Captain Hygiene fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jul 9, 2022

Ofecks fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jul 31, 2022

• I'd bump Zelda up to Masterpiece. I bought it close to the release date and It was the last game I bought for the GB until I revisited the platform much later during the GBC years. I thought it was amazing from beginning to end. I liked it even more, in some ways, than LttP, if that says anything. Just an absolutely stellar game that I can't find any major faults in. I even collected all of the Secret Seashells, without a strategy guide (or internet access) and "holy poo poo you get the loving Master Sword omg " was the perfect capstone. Several years down the road, having the DX version, plus both Oracle games, was complete 2D Zelda ecstasy. All 3 of them together is a really top-tier video game package.
  
• I think I'd swap Mario Lands 1 and 2. I didn't have a copy of Mario Land 1 myself until my cousin gave it to me years after its release, but I played it plenty on friends/family's GBs when it was current and it was for sure a system seller. The control is a little slippery but I can get used to it. That said, ML2 didn't impress me as much. I think the big chunky look of everything played a role in that opinion. Also some of the BGM tracks got on my nerves. It also seemed to play a lot slower, whereas you can really zoom through ML1 if you know what you're doing. ML2 is still a solid game, but I don't think it's better than the first.
  
• Swap Final Fantasy Adventure and Metroid 2, for me. As I mentioned before, there's just some kind of special sauce that FFA has that really clicks with me. I played it over and over from beginning to end, so many times. I hear your complaints about the menuing, and some of the bugs are frustrating, but that is the only thing keeping it from my own Masterpiece list. Metroid 2, on the other hand, was a fine game but I think I like the original NES version more (actually the FDS JP original is even better). Ultimately, I never got the same amount of joy playing M2 than I did FFA.
  
• I tried out Batman via emulation not too long ago and I think it's better than your ranking. It Has Potential, for sure, maybe even Adequate. I thought the platforming and run-n-gun aspects were fine. I even liked the shmup level. Maybe your setup has a bunch of added input latency. Generally these sort of games are more enjoyable on real hardware or a latency-optimized RetroArch core. I'd also like to try Gremlins 2 sometime to see if I find it as wretched as you did.
  
• Castlevania Has Potential. It's very rough around the edges, but I think that's because Konami was on a tight deadline with brand-new hardware. It's still a Castlevania game. Also, CV2 Belmont's Revenge is an amazing game and it pretty much plays the same. They just corrected all the mistakes they made with Adventure.
  
• So, Catrap. I'd put it lower, significantly. Adequate, maybe, but realistically Has Potential, I think. Full disclosure: my bias here is due to me being stupid and easily frustrated by puzzle games. Especially ones like this one where you need to engage the Chessboard Brain and think 4+ moves ahead. I'm just really horrible at stuff like that. That said, I hear and validate the compliments towards it. My sister had this game, we both got Game Boys the same Xmas ('91) and that was her extra game. Mine was Kunio-kun Soccer (Nintendo World Cup). No idea why I asked for that instead of Mario Land! Or TMNT! Or Castlevania! Or Metroid 2! Or any of the good titles that were out by then! Maybe I gave my mom a list and she just picked that one. Anyway, Catrap is quite charming and I see why y'all like it.
  

• Tail Gator! I've only played maybe 10-15 minutes of it but I think I'd set it higher to Solid. This is one I remember seeing in the Purple NP Game Boy Guide and its screenshots were very intriguing. Now that I've played a bit, I think I would've enjoyed having that one in my stack of cartridges as a kid.
  
• I'd be really surprised if I held an obscure third-party game (by a B-tier publisher, even) like Avenging Spirit in as high regard as you did. Just based on what I've read about it and the screenshots I've seen (plus some footage of people playing the arcade original), maybe Solid at best? I dunno, but I skipped that episode so I'd better go back and watch it to find out.
  

• Final Fantasy Legend 1 & 2. Great portable RPGs. FFL1 was intentionally designed to be completed in 8 hours, the flight time from Tokyo to Honolulu. So it doesn't overstay its welcome. And I love all the gameplay freedom it offers you, especially when compared to stuff at the time like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy IV. FFL2 took that concept and just ran with it, blazing down the corridor. I'd say it's the best RPG on the platform. After I bought a GBC (mainly for the Dragon Quest 1-2 port), I picked up FFL1 (because Sunsoft was re-publishing all the BrickBoy FF's at the time), and intended to buy FFL2 eventually but I never got around to it. My SO at the time had FFL3 and I stole it from her to try it out, but I did not like it for some reason. Now that I'm thinking about it, the morphing of all the characters (like the Monsters in the previous 2 games) didn't sit right with me. May have been a little too much gameplay freedom. Choice paralysis, probably.
  
