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

Category: game boy

  • Wicked Plague (2025)

    Wicked Plague (2025)

    I picked a hell of a time to get back into Game Boy games.

    Have you seen this ModRetro shit? People are fucking pissed at having to confront the ethics of an amusements company being directly attached to the military industrial complex. You’d think they would have given any amount of a shit about the decades of precedent for this exact kind of thing – where do you think FPGA even came from? – but I’m glad people are at least being a little bit more conscious of what they consume. Here’s hoping it’ll stick when it isn’t just expensive gunmetal Game Boys.

    You know who I came away from all this kerfuffle respecting? A handful of the devs who signed games for distribution with ModRetro. Don’t get me wrong, having partnered with them in the first place is indicative of a lapse of judgement at best and outright malice at worst, but when I see the devs respond to the announcement by making their $40 cartridge free or close enough on Itch? That’s the good shit, that’s how you actually strike a blow, even when it’s directly at cost to yourself. And then you have the folks like Locus-motion, developer of Wicked Plague, who straight up encourages people to track the rom down should that be the route you want/need to go. Good on y’all.

    …makes the rating seem a bit weird, huh?

    Wicked Plague should be a knockout. It makes incredible use of GB Studio, an engine I’m used to seeing struggle with grid based walking simulators. They should be using this thing as a case study for what the tool can do. Movement? Kinda Soma-era Castlevania, albeit with fewer tricks. Music? Hits the vibes perfectly. The spritework? Holy shit. If it wasn’t for the aspect ratio I might have thought this was a GBA game. If this’d come out back in the day it would have blown minds and destroyed penises.

    Then you play the actual game, and it’s pretty solid! Bit vanilla, bit simple, borderline linear despite its clear inspirations, but I’m not really upset at chaining combats and checking closets for energy drinks (your abilities return by curing your hangover via chugging cans, it’s a nice thematic touch). This could really be something! Why…why am I already at the top of the tower?

    Oh. Oh it’s over. It’s over in under two hours. That’s why. Wait, ModRetro charges forty dollars for this? Hahahahahaha get fucked.

    Look: my intent is not to criticize a dev for releasing a short game at a high price, especially a freshman solo effort that’s this polished. Decisions like that rarely fall to the dev, and besides, I love short games! I spent roughly 5 years almost exclusively playing and reviewing indies. Digestible games I can beat in a weeknight or two are my jam. But Wicked Plague doesn’t just end, it can barely wait to end, and it’s not like the publisher didn’t know that. It only just introduces movement options beyond the double jump before credits roll, and I know I didn’t miss anything of note because you need those to get to and beat the boss in the first place. I 100%’d this thing inside a Steam refund window. Imagine buying a Chromatic to own the drone strike dislikers or whatever, spending Analogue Pocket amounts of money, only to wrap your new game before you even need a bathroom break. Sure that’s authentic to a lot of Game Boy games, but is that really the kind of authenticity anyone wants?

    Then there’s the translation. Again I am not faulting the dev at all here, English isn’t their first language. I’m pointing the finger directly at ModRetro. You’re supposed to be a publisher and partner – fucking act like it and make this shit comprehensible. This game reads terribly. The characters can barely hold a conversation; they just kind of speak at each other, words tumbling every which way that rarely mean exactly what they intend. It never got in the way of actually completing the game but that’s only on account of there being so little game to complete in the first place.

    This feels like an Emperor’s Clothes moment in a lot of ways. ModRetro is putting drone-compatible lipstick on Itch games, y’all. Hopefully they don’t fry consoles like Limited Run’s! If you want to overpay for a fancy cart just talk to Incube8, not that you have to given that they’re reasonable enough to offer digital versions.

    Incredible things have been happening in the Game Boy scene over the last several years. I’m not naive enough to think that consumers will smarten up long-term when they can’t even stop giving Microsoft money, but I at least hope that when they’re done making easy dunks on a magnesium Little Tikes hoop they’ll exhibit a bit of curiosity as to why people would want it in the first place. Just know that Wicked Plague doesn’t warrant being an accessory to an aspiring war criminal.

    2.5/5

    Itch page here, though the game is currently broadly unavailable aside from the physical cart. I recommend waiting for an eventual fully independent release.

  • Penguin Wars (1990)

    Penguin Wars (1990)

    You know in Europe they called this King of the Zoo? That’s a way better title. At least both games feature the same amount of weaponized bowling.

