Nemesis (1990)

Box art shamelessly stolen from GameFAQS.

Shoot-em-up box art was always pretty "metal" during the 1980's

and early 90's, but even this cool art pales in comparison to the

Japanese box, which parallels the original Gradius arcade flyers.

Scrolling shoot-em-up games are one of my favorite classic game genres.  I already established this, in my review of Solar Striker, but because it's been a while since I posted that review, I wanted to make it abundantly clear.  I'm not always very good at them, but I have fun trying.  Though I occasionally go into fits of gamer rage because I die at the exact same spot 12 times in a row, it's the idea of inching your way through a furious gauntlet of incoming enemy waves, laser fire, and shrapnel, that fascinates me to this day.  One of the shmups that defined the genre was Konami's arcade classic, Gradius, referred to as Nemesis, outside of Japan.

I'm not entirely sure what's happening here.  Is the Moia head looking at

the dinosaur bones, satisfied from a meal, or wishing they still had meat

on them, so it could partake? Either way, it looks quite menacing in pixels.

Gradius was a break-through in a number of ways.  It took the basic, side-scrolling shooter formula that Konami had previously pioneered with Scramble, and instead of the constant struggle for fuel, replaced that with an intricate upgrade system.  If also made things far more detailed and interesting, with markedly improved graphics, catchy and memorable music, and an interesting concept of "shoot the core" with the bosses.  This helped solidify the idea of end bosses having weak points, so that you couldn't just shoot them anywhere to deal damage.  All of these elements were instrumental to the genre as it developed, and became mainstays, not only in the later Gradius games, but in shooter games on the whole.

The ACTUAL title screen looks far less menacing. But it still has the

awesome logo design, which remains a staple throughout the series.

Nemesis, Konami's first shmup entry into the Game Boy library, by way of their Ultra Games imprint, is a fine shooter that, while borrowing its namesake from the worldwide arcade and Japanese MSX releases, doesn't quite match the arcade game in terms of design.  Nemesis on the Game Boy takes elements of the original arcade game's design, and implements them here, but there's original content as well, making for a bit of a mashup, of sorts.  Rather than a straight arcade conversion, you get something that feels familiar, but with enough original material added so it also feels fresh and new.  And compared to the previously mentioned Game Boy shmup outing, Nemesis is the Cadillac to Solar Striker's family station wagon.

Like Konami's other early Game Boy entries, they wisely choose to

include a level select, as well as  giving players the option to change

the button config, toggle auto-fire, choose the difficulty level, and

grant themselves extra lives.  This makes the game much more

suited for quick sessions on the handheld Game Boy hardware.

For the uninitiated, the major draw of the series is the power-up system.  As you shoot down enemies, some of them will drop special icons that you pick up.  The first one you obtain will light up the first entry on a small bar at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to increase the speed of your ship.  If you elect to wait until you've collected more icons, each subsequent pickup will shift the selection on the bar over by 1 space, until you've reached the end, then it wraps back around.  In slot 2, you can add missiles to your ship's arsenal.  Slot 3 yields the "Double Shot", which upgrades your ship to not only shoot forward, but also a 2nd shot will fire upwards at a 45 degree angle.  Slot 4 gives you a power laser shot that fires directly ahead.  In slot 5, there's what's called an "Option" - this creates a small entity that follows your ship around and doubles your firepower.  In most Gradius games, you can add up to 3 or 4 of them.  Due to the obvious limitations of the Game Boy hardware, you can only add 2 in this game.  In the 6th and final slot, you can add a force field to the front of your ship, which is capable of absorbing some damage so your craft doesn't explode from contact with a single volley.  You can power up your speed multiple times, and your missiles twice, and in any order you like, so it's obvious to see that the way you approach the game can be entirely your own, and you can really experiment with the weapon load-out.

If you can get good enough to survive the initial onslaught of enemies,

it's pretty easy to get fully powered up during the first level of the game.

