wack game boy zone. there's a small doodle of a game boy above zone

Category: game boy

  • Feed IT Souls: DOME Edition (2025)

    Feed IT Souls: DOME Edition (2025)

    Feed IT Souls is an angry game. I suspect it wouldn’t exist without that anger. This game is its opinion on its subject matter, fully entangled and intertwined, and it hates that subject. If you’re reading a blog about indie, artist-made Game Boy games in current year, you’ll probably find something to agree with here. I have thoughts on those thoughts, and will elaborate on them in a minute, but I’d be doing FIS a disservice if I didn’t talk about it as a video game as well, because it’s pretty good at being one!

    This is a platformer, and as such you have a jump. Said jump lasts about exactly as long as you hold the button until you hit its apex, meaning movement feels responsive, weighty, and most importantly, precise. The levels take this precision into account, demanding accuracy or a trip back to the last checkpoint, but never becoming so challenging that it feels unreasonable thanks to the quality of the player control.

    FIS is technically a metroidvania, albeit a considerably distilled one, and as a result you gain some movement tricks over the course of the game. I typically dread when platformers grant significant midair controls as the level design and challenge tends to suffer as a result. You’ll be spared from me complaining about double jumps and their consequences today, because FIS’s execution of aerial movement is better than most. The dash here combines movement with offensive utility in a far more satisfying manner than many comparable games, maintaining the game’s pace and precision, without ever feeling like it’s trying to fit too many functions onto the Game Boy’s layout. It’s satisfying! I’d have liked to see a few more hazards, as well as some more challenges (optional or otherwise) that really squeezed this moveset for everything it had, but I’m willing to chalk this up more to my enjoying the gameplay enough to want more of it than any failure of design.

    A playthrough of FIS will probably take most folks about an hour or so. I played carelessly, and spent a bit of extra time slithering in and out of the game’s many wall-vulvas at the end to grab the 3 eggs I missed for 100%, so I spent more time in the grime. I was never bored for a moment, and it opts to wrap up just before its ideas would start running out of steam. Let me reiterate though, you’re just as much here for this game’s ideas and catharsis as you are the hop’n’bop if not more so, and as a result this brisk pace only serves to strengthen what’s on offer.

    Alright, that’s the video game addressed! Now I get to call Elon Musk a loser on a website that talks about Game Boy games and have it actually be relevant! What a time to be alive.

    So yeah, that’s what this game is about. If you consider that a spoiler I apologize, but it has a bigass muskrat enemy as well as a ton of direct references to the man and his ceaseless posting pretty early in, so I don’t think I’m ruining anything by saying so. If anything I suspect a lot of folks would be a lot more interested in the game’s pitch if it just came right out and said it on the itch.io pa-oh wait, it does! It says anti-Musk right there! And people on the internet manage to be surprised or confused as to what this is trying to do? I get we’re here to play Game Boy games, but there isn’t even subtext! Come on y’all.

    Anyway! I think we’ve all earned a bit of Musk-bashing as a treat after being subjected to years of his dogshit opinions and suffering his continuous direct impact on our actual real lives. This game doesn’t even alter his actual words that much beyond recontextutalizing them for the MeatMars we find ourselves on. He’s just as petulant, idiotic, and pissy here as the real thing, ruining the lives of everyone around him in service of seeing his vision through, only to constantly change that vision when the realities of the situation prove it untenable then declare victory by super-genius anyway. With every shove of the goalposts more lives and skilled workers are lost, until the situation deteriorates to the point where he needs to upload his consciousness to a comically oversized smartphone and manufacture more help. Now your player character is the newest helping hand fresh off the conveyor belt, built to serve, unquestioning, lest you be thrown back in the meatgrinder and replaced with another. The greatest sin you commit in the eyes of your “creator” is reclaiming your agency. Apt!

    Look, I’m a writer. I like a clever work that I need to unpack as much as the next person who was failed by a public school gifted program. Subtlety can be useful, but it is but one tool of many in a writer’s belt, and sometimes it’s the wrong tool for the job. Sometimes precision instruments don’t get it done. Sometimes you just need a hammer. Feed IT Souls is a pneumatic one. I can’t call this the greatest Game Boy game I’ve played, indie or otherwise, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it from head to tail, both as a platformer and as a platform.

