Pit Fighter (1992)

Image shamelessly stolen from GamesDBase.
3 buff dudes and a lady in dominatrix gear. Nothing can

go wrong with this scenario, right? Nothing at all...

Since the inception of the modern fighting game with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in 1991, scores of video game developers have attempted to jump on the head-to-head fighting game bandwagon at least once.  SNK had Fatal Fury, Midway had Mortal Kombat, Data East had Fighter's History, and even Capcom rivals Konami had the little known Martial Champion.  Prior to the fighting game craze, however, companies were still trying to figure out a way to make a fighting game that wasn't just walking left to right, mindlessly punching enemies in the face, but focused more on actual human interaction.  Atari threw their hat in the ring (sorry, pun intended) with 1990's Pit-Fighter, originally released in the arcade.  The game was received well enough to receive a whole cadre of home conversions, including a port for Nintendo's own Game Boy.

Unlike some games, at least the logo is the same here

as it is on the box. That's about all that's good about it.

It makes a weird kind of sense that someone would port a game like Pit-Fighter to the Game Boy, and yet it makes no sense whatsoever.  It makes financial sense, because if you liked the arcade game, you might want a home console or portable version, right?  So why not port the game to anything and everything with enough power to give some facsimile of the game?  Where that logic ends, however, is with the realization that the Game Boy just didn't have the power to approximate a game like Pit-Fighter with enough technical success to make it anything more than a curiosity.  Rather, it's more of an abomination.

Buzz is one of the 3 fighters you can choose from. Not

much to look at, he's your standard beefcake wrestler.

Forget the fact that several development teams, including some of Nintendo's own, had been able to make the Game Boy do some pretty amazing things by 1992.  Logically, you don't take a 3-player, open arena based head-to-head fighting game with beat-em-up mechanics and environment interactivity onto a handheld system that is barely as powerful as its home console hardware predecessor.  I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at that meeting at the Atari Games/Tengen offices when they decided to port the game to the Nintendo Game Boy.  That must have been an interesting discussion.

I could totally see this happening at the Atari Games/Tengen offices, given how much focus
there was on pure profit during those times, especially with arcade ports to consoles.

Nevertheless, like any game company wanting to eek every cent of possible profit from their intellectual properties, Atari Games decided to port Pit-Fighter to every possible console they could to maximize the game's earning potential.  They probably knew that console ports of Street Fighter II were going to dwarf any earning potential they had soon, so it had to release fast and on as many platforms as they could muster in order to capitalize on the arcade original's marginal popularity.  Indeed, the SNES port of Street Fighter II, followed later by the Sega Genesis release of Street Fighter II: Championship Edition took the console world by storm, and most other fighting game franchises were left in the dust.  No one can fault Atari for wanting to bleed the proverbial turnip dry, given the fervor fans had for one on one fighting games by 1992, and wanting to get in on a piece of that action, monetarily speaking.  Sadly, the Game Boy conversion (that term used very loosely) of Pit-Fighter, leaves a LOT to be desired.

Don't talk to me like that, you meanie!

Here's the basic setup, for the uninitiated.  Pit-Fighter is a head-to-head fighting game that, at least in the arcade original, would "pit" (pun intended) up to 3 fighters against one another in mortal combat (I can't help myself).  Each area is an arena in a sort of 2.5D view, and you can move up, down, left and right, and all over the place.  You have the ability to punch, kick, and jump (with both buttons simultaneously), and depending on your proximity to another fighter, and the combination of your movements and button presses, you can do other things like throws, or slamming/kicking your opponent when they're on the ground to deal extra damage.  After you win a round, you're granted temporary use of a special attack, which you can execute by sort of "swiping" over the two attack buttons in rapid succession, executing the attack.  It's a tad clumsy, but it works well enough, and that usually deals more damage than anything else, so it's important to use that as frequently as possible.  Each fighter's health is represented by a counter that slowly whittles away as you or your opponent take damage.  Once the counter reaches zero, it's game over.  No continues, no second chances, just death.

Looks like Buzz won himself a match! I hope that $1850 is enough

to pay his medical bills after the next subsequent beat down!