All this weaponry, and all these options (pun intended) available to you, don't necessarily mean you're going to walk through this game, however.  Nemesis is quite the challenge, for a handheld title, and if you're going to beat the 5 main stages, you'll need to hone your skills, sharpen your reflexes, and memorize some enemy patterns, placements, and attack vectors, in order to survive.  You'll also need to make sure you power up your ship as quickly as possible, as the waves of enemies are generally more than your tiny craft can handle with its default pea shooter and slow speed.  Thankfully, in addition to the power-up icons, you'll occasionally be granted a smart bomb icon instead, which will destroy all low-level enemies on screen at once, along with any bullets.  Be careful not to run into any scenery, however; the ground and other obstacles aren't just backgrounds - some of them are in the foreground with your ship and will destroy you in a single hit, even when you're equipped with the shield.

Like me, you'll probably be seeing this screen a lot at first.

A common strategy that I like to use for powering up goes as follows.  First, increase the speed of your ship by 1, so you can more easily dodge enemies and incoming fire, as well as more quickly grab additional power-up icons.  Second, activate your missiles, so you have additional fire to help ward off enemies.  Third, get yourself an Option, so you can double that firepower.  Fourth, grab the second option available to you.  Fifth is a toss-up between powering up your forward fire with the laser, activating the double shot, or adding the force field.  I usually opt for the laser or double shot, to more easily mow down enemies, then go for the shield later.  Lastly, once you're fully powered up, keep collecting power-up icons for points, but keep track of where your power-up bar is at.  If you can stop collecting after cycling through them once or twice, and leave it on the sixth entry, you can easily activate the force field again if you take too many hits and are left defenseless.

This is one of the more formidable enemies. It takes a lot of damage,

and the 3 pods it shoots out are impervious, so you have to dodge them.

Graphically, Nemesis is an impressive game.  Konami had excellent command of the Game Boy hardware early on, and after several years of programming for Nintendo's Famicom and NES hardware, were naturally adept at bringing this kind of 8-bit action to the small screen.  Some developers had a hard time adjusting for the scale of the small screen, but Konami's early efforts always seemed to strike that nice balance between good graphics, and proper scale and playability.  Your ship is large enough to see some detail, and look nice, but small enough so that it doesn't feel claustrophobic amongst the enemies, incoming fire, and stage layout and obstacles.  The enemies are mostly recognizable from other Gradius games, outside of a handful of original creations for this title, and are all well rendered.  Backgrounds are minimal, which works well, because it cuts down on the motion blur on the hardware.  Instead, most of the areas are given excellent graphics to show off the terrain and obstacles, and they all look really nice.  Animation is limited, but there are a couple spots that have what appears to be parallax scrolling, which was quite a feat on the system.

When you destroy a boss, it disappears in this really cool, satisfying "warp"

effect, where the sprite splits off into different lines, and the images diverge

in different directions. It's hard to explain, but it looks great on the hardware.

In the audio department, Nemesis is the usual Konami par excellence.  Konami really knew how to get the most from 4 channels of sound, and they do a great job here, not only providing music that sounds good, and is fitting to the game, but is also catchy and interesting.  The first stage music recalls the original Gradius theme, and you also get some music later that is lifted from this game's forbear, but the other tunes on offer here are original compositions from 4 different composers: Shinya Sakamoto, Yuji Takenouchi, Tomoya Tomita, and the incomparable Michiru Yamane, who is much more well known for her work on the Castlevania series of games, most notably, the excellent soundtrack for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.  Sound effects are also generally good, with some interesting use of the Game Boy's noise channel for certain effects, which also utilizing one of the dedicated sound channels for a lot of the weapon and enemy explosion noises, without interrupting the music from the other 2 channels.  Overall, this is prime sound design, and a soundtrack that stands as one of the best on the system.

This bad boy starts off as 4 smaller balls, then merges into a single giant

ball of destruction, then splits off again into 4 smaller balls. If you're fast

enough, you can destroy all 4 smaller balls before it has a chance to

reform into the larger ball a second time, saving yourself some headache.

Nemesis, like its arcade forefather, also doesn't stop after the 5 levels you see in the initial configuration screen.  Instead, while completing those 5 levels will get you a credit roll and congratulatory screen, that's not technically the end of the game.  As soon as the credits are done, you're thrust back to the first stage again, with all your current arsenal intact, to face off with the enemy again, but this time, the stages are harder, enemies are faster and shoot more bullets at you, and the whole thing is more frantic.  Stages 1-5 are now labeled as 6-10, and as is the Gradius tradition, in order to say you've truly beaten the game, you need to complete it on the second loop.  However, after the second time through, the game doesn't end, you just get another credit roll, and then it's back to Stage 1 again to keep going.  For savvy players and score chasers, this will be a welcome feature, though one has to wonder if Konami considered this as necessary, given the pick-up-and-play nature of the Game Boy, which lent itself to shorter play sessions.

