC" option, and choosing which of the 2 themes you want to listen to.  Both are perfectly pleasant, and while they may get annoying after 15 or 20 minutes, they're nice little tunes that fit the slow, methodical pace of these board games.

Did I mention that the "Invalid Move" sound is really annoying?

In terms of options, each game seems to have a number of them.  Checkers, Reversi, and Backgammon each have 3 difficulties.  Chess, on the other hand, has 6 in total.  In Checkers and Reversi, there's a "Take Back" feature, which is sort of like an "undo" option.  You can roll back moves as many times as you like, in order to get a better sense of the progression of the game, and fix your mistakes.  This might seem like cheating, and in all reality it is, but used sparingly, it can give you a bit of cause and effect to help you learn the game strategies more effectively.  The "Reset" option allows you to exit the game you're playing and go back to choose another, which is a nice touch.  Backgammon includes the "Double" option (part of the rules of the game), as well as an "Auto Roll" feature, presumably to speed up the progress.  All games include a "Swap Sides" feature as well, and this is definitely something that could be exploited to cheat and "win" the game without having to put forth the effort.  I'm not sure what the purpose of that is, and since I don't have the manual, nor can I find a scan online, I honestly don't know what Beam Software was thinking by including that.

When your piece gets knocked back to the starting quadrant in

Backgammon when your opponent is near to having all their

pieces at their "home quadrant", you're almost assured to have

a quick defeat. I wasn't far from that scenario here.

I mentioned it before, but it bears repeating - I really appreciate the inclusion of a "single Game Boy" feature.  If you were a "typical American family" during the late 1980's or early 1990's, you probably went on a number of road trips to see family, see the sites, or just get out and drive.  In order to keep the peace, before the advent of such niceties as built-in DVD players, and to prevent you from having to play the same children's song cassette 30 times, you might have bought your kids a Game Boy.  If you were wealthy, you might have bought more than one, but the average middle-income family probably only owned one, unless one of the kids saved up a bunch of allowance or lawn mowing money to earn one.  With potentially only one Game Boy game in the car for a multi-hour jaunt across country, this is the type of game that would have made the trip more fun, and because of the slow pace, and the fact that each of these games can be drawn out, depending on the amount of time each player takes to move, a couple kids could easily burn 20 or 30 minutes on a single game of Checkers, and more on a game of Chess.  Similarly, a rousing Reversi match might be a good 15 minutes, and Backgammon would vary, though you could easily get anywhere from 10-30 minutes from a match.  The original Game Boy's blur-prone screen would have had no issues with this, and as long as you were driving in good sunlight, I can see how this would have been a good choice for kids who appreciated these kinds of games off-screen.

I'm getting absolutely walloped here. As you can see, the game's

AI has doubled my score, and is well on its way to trouncing me.

Incidentally, because I had never played Backgammon before, and didn't know the rules, I tried several times to play before I broke down and looked it up.  I tried to read through a rules website, but quickly became bored with the dry explanation.  I then went to YouTube and searched "How to play Backgammon for beginners", and was greeted by an entire series of short videos by a heavy-accent bearing man from what I can only assume is the UK.  I spent over half an hour watching these intro videos, and though I still fumbled with the game after that, I was actually beginning to figure things out.  I downloaded a Backgammon app on my iPhone after that, and having played a few matches on that, I went back and finally got the swing of this version, after figuring out which direction I was supposed to go with my pieces.  I had missed that salient point early on, and it was throwing me off.  For the Backgammon beginner, I would recommend looking up tutorials, because it took me a long time to figure out how to actually play.  Once I did, I began to actually employ some strategy, and have even been able to win once or twice.  Given the chance now, I think I could play Backgammon in real life and enjoy myself, so I owe it to this cart for formally introducing me to it, despite the challenges in getting it figured out.

The Chess game has a neat board editor where you can, presumably,

build out your own board. Unfortunately, you can't use more than the

normal requisite number of pieces on each side so you don't break

the Sargon engine's ability to calculate moves. Bummer.