In the original arcade game, you had nice extras like the 3 player melee, weapons you could pick up off the ground, Double Dragon-style, and crowd interaction.  If you got to close to the crowd, the audience could attack you or push you back into the fight, and you take damage.  This was a strategy you could use to your advantage, by backing your opponent into a literal corner, then a combination of allowing the onlookers to pummel them, and unleashing your own fatal fury upon them (sorry, I can't stop).  In the Game Boy version, the 3-player mode is removed, for obvious reasons, and sadly, there are no weapons available to assist you.  You have to rely solely on your own art of fighting (it's getting bad) to see you through each match.  Unfortunately, there's no health regeneration between levels, and no health pickups or bonuses, so the best and only strategy you can hope for is to get through each level with little or no health lost, so you can make it to the final fight (that was low hanging fruit) with as much energy as you can.

$11K for a single low-level fight? I picked the wrong profession...

Graphically, the game does as good a job as you could expect the monochrome handheld to do.  The arcade game was a touch herky jerky, and Nintendo's venerable handheld doesn't handle the scrolling very well so it jerks and stutters a fair amount.  The crowds have exactly 2 frames of animation which go back and forth at varying intervals, so it gives the illusion that there's more going on than there really is, but as you'll be focusing on your opponent, you may not even notice.  The character animations are copied from the original, though obviously scaled down for this format, and are equally as awkward as the source material.  The strange thing is, on the original DMG hardware, the game looks fine.  With different palettes, however, the graphics have a weird effect where your character sprite, or other elements, may disappear into the background because of the blending.  This is evident with the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player, as well as with the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.

In terms of audio, it's a mixed bag.  The game has relatively impressive voice samples, taken straight from the arcade game, that are present here.  However, for anyone who played the original, they would notice the rather limited number of samples available here.  Speech samples are a small handful of grunts, a laugh, and a couple yells.  It's reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 of the original voice samples, and despite being somewhat impressive coming out of the Game Boy hardware, are still far less than what the original game allowed for.  There are also punch and kick noises, which sound like you might expect them to, sort of a "whiff" sound.  Unfortunately, only one music track from the arcade game is converted, and because the original wasn't exactly a bastion of great melody, since that's all that's left available from the 4 sound channels on the hardware, it grates quickly because it's just not that well composed.

"You're the best around,

nothing's gonna ever keep ya down!"

The other curious thing about the audio is what happens when you play Pit-Fighter on a Game Boy Advance, GBA SP, or Game Boy Player add-on.  You get this curious effect where, interspersed with the sound and music, you hear this high-pitched whistle or ringing effect.  It rings somewhat intermittently as the game is played, but the occurrence of it is near-constant.  As if the game's sound didn't already border on annoying, this happens, and puts the whole experience over the top.  It's an interesting phenomenon, and while I don't yet know the reason for this anomaly, I recorded a video documenting it, along with the odd video problem I mentioned earlier, regarding character sprites blending into the background:

Episode 001 in my new Game Boy Oddities series.

At the end of the day, Pit-Fighter remains only marginally playable.  The original game wasn't known for tight control, and the Game Boy port fares no better.  The game's "moves" aren't easy to pull off, and some of the maneuvers, like the rolling that Buzz can do when he gets up from being knocked down, I was never able to accomplish.  The graphics are problematic because of the choice to merely copy the arcade, rather than retool for the hardware, and the impressive speech samples aren't enough to save the game's audio from being anything more than mediocre at best.  The game offers no continues, unlike the arcade original, and because there are no power-ups (like the "power pill" which offered temporary invincibility in the original), health restores, or breathing room, the randomness of the enemy characters just adds to the punishing difficulty.  With some practice, I was able to kind of make it to the 3rd fight on most every attempt, but the game also lacks the "Grudge Match" option, where you fight a clone of yourself to try and score 3 knockdowns.  With all that's missing from this port, all that the development team failed to tighten, and the obvious fact that this just wasn't a stellar game to begin with, and you're left with a Game Boy title that made neither Tengen, nor TH-Q, into world heroes (please, someone stop me!).  I paid exactly $4 for this, and that's probably the most I would encourage anyone to pay.  Not that I'm encouraging anyone to pay for this game.  No, I would tell you to stay away, because it's just not a good game, it's not a fun game, and it's not worth your time.  Pass this one up unless you're a Pit-Fighter die-hard (should such a creature exist), or an avid collector like me, who masochistically has to have every title, no matter how wretched.