The stage 4 boss has a simple pattern, but don't let that fool you. It can

dish out a large number of bullets, and it's easy to get caught in the crossfire.

With all the good here, is there anything that brings this game down?  Not much.  As with many Game Boy titles, motion blur is a factor, but that's a hardware limitation.  Konami does their best to mitigate this with limited animation in the sprites, and it helps keep the flicker to a minimum, but it's still there in spots.  One of the later stages uses an awful lot of the darker shade for its foreground obstacle graphics, and while it looks nice and detailed, it could have used a touch more variety in the shading.  Occasionally the sound effects get to be slightly cacophonous, due to the sheer amount of enemies you'll be taking out, and while it doesn't drown out the music, it detracts from the overall presentation, if only slightly.  These gripes, however noticeable, are all relatively minor.

Congratulations! An end sequence with no Engrish!

At the end of the day, this is one of the finest examples of the horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up to be released for a handheld game system.  Only this game's sequel, Gradius: Interstellar Assault, the Japan-only Sagaia entry in the Darius series, and perhaps the colorful Gates of Zendocon on the Atari Lynx can possibly rival this title's sheer excellence and presentation.  It has the looks, it has the sound, and it has the tight gameplay that fans had come to expect from Konami by this point, and they delivered the goods.  It may seem inexplicable that such an action-oriented, twitch shoot-em-up could be released on Nintendo's monochrome handheld, but Konami did it, and this game stands as one of the best examples of the genre from 1990, and quite possibly, one of the best on the console itself.  Thankfully, because the game sold well, it's also very common, and inexpensive to pick up.  You should be able to score a copy for $6 - $8 or less.  It's worth every penny, especially if you're a fan of the genre.  Highly recommended.

Cosmo Tank (1990)

Image shamelessly stolen from GameFAQs.

Similar to Solar Striker, the logo image for Cosmo Tank is so metal.

In the year of our Lord, 2016, Atlus is known for 2 things.  First, for being currently the foremost developer keeping the Japanese RPG, or JRPG, alive in the west.  Second, for having been purchased by Sega, and having been, thus far, largely left alone to do what they do so well.  Prior to becoming a go-to RPG powerhouse, however, Atlus dabbled in a number of different genres. They've published puzzle games, platformers, beat-em-ups, and a number of other games.  Keep in mind, some of these games were developed in-house by Atlus, and some were not.  One such example of an early game that may have had some bearing (or not) on the RPG direction Atlus would eventually settle into is Cosmo Tank, developed by Asuka Technologies.  Curiously, Cosmo Tank is the only game attributed to the studio, and it's a shame, because while Cosmo Tank is flawed, it hints at what could have been, and shows that, in the right hands, the Game Boy can do impressive things.

Unlike Solar Striker, this game has consistency between the box art

and the logo on the title screen. Way to go, Asuka Technologies!

Occasionally, developers fall into the trap of trying to bite off more than they can chew.  Sometimes they take on a license that is too big and venerable for them to do anything meaningful with it, or perhaps they try to take on a genre with which they have no experience, only to fail because they didn't study the source material.  In this instance, it's because Asuka Technologies tried to tackle too many genres at once.  Truly good developers can design games to cross genre boundaries and be successful.  Asuka Technologies shows that they have the chops, but they don't quite get the job done.

Wait, what's this - no "Vision Quest" mode?

The basic premise of Comso Tank is thus: you are the lone operator of a superior battle machine, the "cosmo tank", as it were, and your mission is to go after Gregor, a typical mad scientist type who has seen his genius outclass everyone else, and has decided that it's better for him to rule the universe, rather than allow the plebes to have freedom.  Something like that, anyway.  It's not made entirely clear at the start of the game why you're doing what you're doing.  You're literally thrown onto a planet with your tank and told to "Destroy the life cores of each planet."  Kind of a raw deal, given that you aren't given much information, or much to work with.

Private - "What's a life core, sir, and why do I want to destroy it?"