• As mentioned above Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge is superb. I'm not sure I'd rank it as a Masterpiece, but it's up there. The soundtrack is absolutely incredible. I am still floored, to this day, at what Konami accomplished with the GB's little wavetable. It's one of the GB soundtracks I have in my digital music library, to listen to on a whim. It's a rip of the official "Dracula Best" volume it was on (I forget which one), and they added reverb to make it sound even awesomer. My sister didn't have many GB games, but this was one of them. She liked Castlevania for some reason. I would borrow the GB cart from her and play it with my Walkman headphones.
  
• I really like Sword of Hope. It's kinda like portable Shadowgate, but there's an actual RPG attached to it. Not a complex one, but I was fond of the concept when I bought a used copy during the GBC years. I was working at a FuncoLand at the time, so I got a nice employee discount on used stuff that would come in. You should've seen the Sega Saturn I yoinked for myself that someone traded in, it was basically in brand-new condition. I digress. There's a SoH sequel and it looks like improved more of the same, but I haven't played it before.
  
• Roland's Curse was a game I picked off the shelf to buy at Babbages. The fantasy theme and Zelda-like perspective piqued my interest. But I was a little disappointed with it. Was kinda short and repetitive. I sometimes got pretty lost wandering around. Had interesting music, though. Kinda melancholy, but I like that sort of thing. Only recently did I learn that it was made by NMK, who is more famous for their somewhat-janky-but-incredibly-stylish arcade shmups. It also has a sequel I've never played but it looks like an improvement over the original.
  
• Normally, a really straight-forward portable port of Space Invaders isn't noteworthy, but the game itself is kinda secondary to this memory: my 2nd date in high school was with a friend-of-a-friend of my first date. Both girls went to a different school than me. I met the first one via a blind date at the music shop where we both took guitar lessons (the shop owner set us up). She wasn't interested in me romantically, but we became friends. And I befriended some of her friends. And I asked out one of them at some point and (to my surprise) she said yes. When I went to pick her up, she invited me in to meet her parents and younger siblings. I saw a Game Boy Pocket lying on the couch and I was like "oooo video games" and my date said it was hers and let me try the game inside - Space Invaders. Yup, it was Space Invaders alright. Not much to say about Space Invaders. But I remember being caught off guard by the fact that "A) this GB Pocket is pretty neat, the screen is way better than the BrickBoy and B) hey wait a minute... a girl likes video games?!?" I'm older than all of you, this was a much rarer thing back then ('96 or '97), especially for teenagers. I mean, my older sister had a GB but she didn't play it much and didn't take any interest in the non-portable consoles I had, so this was different I think. I knew exactly zero female peers my age that were into gaming. So this gal that I was taking out was more interesting because of it. But it didn't really work out between us - that date wasn't great and neither of us asked for a follow-up, so yeah. I just think that sort of perspective was important for me. Like, it gave me just a little bit of hope for the future of my personal connections.
  
• GB shmups! I've had the pleasure of playing Solar Striker, Nemesis, and R-Type. I think I can safely say at this point that shmups don't really work well on a portable system, especially retro ones where you gotta button mash sometimes. And the blur from moving objects on the BrickBoy's screen... yikes. I was shocked and appalled to discover the actual framerate of Nemesis many years later (it's quite low), but I guess they did it that way for a reason, huh?
  

• Overall, I think the Game Boy had a much more diverse and interesting library than NES. Possibly SNES, too, considering the vast gulf of SFC games that stayed in Japan. There's all kinds of quirky GB stuff from every genre that made it to NA kids. I guess the library is fairly puzzle-heavy, but it makes sense given how those kinds of games do well on there. I think the Game Boy was an important part of the Nintendo ecosystem at the time, and I'm really fortunate that I had all 3 of those parts. Combined with a Nintendo Power subscription and its bonus guides like Purple GB, it was A Good Time for tween me, and gave me a much-needed reprieve from the emerging horrors of adolescence.
  
• I don't have much to say about Pokemon except that I'm basically Too Old For That poo poo. At least I was when it finally came out in '98. I had already graduated high school! And at that point I'd left Nintendo mostly behind (was pretty deep into Playstation by then). I'd seen the anime on afternoon TV a few times (anime was pretty rare, so I usually checked it out whenever I saw it on), but it didn't sell me on the games. To this day, I've still never played any Pokemon game. Considering their importance to the industry, I think I'd like to rectify that. On real hardware, anyway. All I have right now is a Famicom. There's several unlicensed Asia-region Pokemon titles, a couple of which got fan-translations, but I think I'd rather order a tricked-out modded GBA and then have access to 20 years worth of portable gaming and it's... mostly legit! If only Stone Age Gamer's Everdrives would come back in stock...
  

Ofecks fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Aug 5, 2022

Ofecks fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Aug 8, 2022