    This is an early Game Boy game and yoooooou can tell! It’s incredibly simple: there’s an animal on each side of a bigass table. They have 5 balls per side. The balls are rolled across the table at the opponent, with variable power depending on how long you charge a shot or what your character is good at. The winner of the round is determined 1 of 2 ways: getting rid of all of the balls on your side, or having fewer balls on your side when time runs out.

    There’s also a very slight dodgeball element? If a rolling ball makes contact with a player they get stunned for a bit, which again, is a variable stat. This is, predictably, quite exploitable against the AI! My lil Harvest Moon-ass cow won most matches by beaning its opponent upside the head until the ref had to step in. I say it’s slight, not because you’re not smacking people, but because the roll is fairly slow and easy to dodge unless you get caught charging a shot too late. In a mildly impressive feat of programming balls can bounce off each other mid-roll, but 3D-ish effects hadn’t been fully figured out on the Game Boy just yet so it’s pretty hard to gauge doing that on purpose.

    You’d be forgiven for thinking that there not being much here means it’s a lesser GB game. Hell, depending on who you ask you may be right. I don’t agree with that hypothetical hater! The Game Boy is excellent at these sorts of bite-sized experiences meant to be played for no more than half an hour or so at a time, and Penguin Wars is exactly that. It feels like an bartop arcade cab set to free play in tiny form, and while the novelty of having that in the pocket has long since worn off for many, I still find value in this sort of design. At the very least, it’s fun to chant “somebody’s getting fuuuuucked“ at a mouse as you continuously launch bowling balls at its tiny frame.

    3/5

  • Toad In the Hole (2022)

    Toad In the Hole (2022)

    I don’t know what inspired Louie Zong to make a playable chiptune EP but I’m certainly not going to complain.

    Toad In the Hole sees our hero, the titular toad, hunting down the Jump Stone. The reason for doing so isn’t revealed until late but you’ll be happy to see how it resolves. It’s a pretty standard platformer, with your silly lil guy waddling side to side, hopping, and croaking very loudly on command.

    Look, as a video game it’s whatever but that’s not why anyone is here. TITH is cute, funny, and has some solid jams with the kind of funk and humor we’ve come to expect from him. It’s super short – we’re talking like 10 minutes – and in this case I think that’s a positive. Means you can play it twice in quick succession! Maybe have toad do something else with his newfound jump powers!

    You should at least fall in a pit once, for the bit.

    3/5

    Itch page here!

  • Kirby’s Block Ball (1995)

    Kirby’s Block Ball (1995)

    You mind a personal intro? Actually, fuck it, I’m just gonna. This one’s already entirely self indulgent anyway.

    I’m planning a move. The farthest I’ve ever done, in fact. Lotta anxieties around that, lemme tell you! One opportunity this avails me is a chance to trim my belongings down, which includes my game collection. Don’t feel bad for me – I genuinely see this as a positive! I’m absolutely not a minimalist, but I am one of those weirdos whose mental state deteriorates proportionally with clutter. As I picked through my stuff playing “should it stay or should it go” I got to my GB/GBA carts, a pre-trimmed collection I wasn’t planning on reducing given that it all fits in a tiny container, but I picked through ’em anyway and locked eyes with Kirby for the umpteenth time. Yeah, sure, why not.

    Kirby’s Block Ball was the first video game I ever owned. Not played, but owned, mine. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid but my fascination with friends’ systems combined with 90’s purchasing power eventually saw my Mom and me heading to a Target with intent, then walking out with a Game Boy Pocket bundle. She scouted that deal like a hawk and I was absolutely not going to complain regardless of the included cart; video games were the sickest shit ever and now I was going to have one! And my system was red!!!

    I feel like in hindsight she probably realized a Game Boy was the wrong choice from a financial perspective. Sure a home console would have cost more up front, but the money we saved on AAs would have paid for college. Sorry mom!

    Little me eventually got Mario Land 2 and was gifted some other carts here and there, but Kirby’s Block Ball always remained a favorite. I’d go back to it to chase high scores, or do that weird child thing where you fixate on a very small piece of an overall package, which in my case meant finding a level that allowed me to trigger the Air Hockey minigame as quickly as possible and 3-0ing that thing over and over again. I wonder if it explains a lot about my tastes and tendencies. Of course my long-term entry point was a weird-ass spinoff nobody played. I was always going to be this way.

    As an adult with critical faculties who’s played thousands upon thousands of games and even occasionally gotten paid to do so, my relationship with the medium has changed. I’ve had my sentimentality burnt off by sheer exposure, my enthusiasm for games remaining just as intense, but manifesting in an entirely different way. I am fully capable of separating myself from my experience and evaluating the game in front of me, I swear. Watch!