General - "Are you questioning my orders?"

Private - Sir, no sir!"

The 3 modes of gameplay are "QUEST-MODE", the main story mode of the game, "TRAINING-MODE" where you can practice one of the gameplay types across multiple levels, so you can learn enemy patterns, and "VS-MODE" for 2 players.  This, of course, requires a 2nd copy of Cosmo Tank, another player with a Game Boy, and a Link Cable.  Sadly, I don't have any of these prerequisites, so this review will focus almost exclusively on the meat and potatoes of the cart, which is the QUEST-MODE.  Suffice to say, TRAINING-MODE is fun for a few minutes, but as I'll explain through this review, it gets old quickly.  Rather, most of your time will likely be spent in the main story campaign.

These enemies seem a little crabby to me.

The first type of gameplay you'll take on is an overhead, free-range shooting section.  You'll control the tank and go in any of the 8 directions on the map, with a basic laser cannon and a couple smart bombs at your disposal.  Enemies will seemingly assault you from every side, with alarming frequency, so you had best be on your toes.  You start with a relatively small life/armor bar, so take more than 2 or 3 hits, and you're done for.  As you destroy enemies, some will reveal a multitude of power-ups you can collect.  Small capsules are smart bombs, which will destroy all small enemies on screen, and damage larger ones.  You can stock up to 10 of those.  "P" capsules are for powering up your tank.  However, in order to gain a power level, you have to collect 10 of them.  Doing so upgrades your laser to a double-shot laser.  Doing so a 2nd time upgrades to a sort of energy ball that waves back and forth.  Small "L" chips refill a single bar of tank armor, and the larger "L" capsule refills a much larger portion of your tank's armor.  For each enemy you destroy, you receive experience points.  Small enemies grant 1 point, larger enemies usually grant 2 or 3.  For each 100 points you earn, you level up, and your tank's armor bar becomes larger.  The tank can be leveled up to 6 levels, effectively doubling the amount of hits you can take from like enemies.

This tank is all about that base.

In the overhead sections, you drive around the map, blasting enemies, looking for what to do.  There are small bases on each map that serve different purposes.  Some bases will give you information about your objective, some refill your life, and some provide upgrades to your tank.  Each of the main planets past the first one has a different upgrade, and though you can select the levels to traverse to past the initial planet, some planets aren't really passable until you have a certain upgrade.  As you travel around the overhead maps, your goal should be to destroy enemies and level up your tank as much as possible.  In additional to the bases, you will also discover caverns and tunnels that you'll need to enter.

When paused, you can see what level you're at, how much

experience you've gained, and what your laser power is.

Inside the caverns and tunnels is the 2nd type of gameplay introduced here.  Rather than the overhead free-roaming shooter style, the game switches instead to a first-person dungeon crawler type of game.  Your only moves are to either move forward, or to turn left or right.  As you explore each cavern, you may find yourself suddenly in an enemy encounter, with the enemy shooting at you, and moving either left or right, around your tank.  The radar shows you that the enemy can move around you, and you can swivel your tank's cannon around to fight the enemy.  In this battle style, enemy projectiles only hurt you if they collide with your ship in a relatively head-on manner.  So if an enemy is off to one side or another, and they're firing straight ahead, but the shot isn't hitting your tank in roughly the middle third of the view, you won't take damage.  This becomes a critical strategic element throughout the game.  Once the enemy is destroyed, your tank cannon swivels back to its previous cardinal position, and you continue to wander through the cavern.

In these first-person enemy encounters, you can move the targeting

reticle up and down to track the enemy's movement as you fire.

In the tunnels, your goal will be to take out the "Life Core" of each base, which is a fancy way of saying you fight a boss.  In addition to these life core boss encounters, you also have to take out a Control Tower, and often smaller life core units which are stationary and just fire away at you.  Once you destroy the Life Core, you'll get access to a map of the cavern (basically after your need for it has expired), and you'll get a brief sense of where you may need to go to find the exit.  Also, destroying a Life Core means your health will be refilled, which is always a plus.  Upon finding the exit, you'll be thrust once more into the top-down perspective so you can find the next objective, which is usually either another tunnel to explore, or if you've rooted them all out, finding the base where you can get off the rock you're on and travel to another planet.