So what's the verdict here?  That will depend largely on your affinity for these board games.  I'm terrible at Checkers currently, because I haven't played in years.  My dad tried, and failed, to teach me to be strategic in Chess, and my childhood best friend didn't fare much better, so I never really learned to play it well.  I've always been pretty bad at Reversi, having been regularly stomped on in school when playing it as Othello.  Backgammon, however, is intriguing to me because I never played it as a kid, and it seems like the combination of strategy and luck makes it stand out more for me than the other games.  I can't say I would spend much time with it, but had I owned this as a kid, my younger brother and I would likely have spent a fair bit of time with it in the car, seeing as how I owned the Game Boy, and he was often left to just watch me and sulk because he didn't.  There are fancier versions of each of these games available for modern smartphones these days, so unless you're looking to conserve your phone battery so your kid doesn't run it down playing these games, it's a good, relatively inexpensive alternative.  Still, it's hard to recommend nearly 25 years after its release, if only because most anything you can get today, for free even, would look, sound, and play vastly superior to this iteration.  Still, for a few bucks, it's a decent enough time waster.  I'll give it a casual recommendation, if you can find it cheap.  I probably paid more than it was worth, at either $7 or $8, as I wouldn't pay much more than half that, unless you're a masochistic collector like I am.

Radar Mission (1991)

Image shamelessly linked from Game Oldies. Once again, I find myself

in awe of late 80's, early 90's box art. The cool fonts, the excellent,

hand-drawn artwork, and blatant overstatement of the actual product.

Ah, nostalgia.

I love playing games.  I love video games, of course, because, if I didn't, writing this blog would be pretty silly of me, wouldn't it?  But I also love other kinds of games.  I grew up playing board games and card games with my family.  I can rock a game of Klondike Solitaire any time, and I rather enjoy trouncing my family in a rousing game of Scatergories.  Yes, I love a good tabletop game.  So do a lot of other people, I'd wager, which is why we see so many conversions of popular card, board, and other tabletop games on video game systems.  The Game Boy was no exception to this, and received a number of relevant titles.

Radar Mission, on paper, is the very definition of taking a board game and turning into a video game with enough added content, feature/functionality, and substance, to make it worth playing over and above the source material it shamelessly copies.  In this case, it's the venerable classic Battleship.  Yes, the game that invented the catch phrase, "You sank my battleship!" that nearly every North American child in my generation could pull out of the air, since during almost any commercial break for after-school programming, or Saturday Morning Cartoons (RIP), a commercial for some iteration of the game was inevitably aired.  The difference with Battleship, however, was that many versions of the game came with more than just plastic pegs, plastic ships, and a nice custom game board.  Some versions came with lights, sounds, and gripping nautical warfare action!  Okay, so maybe I'm channeling the commercials from memory, but the truth is, as a property to translate to the video game medium, Battleship had already transcended its pressed cardboard and plastic game piece brethren, and was therefore going to need more than just pictures on the screen and cutesy music to spruce it up.

And once again, we have a completely different game logo design

from the box to the title screen. Another case of the left hand and

the right hand not being aware of one another, methinks.

I suppose Nintendo was able to produce Radar Mission (or Kaisen Game: Radar Mission, in Japan) without having to pay Milton Bradley bucket-loads of money, because the game originated as a pen-and-paper game, and took on a number of physical board game revisions, before Milton Bradley's more famous Battleship game became a household name sometime during the late 1960's and early 1970's.  By the 1980's, of course, it had become a phenomenon, and I think it was almost a prerequisite that any American family had at least one Battleship game board in their house.  At least in my experience, I believe all my friends' families had the game, my grandmother had it, and they even had it at school where we could play during certain activity times.

Game A in Radar Mission sets itself apart by offering a number of features that its inspiration never boasted.  First and foremost, when you start the game, you get to choose what size of game board you want: 8x8, 10x10, or 12x12.  You only get to choose the size of the initial board, however, because, if you happen to defeat the enemy during the first match, you move on to a 2nd level with an 8x8 board, and then on to a 3rd and final level where you're attacking the enemy's base on land.  It gives the game a lot more depth than the traditional board game variety.  You have the ability to toggle a "Near Miss" feature, which means that, when you or your enemy fire a shot that lands in the water next to a ship, a warning sound will play, letting you know that in one of the spaces directly above, below, or to either side of your ship, there's a target you can hit.

Here you can see all the options available in Game A, like the ability

to have aircraft launch, near miss, and WHAT ON EARTH, is that

Hitler commanding your fleet? No wonder I lost so much!