    4/5

  • Tennis (1989)

    Tennis (1989)

    “Mario” Tennis? We’ve already got that game at home! See, there’s Mario! He’s the one who keeps telling you how bad you are at serving!

    Consider that this was a Game Boy launch title, on a system that was a lot of people’s first exposure to Nintendo and its roster of marketable mascots. I would love to meet the person whose response to “Hey, do you like Mario?” would be “Who, the Tennis judge?”. He’s so out of place too, just sittin’ there watching completely normal dudes whack the ball around, surrounded by an audience of more normal dudes. If it wasn’t for the cutaways to his smiling face every time you foul, I’d have thought it was just an overt easter egg or something, but no! They want you to know that Mario is Here. Watching. Waiting.

    Beyond the ever present plumber, yeah this sure is a Tennis game. A hits fast but risks clipping the net, B lobs and travels slower. Your dpad input influences your shots and gives you a surprising amount of control, and it doesn’t do you the kindness of Mario Tennis when it comes to hitting the ball well outside of the lines. I initially chafed at Mario constantly telling me that the very-obviously-on-the-line balls weren’t, but grew to appreciate the amount of finesse this game’s hitting has. Makes for good multiplayer too!

    Where I have some gripes is the character movement. It, uh, sucks. You’re slow as hell, there’s no lunges or dives or anything, only waddle around and smack. It makes playing the net feel incredibly risky as you can position the ball better, but any wide lob will kill you dead without recourse. The game has 4 levels of difficulty as well, each making your opponent faster and boosting the ball speed, meaning the game becomes entirely about positioning.

    Actually, let’s talk about that speed for a second. Tennis goes fast as hell by levels 3 and 4. Where was this in Baseball? That game felt like you were playing in the vacuum of space, meanwhile Tennis had me gripping my GB a little too tightly as I rocked the pad back and forth rapidly, scrambling to keep the ball in play against a much stronger opponent. On level 4 it was almost more Ping Pong than Tennis and I consider that a feature. When you take the game on its terms and allow yourself to just play, Tennis manages to capture all of the intensity of actual matches surprisingly well despite, or in part because of, its simplicity. It’s just you, your opponent, and the ball. Oh, and Mario. Mario is there. Mario is always there.

    So is this as good as Mario Tennis, a game that came out over a decade later? Hahahaha, no! God no! That said, the more I played Tennis the more I came to enjoy it. Sure the movement is stiff, but the ball control and sheer speed is enough to make me appreciate it on its own merits. Turns out this “Nintendo” company actually can make a sports game! You love to see it, and I don’t mean the tennis score definition.

    3/5

  • Heiankyo Alien (1990)

    Heiankyo Alien (1990)

    It takes an enviable amount of confidence to call a game “THE JAPANESE MASTERPIECE” on your print ads, but Meldac had it like that back in the 90s. You don’t localize a game like Zombie Nation without being totally convinced it’s a good idea, and they were absolutely right to do so. Everyone say “Thank you, Meldac”.

    The history of Heiankyo Alien is as interesting as it is lengthy, a consequence of its original design emerging in the late 70s from a team at the University of Tokyo’s Theoretical Science division. That version is included on this cart as a bonus for the ludologically curious! It’s…definitely a game from the 70s that isn’t Space Invaders, but it represents a niche within a niche and predates the likes of Pac-Man by a year, so that’s neat.

    What immediately struck me was the sheer amount of personality contained in the new game’s rendition. The sprites are goofy and expressive, the movement is snappy, and the music, my god. HA has some of the best jams found on the system, combining traditional Japanese instrumentation in bloop-heavy Game Boy form with a modern edge that suits the retro-sci-fi-ness of the whole affair. Just phenomenal music to dig holes to.

    Oh yeah, that’s what this game is about! Aliens have descended in Heian era Japan and are scarfing down people in the streets. For whatever reason our little Kebiishi is only armed with a shovel, but he’s about to make it every alien’s problem. Gameplay sees you running through various mazes, digging holes, then burying aliens alive when they stumble into them. Any contact with them will see you devoured whole! The sprites for this are kinda fucked for the Game Boy, honestly! I guarantee at least a couple children had Heiankyo Alien Nightmares. God that’d make a good album name.