A lot of the enemies in this game seem to have a crustacean theme.

Perhaps someone on the Asuka Technologies roster was a Darius fan?

This brings about gameplay type 3: the vertical scrolling shoot-em-up.  As a fan of shmups, the prospect of a shooter inside an existing game intrigues and usually excites me.  Here, however, it's just your tank transforming into a spaceship, Guardian Legend-style, and flying from the planet you just conquered to the next one you choose on the selection screen.  The shooter levels are pretty basic and nondescript, with the same weapon you had in the overhead stages available at your disposal to take out enemies, as well as the same stock of smart bombs.  Enemy waves and patterns are pretty boring, though they do come quickly, so be on your guard.  There's not much to these levels, however, and they lack variety.

You always start on Planet Desa, but after you defeat that planet's

Life Core, you can choose which planet to travel to next.

As I mentioned earlier, the game isn't entirely linear, because you can choose which planet to go to after you complete the objectives on Planet Desa.  This is a tad misleading, however, because some items are required to progress very far.  For instance, you can't progress across spots in the overhead sections where the ground is mostly water without the "Hover Unit" which you'll acquire from Planet Monoa, and you need the "Shield Unit", obtained from Planet Gadam in order to drive over places where the ground looks "broken".  So while there's some freedom to go and grind for experience and "P" capsules to power up your ship, assuming you did so on Planet Desa already, chances are, you'll already be at full power and such an act will be redundant.  I will say, you'll stand little chance of success if you try to go after Planet DN-1 without the other upgrades, however, especially the "Pulse Unit" from Planet Aquel, which allows you to charge up your main shot to a powerful energy ball.  This becomes essential for boss encounters later on.

Gotta love the "warp tunnel" effect in the shooter stages.

There are a couple additional mechanics thrown in for good measure.  One is on Planet Aquel, with a secondary boss fight.  Taking the form of the overhead tank sections, you fight a large lobster-like creature that throws duel boomerangs at you.  Assuming your main laser is fully powered up, you can make quick work of him, though his pattern does take a bit to discover.  It's similar to the other overhead tank sections, except that you're confined to a single screen, there's no background, and it's literally just a dark screen with you and the boss.  It's the most "normal" action game boss encounter in the game.  In addition, once you've completed all 5 planets, a 6th planet, Gidoro, opens up, and at the end of the shoot-em-up sequence, you get to fight the Planet Gidoro itself, which is sort of a giant scarab beetle thing that shoots at you as you attempt to shoot at it while dodging its onslaught.

Here's that lobster boss I mentioned before from Planet Aquel.

Send him back to the dinner table where he belongs!

Graphically, the game is quite good, especially for such an early title.  Having been released not much more than a year after the Game Boy's release, the sprite design is quite good, with a cool tank design, a nice heads-up display for the first person sections, nicely done terrain graphics that make excellent use of the Game Boy's limited 4-shades of green, and overall, the enemy designs are detailed and nice to look at.  The tank has a satisfying "shudder" effect signifying its size and tank-like movement, as well as when it takes damage, and there's a cool explosion effect when you destroy the falling meteors on Gadam or in the shooter portions.  The larger Life Core bosses are all interesting, and the graphics convey, as much as is possible on the platform, that sense of depth you need in the first person areas.

A couple planets have these annoying barriers you can only clear

by using smart bombs. Conserve them well, or you'll have to grind.

In the audio department, the game is also strong.  The music is generally fitting in the game, with a nice upbeat tune playing during the overhead sections, complete with a nice little bridge riff that makes you think the song is going to completely rock out for a bit, then settling back into the groove.  Music in the caverns is more atmospheric, with different themes, depending on whether you're tackling a primary cave with the full Life Core, or just a smaller cavern with a Control Tower, and the shooter sections have their own theme as well.  There are short little tunes that play when you go into a base, and when certain objectives are met.  Sound effects are generally good as well, with better overall sound design than the usual fare you might expect from an early Game Boy title.

The primary strategy for first-person boss encounters is to stay off to

the side until an opportunity presents itself to fire, then move in so

you can line up your targeting reticle to hit the boss. Just be careful

not to stare head-on for too long, lest you get blasted.