There's also the "Lucky Shot" feature, which is triggered in a seemingly random fashion.  When you or your opponent miss a shot, you may be granted a lucky shot on your next turn.  There are 3 varieties: first a single square shot, which, if successful, will completely destroy a ship in 1 hit.  Second, there's a 5-shot blast which fires off 5 shots in the shape of an "X", and finally, a 9-shot volley that mirrors the 5-shot, but just stretches out 1 additional square diagonally from the center-point.  If toggled, you will be alerted of near misses with these, though it's still a guessing game as to what side the actual target will be on.  Then there's a nifty feature where, mid-way through a match, your aircraft carrier can launch a fighter jet, which will randomly move to different squares surrounding the location of the aircraft carrier (even after it has sunk), during each turn of the game.  If your opponent has sunk all your ships, but your jet is still in flight, you still have a chance to take them out, as long as they haven't taken it down.  It adds an additional strategic element, because of the need to hit what is, essentially, a moving target.  Finally, you can choose between 2 captains to command your fleet, and 3 different opponents to play against, though the actual choice doesn't matter, as each commander plays exactly the same.

It's a satisfying sight, seeing your enemy's ship go down in flames,

helpless to defend themselves against your missiles. No, I don't

need therapy; all is fair in love and war, remember?

Game B is where the biggest deviation from the Battleship formula comes in, as it has nothing to do with the board game, but is instead a submarine-based action shooting section, with a first-person perspective.  You control your sub, and can move left and right on the play field.  Pressing Down on the D-pad will submerge the craft, and you can move left and right while watching the radar map, then press Up on the D-pad to raise up out of the water, and put you back into first-person view so you can either torpedo enemy ships, or use your machine guns against the enemy sub.  Before each of the 3 rounds, you can equip your sub with a turbo propeller for additional speed, a twin-torpedo shot, for easier aiming, and powered sonar, which will reveal whether enemy vessels are moving left or right.  Occasionally, you'll see bags of money pop up on screen, which you can shoot to earn more money, which will help you buy those upgrades again for the next round.  Both you and your enemy start with the same number of ships each round, and the object is to blow up the last ship of your enemy's fleet before you can, or to blow up your foe's submarine, should you be so lucky.  In the first-person view, you may get an indicator arrow pointing left or right, as to which is the best direction to travel to reach the most enemy ships to take out.

As you can see, I've already taken out my opponent's aircraft carrier.

The area my targeting cursor is over happened to be the next ship I

hit.  It won't be long before it's blown to smithereens, sinking to the

bottom of the sea, forever to be nothing more than a relic of warfare.

Here's the tricky thing about Game A: the AI is all over the place.  As one would expect, the game attempts to approximate what a human would do, but sometimes it feels very random.  Anyone I've ever played Battleship against, once they've found one of your ships, they continue to fire in that region until they've sunk the vessel.  Sometimes, in Radar Mission, your enemy will hit your boat, fire a couple near miss shots which give them license to sink the vessel, and then, inexplicably, they'll begin firing on random spots on the board, seemingly in an attempt to find other ships.  It's a strategy I've honestly never seen, and it's a bit baffling.  I'm not complaining, however; Game A provides quite a challenge, and I only conquered my opponent after about 15 or 20 attempts, during a game where the CPU used the aforementioned tactic.  Apparently, my nautical warfare skills need some tightening up.

Finally seeing the smiling face of my fleet admiral and the celebratory

dance of my crew was quite a feeling, after being taken down so many

times. It felt good to finally win all 3 rounds and defeat the enemy.

Game B, however, really ups the ante in the area of challenge.  The enemy sub seems to have an innate sense of which direction to travel for maximum kill speed, and is relentless in firing machine guns and torpedoes at you when you cross its path.  My assumption is, because the other sub can destroy you, that you could also destroy it, but I haven't been able to accomplish this apparently herculean feat.  Rather, I have focused on taking out the opposing ships, but I've only ever been able to get past the first round, with a scant, single ship in my group remaining.  In the 2nd stage, assuming I earned enough money to buy all 3 power-ups again, I get absolutely creamed by the lousy enemy craft, and haven't seen the 3rd stage, as of yet.  Oh, and unless you're a masochist, or an absolute Jedi at games like this, don't even think about trying Game B without buying the upgrades before each round, because you'll probably lose.  Needless to say, Game B presents a pretty stiff challenge, though I suppose with enough practice, one could best the 3 stages and achieve victory.