    So you’re playing a game of territory control. Your first order of business on any given board is to establish a safe zone that’ll prevent an ambush, then gradually expand it by filling and digging new holes further out, shifting from defense to offense as you gradually thin the aliens’ numbers. Placement of holes is critical as aliens won’t stay in them forever, and if another alien runs into a partially-buried pal they’ll immediately free them, which can see you getting chomped from what appeared to be a position of strength. Combine this with the alien movement behaviors being kinda random until the last one, who will immediately speed up and chase you to the ends of the screen, and you’ve got a game state that’s always comprehensible but never solved.

    Outside of a few environmental quirks like walls that open and shut or a boat you can scoot across sections of the level with later on, that really is all the rules to Heiankyo Alien. Yet from this simple foundation is built a game that I find fiendishly moreish. Approachable, moderately challenging, a bit lucky but always achievable, just perfectly calibrated arcade action. I’ve cleared this thing several times now – not an extraordinary feat, it’s pretty short – and my best run thus far saw me only losing 1 life. I want, no, need to perfect this thing eventually. I’ve got the alien brainworms and they can have all the gray matter they want.

    Transparently, Heiankyo Alien was going to top the current list no matter what. I’ve got a backlog of completed games to write about and keep trying to plug away at more, but unlike literally every other game I’ve played for this project I keep going back for more rounds of this instead, and that’s the strongest endorsement I could give. I’m not always gripped by arcade style games on console as they often lose something for the lack of quarters, joysticks, and secondhand smoke, but Heiankyo Alien fully transcends all of my preexisting hangups. It grips me in the kind of way only the best arcade games can, perfectly aligned with my brain chemistry, and I couldn’t be happier to give it its flowers 25 years later.

    That’s essentially the complete writeup. My original intent was to give this just shy of a perfect score given how slight its scope and completion time is, even though what’s on offer is excellent. Can I tell you what bumped this up to full marks, though?

    I traveled across the country to visit family recently, and was fortunate to get to spend a few days with my nephews and niece that are really little and love video games. If they aren’t playing some sort of big Nintendo release in the living room, they’re on their tablets playing games that even their parents have described as brain rot. At one point, after they expressed interest in the funny brick I was traveling with, I handed them my Game Boy with Heiankyo Alien ready to go and let them take turns figuring it out with minimal guidance.

    They were fascinated. It gripped them like most games don’t. They were actively experimenting, giving each other pointers on where to dig, how to dodge aliens, trying to predict their behaviors, and getting eaten over and over until bedtime. No ad break interruptions to earn resources, no connectivity issues, no distractions, only pure unleaded video game. They were so engaged that they even managed to share without fighting the entire time! That’s a small miracle!

    There’s just something about Heiankyo Alien that works on a level most games don’t, a true It factor, and for me that overcomes any complaint I could level at it. Heiankyo Alien forever.

    5/5

  • The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle (1989)

    The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle (1989)

    Every time I look at this title I feel compelled to correct it, but no, this is THE Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. The sequel is too! Not the third or fourth though, those are just Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 3 and…Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4? In? Featuring? These naming conventions are crazier than the castle itself!

    This is neither the time nor place nor author to regale you with the entire history of Crazy Castle and its various brand affiliations. Someone else on the internet can do that for you. I’m more interested in focusing on the game itself. Believe it or not I’ve never actually sat down and played any of these for more than a fleeting moment on a system I did not own. You absolutely knew someone who had it, probably played it on a bus ride or something, but the rate of exposure was far higher than the rate of actual direct play. Extremely cousin-core cartridge.

    This game, hell this entire series, has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Omnipresent and immediately recognizable, yet difficult to discern from one entry to another. Never loathed, rarely loved. I knew just how many of these were ahead of me so I figured I should get through one relatively early on in this project’s life, y’know? Figure out where I stand in the Crazy Castle Discourse. Turns out? Pretty alright! If you were purchasing a Game Boy in the year of our lord 1989, I’d even go so far as to say that this’d be one of the better choices!

    The game design here is leaner than rabbit meat, to the point where our titular Bunny can’t even jump. Super weird! Bugs is forced to hoof it through 80 levels of slightly increasing difficulty, Scooby-Doo-ing his way through connected doors and pipes to collect all the carrots in the stage. Several other marketable mascots try to prevent him from eating his veggies. What does all of this have to do with the rescue of Honey Bunny, the stated motivation in the manual? Fuck if I know! She’s not even shown in the game at any point. I gotta imagine she was abducted for sinister Lolafication purposes and Bugs was just too slow to save her. Or maybe…maybe he didn’t want to? Gasp!