By this point in the review, some of you reading may be wondering, with all that I've described, how can this not be the greatest Game Boy game of 1990?  I can answer that with a single word: execution.  The scope of this game's design is impressive.  With everything Asuka Technologies attempted to do, it's easy to take this game's size and scope and see it as a win.  However, none of the elements in the game are fully realized, and end up being a bit half-baked.  The overhead sections play fine, but the limited enemy patterns and endless waves coming at you is a cheap mechanic that substitutes for better designed enemy encounters.  Some of the enemy wave patterns are cheap, and will inevitably result in taking damage.  Yes, you can get "L" chips and "L" capsules to refill, and there are bases where you can refill life, but practically forcing you to take damage due to a combination of endless enemies and sluggish, awkward tank movement is hardly good design.  The first person sections are better, with the kind of atmospheric, sparse design you want, fewer enemy encounters and all, but the mazes are a bit pedestrian, and the non-boss Life Cores and Control Towers are completely devoid of any challenge due to the "middle 1/3" hitbox I mentioned earlier.  Shoot and dodge, shoot and dodge, ad infinitum, until the core is destroyed.  It seems more like an empty sub-boss fight than if it was just a stationary object for you to destroy.  The shooter portions are also pretty sparse and underwhelming.  They don't have interesting enemy patterns, and aside from the cool meteor explosion effects I mentioned, are hardly noteworthy, especially since there's only 1 of them, just prior to Planet Gidoro, that culminates in a boss battle.

The Life Cores on Planet Gidoro are all the previous Life Cores you

have faced, effectively culminating in a sort of boss rush before

the final encounter with the mad scientist and his ultimate weapon.

In addition to the stunning mediocrity of each gameplay type's implementation, there are also additional flaws that weigh the experience down.  If you die in either the overhead or first person sections, you lose all your weapon and health upgrades.  Despite the fact that you have to grind to achieve these upgrades, one death and it's back to square one, much like a shoot-em-up game from the same era.  Because of the possibility of taking damage during a Life Core encounter, your best bet is to go grinding in the overhead area to get back to full health and laser upgrades, because otherwise, even the smaller life core and control tower fights will take a long time, because you'll be pelting those units with the weakest cannon in the game.  Another oddity - your laser maxes out at Level 3, but you can still collect up to 9 "P" capsules above that, though it has no additional effect to your weapon's power.  It's unfortunately that the development team didn't see fit to make weapon and/or health upgrades stay with you after a couple planets, so you're not back to a beginner power level when you die.

Even if you're fully powered up, the final boss takes a LOT of damage.

There are enough objectives to complete in this game that the lack of a save or password system hurts it quite a bit.  If you sat down to play through this game, you could probably do the whole thing in a little under an hour, assuming you know all the tricks, but as a portable game, especially one that has you grinding for power-ups, with as much as there is to do to complete each planet, it would have been nice to have a password system, at a bare minimum, so you could play through a planet, complete its objectives, and then have that password to go back to.  If this were a NES game, it would be less an issue, but as a portable experience, that should have been part of the design concept.  If that wasn't enough, there's no way to pause the game during boss encounters, either in first-person, or during the "lobster" sequence, or during the first-person enemy encounters.  Once you're engaged in those battles, it's all or nothing.  This is a relatively fatal flaw in my estimation, because you're talking about a game designed for a portable system that may need to be paused at any time, due to the times when one might be playing a game like this.  It's a rather egregious omission that just puts the sour cherry on top of the bitter sundae.

Planet Gidoro goes up in smoke.

Despite the game's flaws, it has its fans.  I read through a couple reviews that highly praised the game for its use of multiple styles, excellent graphics, and sound design.  I can't fault those sentiments, because I echo them.  But when you cross genres like this, and none of the elements you present are fleshed out enough to feel fully realized, it lowers the excitement and hampers the overall experience.  Add the additional design flaws/omissions, and the entire package comes out half-baked.  Had Asuka developed this for the NES, and added the other elements and refined it somewhat, I think it could have been a game that is as fondly remembered as something like Blaster Master.  There's so much potential here, but it's unfortunately squandered by the game's inherent shortcomings.  Having said all that, there's fun to be had here, and if you can pick it up for $5 or less like I did, you might still get a kick out of it.  Don't get suckered into paying much for it, however, because the final product probably isn't worth laying out much cash in order to experience.

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.