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.

Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

Image shamelessly stolen from the Castlevania Wikia page.

When I was a kid, this was the baddest looking box art in all the land

when it came to Game Boy games. And by bad, I mean AWESOME.

Nostalgia can be a very powerful force.  It can make adults look back fondly on all sorts of things that, viewed objectively, probably aren't as great as we remember them.  For a child of the 80's, that can be almost anything.  From VCRs and teased hair to classic cartoons and our favorite movies and video games, there are times when it's hard to take a step back and look at those old favorites with a more critical eye.  Sure, that one Poison album might be one of your favorites of all time, but musically, does it still hold up?  What about your favorite childhood cartoon...could you watch it today without cringing or thinking it's nothing but pure cheese?

Seeing that Castlevania logo on the little screen was a sight to behold.

Now think about your favorite video games as a child.  Sure, some of them probably stand the test of time.  But for every Super Mario Bros or Contra, there's always a handful of games that we may still hold in high regard and still have much affection for.  If we could set aside our own memories and youthful experiences, would we still hold those works in the same esteem?  For me, one of those games is Konami's Castlevania: The Adventure on the Game Boy.

Notice the flaming end of the whip - that little fireball is destined for

the "mud man" enemy, otherwise known in the manual as "Madman".

I probably mentioned this in my first article, but I'll recap for context.  My parents wouldn't let me own a games console, because they said (rightly so) that I would monopolize the TV, as the family had just one.  Thus, if I wanted to play something other than simple early PC games, I needed to save my money and buy a Game Boy.  I dutifully saved my allowance, and upon my 13th birthday, my parents took the money I saved and bought me the Game Boy, and then bought Castlevania: The Adventure as my birthday present that year.  1990 became a seminal year for me as a gamer, and cemented the love for the hobby as I poured all my free time into playing on that little grey brick.  Much of that time was spent on Tetris, to be sure, but Castlevania: The Adventure got a lot of play that first year, and for good reason.  Having played a couple of the NES Castlevania games, it was a marvel to me that they could take that experience, and downsize it for the Game Boy screen, albeit somewhat reduced in terms of game mechanics.  Even so, it was a wondrous thing to 13-year old me.

The design team liked to use this tactic a lot - put a candle out of

reach to all but those who would keep the fireball power-up.

Looking back at those times, I have fond memories of visiting my grandparents at their house, taking the Game Boy with me, and sitting between my grandfather's rocking chair and the bookcase against the wall, huddled in the corner underneath his reading lamp, playing Castlevania: The Adventure while listening to my grandparents and my parents talk.  I would occasionally steal away to the kitchen for a jelly bean, or gladly turn it off for a bowl of homemade ice cream, but I whiled away many a Friday evening in just that way. I remember the feeling of victory every time I would make it past Stage 2, and the even greater sense of accomplishment when I had bested Stage 3.  I also fondly remember beating Dracula at my grandparents' house, and gleefully showing my parents that I had finally beat the game, after months of chipping away at it.  Not that they cared, but as a young gamer, it was a triumphant moment.

At first, the Stage 02 "Under Mole" boss is a huge pain. Once you

know where to stand and when to whip, it becomes no sweat.

On the surface, the game looks excellent.  The development team that handled this game certainly got a lot out of the Game Boy during its formative first few months, with good graphics that included nice layered backgrounds, a good use of the Game Boy's 4-shades of green in terms of shading, background elements, and enemy/item recognition, and an overall atmospheric aesthetic that recalled earlier games in the series, but having its own unique flavor.  The sprite for Simon Belmont's predecessor, Christopher Belmont, is recognizable in its basic form, and animates well enough, in similar fashion to the NES classics it is loosely based upon.  The familiar candles flicker in a simple, but effective 2-frame animation, and when you whip enemies, they die in a satisfying little burst of flame.

A descending ceiling of spikes is not my idea of a good time!

The soundtrack is one of the highlights of the game.  Hats off to composers Shigeru Fukutake, Norio Hanzawa, and Hidehiro Funauchi for their work on the game, because the music here, particularly that of the first 2 stages, is impeccable.  The melodies are memorable and stay with you, long after you power off your Game Boy.  The sound effects are also well done, with a nice whip sound, and a satisfying little "crunch" sound when you destroy a candle or vanquish a foe.  The coin pickup and power-up sounds are all familiar, and hearken back to the halcyon days of 8-bits and game design teams using basic hardware to make excellent sound.  This game is truly one of the highlights of early Game Boy titles when it comes to sound design.