    I said I wanted to focus on the game and here I am writing Lola Bunny fanfiction, exactly what Al Gore built the internet to do. It’s fun! It plays well! Movement isn’t exactly snappy but it is responsive, and little touches like continuing to run straight when you finish ascending or descending stairs by holding the same input shows a level of attention to detail in the execution that many games of this era lacked. I didn’t even mind the small set of jaunty little tunes that repeat throughout the thing! The levels are as varied as you could reasonably expect given that there are so many of the fuckers with so few mechanics, and I was surprised at how rarely I felt screwed by the fact that you can only see what lies ahead by scrolling the screen.

    You know who deserves an entire paragraph? Sylvester. There are a handful of enemies and they all behave a bit differently in a Pac-Man ghost kinda way, but none of them compare to the Blinky-esque purrsuit this tuxedo’d toolbag puts you through. Once he has your scent he’s going to follow you at a reasonable pace forever. Much like a mall cop who spotted a teenager pillaging an unattended free sample tray, avoiding him is mostly a matter of having marginally better cardio and not getting distracted by the siren smell of Auntie Anne’s.

    It’s somewhat telling that an enemy who can actually follow you represents the zenith of Crazy Castle 1’s difficulty. There’s a bit of reputation for challenge with this one, but I have to imagine those are childhood memories talking because it’s kind of a breeze. I never lost enough lives to require a password and only found myself using them to take breaks, because 80 floors is just too crazy for one sitdown, and the game saw fit to top my lives off when I did! Anybody could make it through this if their attention span holds. Admittedly this thing is repetitive and I wouldn’t fault anyone for dropping it, but I’m weak for arcady progression and there’s just enough tension in these carrot heists to make pulling them off satisfying.

    Anyway, yeah! That game your weird classmate owned turned out to be pretty good, no matter how unmemorable it may be! My hottest take from it is that I’d rather play this than Lode Runner. In conclusion I just want to inform you that upon clearing level 80 Bugs just waddles onto a mostly blank screen from nowhere before exclaiming, and I am presenting it verbatim down to the formatting:


    CONGRATURATIONS !!

    YOU ARE

    GOOD PLAYER !!

    And you know what, Kemco? I am. I am good player. Thank you for noticing. I think this game has made me dumber.

    3/5

  • In Your Face (1990)

    In Your Face (1990)

    Oh god dammit Jaleco, I was just saying so many nice things about you. You’re going to make me look like a fool and I do that enough already! The site calls itself wack for chrissake – you’re damaging what little credibility I’ve left for myself!

    In Your Face is a waste of 41 kilobytes. This is the barest of bones, devoid of even marrow to sustain you. It’s kind of a riff on Jordan vs Bird, which is already not a great starting point. Don’t worry though, the GB port of that mess didn’t show up for another two years and it’s somehow worse!

    Anyway, IYF. It’s shooting contest ball, meaning you get one hoop and need to run to half court a lot. The modes on offer are 1v1, 2v2, and Off. You can futz with the settings – time, score, duration, etc. That last one should be set as short as possible.

    Once you actually hit the court the game start emitting a horrible set of bloops that legitimately had me wondering if my speaker was ok for a moment. It sounds…wet? Waterlogged, somehow? I’ve listened to this game’s music with and without headphones now and there’s just something viscerally unpleasant about it. It makes me tense my neck up whenever it kicks on and I mildly regret looking it up one last time for the purposes of this writeup.

    Then you play it and everything goes off the rails. The game consists of getting possession of the ball via a semi-reliable steal, sprinting up to the hoop, and triggering the canned dunk animation. Taking longer shots is a good way to lose. The only chance your opponent has of stopping a layup is getting there first, and I legitimately could not tell you what does or doesn’t qualify for a block. I think you need to jump first? Maybe? Normally I’d play a few more times to figure that kind of thing out, but I’m not going to do that for two reasons:

    • I won my first game against the CPU
    • this game sucks

    What Jaleco has demonstrated here is that if you strip baseball down to its essence you end up with a relatively simple, but enjoyable game. Distilling basketball in a similar manner could work, but not when you take all but 2-4 of the players with it. Get this mess out of my face and onto the ugly part of the list.

    1/5