These guys are the smart ones, who stayed back at the dock. They're

not going to be sunk by an opposing sub. No, they'll happily be sipping

beverages in the cantina, laughing at their comrades risking their necks.

In terms of the game's visual aesthetics, they're pretty well done.  The ships themselves aren't much to look at when you're looking at the game board, but the designs are nice, and the animations accompanying each volley are a nice touch, despite being a bit sparse.  Obviously being a slow-paced game, Game A gets by more on substance than flash, but then Game B has some nice touches, like the multi-level scrolling water that looks like a parallax scrolling effect, and a decent depth perception effect when firing torpedoes at far away ships.  The little animations in between stages are a bit goofy, but they're light-hearted, and serve their purpose.  I also kind of like the explosion effect graphics each time you destroy a ship.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. Get the upgrades, or prepare to be

annihilated within short order. Seriously, the enemy sub will cut you

down to size without a moment's hesitation, and you'll be crying.

The music in the game is well composed.  In Game A, there's a standard tune that plays during the bulk of the stage, and then toward the end of each round, the music will change, depending on you and your opponent's status.  If you are down to your last ship, the music becomes serious and ominous, as if to signal that you're in trouble.  If the enemy is down their last vessel, you get a more triumphant, victorious kind of theme that plays, signifying that you're in the home stretch with only 1 boat left to bomb.  When the opposition gets a lucky shot, another serious, frantic-toned ditty plays while they're targeting and firing, as a means of building tension.  The title screen theme is nice as well, with a catchy melody and a nice faux-military sort of feel.  Sound effects are also decent, with the usual "alley-oop" kind of high pitched whistle when firing missiles, a good explosion sound, and a serviceable splash-down sound for missed shots.  The near miss sound is a bit annoying, though one assumes that's the point.  Game B's main theme is a bit less memorable, though once you're down to 3 ships, it changes to the "ominous" theme from Game A, which serves to heighten the action.  I like how the music fades out on the option screens when you select your options and start the game, it's a nice effect.  Overall, the sound design is pretty solid.

There are moments like this in Game B that are very rewarding - the

second before the torpedo hits, you know it's going to find its target,

and you'll get to watch the glorious explosion of an enemy vessel.

It's hard to fault Radar Mission for much of anything, because, in 1991, the Game Boy was really hitting its stride, in terms of development teams really learning how to get the most out of the limited hardware.  The slow pace of Game A, coupled with the original DMG Game Boy model's blurriness, means that it was probably the perfect choice for car rides, weekends at grandma's house, and late night sleepover game sessions.  Game B, with its faster pace and fast scrolling ships, doesn't fare quite as well on the original hardware, but since the animation is relatively flat, it still works pretty well.  Nintendo took an established formula and added some nice additional features that really buoy the game (sorry, pun intended), and make it feel more fresh.  But instead of just stopping there, they added an entirely different 2nd mode, which gives the game even more replay value, especially since both game types can be played with 2 sea-faring swabbies (no, this isn't a pirate game, but go with me on this one).  Sadly, since I only have 1 copy of the game, I didn't get to experience that.  My only real complaint is that, for Game A, there's no mode that allows 2 players on the same device.  That would have been a fantastic addition to an otherwise well made game.  Had I known about Radar Mission back when it released, it might have, erm, "been on my radar" (sorry, I can't help myself), and might have been a game I would have purchased.  I know my younger brother would have played with me, and had there been a 2-player/1-device mode, I might even have convinced my dad to as well.  Regardless, anyone who owns a Game Boy (or compatible device), has fond memories of playing Battleship, and enjoys this kind of tactical strategy challenge, should be looking this game up and seriously thinking about acquiring a copy.  I got mine for $4 (loose cart), and I would think you could probably find a copy in the wild for around that price.  It's well worth that and more, and you could easily sink hours (okay, okay, I'll stop!) into it.  Highly recommended.

Unless you can master the submerging in Game B, you'll be seeing

this screen a whole lot like I did. Thankfully, once you do, avoiding

the other sub becomes a lot easier. You can also submerge to

avoid missiles fired at you by enemy planes, which comes in handy.