Castlevania: The Adventure State 01 music. Stick this in your ear

holes and tell me it doesn't get stuck in your head. I dare you.

Game play is basic, with you controlling Christopher Belmont, running (or sauntering, more on that later) right to left, or sometimes left to right, whipping floating candlesticks for power-ups, and enemies in your path.  Unlike the first NES Castlevania game, there's no sub-weapon here, so rather than hearts giving you ammo for a secondary attack method, they restore life, like you would normally see in other games.  Coins are strictly for points, and littered around the game, you'll stumble upon the occasional 1up, as well as strategically placed whip upgrades, in the form of a dark sphere.  Your basic whip is a thin, stringy thing, and often takes 2 or more uses to kill anything.  Upgrade once, and it's a thick, braided powerhouse with a ball at the end.  Upgrade a second time, and your whip can suddenly throw fireballs.  It's an interesting twist to the 2-upgrade system introduced in the first game, and it gives the player options in terms of eliminating obstacles, as well as reaching some candlesticks.  Each time you get hit, you lose one level of whip upgrade, so two hits and you're back to the thin whip.  Get hit enough to drain your lifebar, and it's a trip to the woodshed for Mr. Belmont.  Thankfully, you get 3 lives to start with, and you can earn an additional life at 10,000 points, and more after each successive 20,000 point total.  You also get a small handful of continues, in case you die.  Let's face it: unless you're a Castlevania wunderkind, you'll die - a lot.

Not all bosses in the game are very true to the Castlevania aesthetic,

but this rib cage-bearing bat creature certainly is.

The chief complaint leveled against this game is its speed, or rather, the lack thereof.  As I mentioned previously, Christopher Belmont saunters along at a snail's pace, and everything in the game seems to follow suit.  Granted, for the game's difficulty, that helps a little, but it certainly counts as a negative.  I don't happen to think it's quite as sluggish as some would say, but I will concede that it hampers the game somewhat.  Secondly, the game's difficulty is quite high.  This is offset somewhat by there only being 4 stages, but there are moments where you're almost guaranteed to get hit by an enemy projectile (like those wretched bouncing balls spit out by the Punaguchi).  Some spots require near pixel-perfect jumps, and to expect that on the DMG's tiny screen is pretty harsh.  It can be done, but it sours the experience.  In addition, the aforementioned Punaguchi's make things very difficult in Stage 2 and 3, and if you don't have the timing down of when they spit out the large attack balls, or know where to stand so you can whip them, you'll almost certainly take at least one, if not two hits, as there's no way to avoid taking damage otherwise.  Worse yet, if you take a hit or two, and are relegated back to the weakest whip, it takes 4 whips to kill them.  These vile creatures rank up there with the bats in the original NES Ninja Gaiden as some of the most annoying, hard to avoid enemies out there.

Stage 03 starts out with background armor suddenly springing forth

to take out Christopher Belmont, so stay on your toes. Also, the

music in this stage makes great use of stereo separation and panning.

Playing this game again, I start to see my love and nostalgia for it slowly erode as I'm batted around by bouncing balls (yes, the game has knockback like its predecessors), expected to make pixel-perfect jumps, and in a constant state of frustration due to the game's less than stellar design.  I still contend that it's not quite as horrible as some make it out to be, but I'm beginning to see that this adventure isn't quite the paragon of early Game Boy action platforming that I originally thought it was.  Konami eclipsed this later with the sequel, as well as the Contra game Operation C, as well as other later Game Boy releases.  The game becomes a blurry mess on the original Game Boy screen, and it makes me wonder how I ever endured playing it with all that blur.  I tried to play it again on the DMG recently, and was shocked at just how blurry it was.  Perhaps I've been spoiled with the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance all the years I've owned them, but the system this game was designed for certainly shows its age when you play a game like this that requires a sharp eye and great timing and reflexes.  It makes for a very difficult experience.

I lost many a life here at this spot as a child.  Sadly, it's still the spot

that claims my stock of extra lives, mostly because I suck at the

timing of these spiked beams.

Ideally, if one is to play this game today, it's via the Super Game Boy or Game Boy Player, or perhaps even on the 3DS via the Virtual Console.  Not that I'm recommending that course of action.  Sadly, I can't even give this a casual recommendation, even as much as I played and enjoyed it as a kid.  It's fraught with too many design and execution flaws that the game's good graphics and excellent soundtrack can't rise above.  Loose carts aren't expensive, by any means, and you could pick this one up for under $10, but unless you're nostalgic for when games kicked your butt 10 ways from Sunday, or are a complete masochist looking for a short challenge, I'd skip this one.  Definitely a "try before you buy" game in today's context.  Sadly, I must own up to having seen this game through "nostalgia goggles" for the last couple decades, and admit that it's just not that good.

Flipull (1990)

Image shamelessly stolen from GameFAQs.
Nothing says 1990 like ransom note style text, bright colors, and

a pun on the word "tubular". Michaelangelo, the Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtle, would be so proud, and would totally play this game,

if he had small enough "fingers" to hold a Game Boy.

While I have tried to, thus far in the Game Boy Guru project, show a balanced set of games, with carts spanning multiple genres, for those unaware, something needs to be put on the table right now.  The Game Boy has a LOT of puzzle games.  We got quite a few in the US, though there are even more in Japan.  Jeremy Parish, who does the excellent Game Boy World series, has lamented the glut of puzzle games on the Game Boy throughout several of his YouTube videos, because you can only have so many puzzle games to play before the novelty wears off.  The overwhelming barrage of puzzlers makes sense, however, given the original hardware's limitations, what with its decidedly underpowered CPU, its small dot-matrix screen, and tendency to blur horribly when playing anything with fast action.  The real trick for developers was to come up with a unique way of implementing puzzle solving that was just different enough to warrant folks spending their hard-earned cash to buy yet another game in the genre.  Thankfully, Flipull has two advantages: being early enough in the system's life to beat the glut, and setting itself apart enough to matter, even after the flood of "me too" puzzle games.

I'm still not clear what "AN EXCITING CUBE GAME" means, Taito.

Flipull is not an original Game Boy title, but rather, a conversion of an arcade game by the moniker Plotting.  It saw a Famicom and Game Boy release in Japan, though curiously, only hit the Game Boy in the US.  I confirmed with noted UK Game Boy expert Matt, the Game Boyle, that Flipull did not, insofar as he's aware, receive a European release.  The rather exhaustive game database at RF Generation also shows in a cursory search for Flipull that only 3 versions of the game exist by that name, the Japanese and US Game Boy versions, and the Japanese Famicom version.  Though the game was released in the arcade as Plotting, and apparently ported to a number of European micro-computers during the 1980's, most notably the ZX Spectrum and Commodore Amiga, curiously none of those versions appear to exist in the database.

So I'm a tiny blob throwing blocks at other blocks, and then after I bit

a block, another block comes flying back at me. It's all fun and games

until someone loses an eye.

I've been unable to find a scan of the game's manual online anywhere, and despite the fact that the US Flipull cart is quite common, I've not stumbled across the manual in the wild as of yet.  As such, the only documentation I was able to find on the Game Boy version was a relatively small FAQ over at GameFAQs, and that barely covers how to play the game.  I also found a PDF scan of the US arcade version manual, which gives a brief overview of how to play the game, as well as noting that there are (in the arcade original, anyway), 60 stages.  I have been unable to confirm that in the Game Boy version thus far, because it's a difficult game, and I've not been able to complete it.  Even so, it's a hard enough game that I suspect even the most skilled puzzle gamers may find some real challenge.

How is it that the incoming block only lands on top of you when you

have no moves left? Or is it just beside you, and you, as the blob,

are just beside yourself with shame in knowing you failed your task?

The basic premise is as follows: you are a blob creature, and you are given a block with the letter "S" on it.  When you throw that block at any other block, you clear it (and any blocks just like it directly connected to the target block in the same trajectory), and whatever block it hits next, gets "flipped" back to you, and that becomes the next block you throw.  There are 4 basic block types: a block with an "X" in the middle, a block with a smaller square in the center, a dark block with a white diamond, and a block with an upside down "T" that looks a bit like the t-shaped tetrad from Tetris.  If my first statement about clearing blocks didn't make sense, let me set the stage.  If you have an "X" block that you're throwing at another "X" block, and there's an upside down "T" block behind it, you'll clear one "X" block, replace the upside down "T" block with the "X" block you threw, and the "T" block will be thrown back at you.  If there are more than 1 of the "X" block in line (vertically or horizontally) with the "X" block you're aiming at, and they line up with the direction you've thrown the "X" block, all those blocks will clear, save for the one you just threw, and whatever the next non "X" block is, that's what will be thrown back to you.  If the block you just received has a corresponding block you can throw at, the process repeats.  If not, you "MISS" and lose a life, denoted by the "S" block at the bottom right of the screen.  Your blob can only move up or down on the playing field, so in order to throw blocks to places you could only target vertically, you have to throw against part of the stationary wall blocks, and a handy-dandy arrow will show you which column you're aiming for.  Clear as mud?

"Ooh, a swing and a miss for the rookie! Tough break, kid!"

In practice, it's actually more intuitive than my overly verbose description might make you think, and once you start playing, it's something you pick up on rather quickly.  Toward the top-right corner of the screen, you see "CLEAR" and a number below it - that number is the maximum number of blocks that need to be left on the screen to clear a level.  "TIME" is, of course, the amount of time you have left to play a stage, and "BLOCK" shows how many blocks are actually left in a level.  Once you reach the max number of blocks in a level, the stage doesn't automatically end, however.  If there are still available moves and time, you can continue playing until you're out of moves.  This is advantageous, as you score additional bonus points for clearing more blocks than what you need to reach the "CLEAR" total.  As you advance a few levels, you begin to have obstacle "pipe" blocks in the stage that you can throw against to catch blocks 1 column closer to you, or if you throw against stationary wall blocks, you can often pass through the pipe block to reach whatever is below it.  As the game goes on, each stage will have more and more blocks, more obstacles, and less time to reach your goal, so you have to manage your time very effectively in order to complete a level.

That little blob jumps pretty high when clearing a level. I suppose

if I were just a blob, such things would excite me like that as well.

A couple other considerations: first, if you're targeting blocks vertically, and you clear the last one from the column you just threw the block at, rather than disappearing, the last block will be flipped back to you, so you have to be careful to not pull such a maneuver too early in the level, lest you waste "S" blocks.  Second, for each block you clear on a level beyond the "CLEAR" count, you earn 1,000 bonus points.  If the "CLEAR" count is 9, and you have 9 left on screen when there are no more moves, you get 1,000 bonus points, but for each block you eliminate below that total, you get an additional 1,000 points.  So if the "CLEAR" count is 9, but you finish the level with just 7 blocks left, that's 3,000 bonus points.  In addition, for every second left when you finish the level, you earn an extra 10 points, so between that and the block count, you can really rack up the score if you can think on your feet and act quickly, decisively, and most of all, correctly during each stage.  The other major consideration is that each level is randomly generated, which means no two experiences will be the same, at least not unless you play the game a lot.  So each time you go into Flipull, you have to be cognizant about the moves you're making and think critically.

As mentioned, you can rack up a lot of points simply by playing
each stage carefully to eliminate as many blocks as possible.

I don't have any information about how well this game sold, but I do remember seeing quite a few ads for it as a kid, and I remember it getting generally positive reviews.  I also remember being intrigued by it, but never remember seeing it in stores when I went to buy the occasional Game Boy game.  Either that, or I was already set on which game I wanted to buy, and had tunnel vision when I got to the store.  Despite that, it seems to be quite common, which is good, because it's a good game that, for puzzle enthusiasts, is worth a look.  I haven't played enough of them yet to know whether this would be considered a top-tier Game Boy puzzler, but I certainly had fun with it, and it has an addictive quality that makes me want to keep trying, even though it brings a relatively stiff challenge.  I paid $7 for my copy, which is close to the current (as of this writing) average price of a loose cart on eBay.  If you can score it for less, go for it.  If not, it's still a good game, and has enough content to keep you coming back, assuming you enjoy puzzles.  If so, give Flipull a try.  Hopefully, you'll be entertained as I was.  Casually recommended.