    Kirby’s Block Ball is more clever than it is good. It’s a wildly innovative take on Breakout and its ilk, with Kirby’s transformations allowing for significantly more finesse and the stages feeling almost more like puzzles than the traditional walls’o’bricks, but its refusal to layer its ideas until the final world limits its replayability and to some extent its appeal. It almost feels distrustful of the player (which to be fair was likely to be a literal child so that may have been warranted) and their ability to retain all of the mechanics, so it almost never asks that you utilize more than one at a time. Combine this with slow ball speed and stages that trap your ball inside unbreakable blocks, and you’ll often find yourself watching the game play itself as you think about how you could do it better.

    …ok but also, like, this game is sick as fuck sometimes? The powerups are mostly movement-based but the Needle in particular letting you stick yourself back on a paddle to re-aim? OH my god. In keeping with Kirby as a franchise the bosses are hardly a challenge, but I really like how their attacks can shrink your paddles down to a single star, with all the ball control and defensive issues that implies. I like the “border line” par scores you need to achieve on each level in order to get to Dedede, and how that final gauntlet does ask you to tie everything you learned together for the most part. They demand you fully master each area as you need to generate as many extra lives as possible so you can convert them to points at the end. Neat! Really, genuinely neat! I’m doing the Marge potato meme with the cart right now, you gotta believe me.

    In many ways I believe nostalgia to be a poison. If you’re constantly looking backwards, the best case scenario is that you’ll stay where you are. I’m especially distrustful of anyone who’s overly engaged in the “retro” hustle. No amount of money or time can buy your childhood back. We need to be willing to have new experiences, take risks, push yourself to become someone better. I don’t go so far as some and say that people experiencing this yearning are fashy “retvrn” types or anything, that’s incredibly uncharitable towards most folks, but I do feel pity. Surrounding yourself with artifacts, the toys you had or maybe wish you had, will stunt and barricade you more than support you. Injection molded plastic makes for a poor foundation.

    The thing is, these old games? They hold up in their own way, even when they aren’t great. It helps that they were designed to just be games, not lifelong commitments with complex monetization schemes beyond what to set the MSRP to on a retail shelf. The state of contemporary gaming is sickening, dog. I hate that if I turn my Switch on the first thing I’ll see is an advertisement. I walk past the Xbox in the living room that we basically only use for movies and am reminded that Microsoft is actively committing war crimes right now. I hop on my PC to play my beloved indies and some bigass multiplayer mess is trying its damnedest to squeeze money and attention out of me, uneven value prop be damned. I didn’t ask for any of this shit. I don’t want any of this shit. This industry is unfathomably ass. I just want to immerse myself in someone’s interactive world, to dissect their ideas, to see what they wanted me to see, to play, and to come out of it with something to talk about. Instead I’m surrounded by clutter, only it’s against my will and I’m not allowed to clean it.

    The Game Boy is a toy. It was designed by a toy company so they could sell more toys compatible with it. It was relatively complex from an engineering perspective, but as a user it couldn’t be much simpler: a d-pad, a few buttons, a slot to pop a game into, and a power switch to fire it up. You play until you flick that the other way or run out of battery, then you go about your day, hopefully a bit happier for having had the experience and maybe willing to try more carts. It was still transparently transactional, but it was only as invasive as you allowed it to be. When I turn Kirby’s Block Ball off and put it back in the box where I keep these old things, I will not receive push notifications enticing me to pick it back up. If I choose to it will only be because I have genuine interest in doing so.

    I like that. I like being able to say “when”, and I don’t know that I fully realized how much I missed it. I want to retain that agency over my attention, even if it means I get some funny looks or miss out on the flavor of the month. I want to choose anticipation over trepidation.

    Also, god damn this game’s music goes so hard. Have you heard this boss theme? Do you have any idea how hard I popped off when they finally acknowledged its existence again??? I didn’t even play Kirby Fall Guys or whatever, but if you give me slap bass this good I will always bob my head on beat approvingly.

    I’m not giving this one a rating.

  • What? Why? Why this? Why the Game Boy?

    What? Why? Why this? Why the Game Boy?

    In short: because I’m a fan of taking an incredibly stupid endeavor extremely seriously.

    In long: because I’m a fan of taking an incredibly stupid endeavor extremely seriously, and I think the Game Boy is a uniquely interesting platform for this kind of sort-of-impossible project.

    Look, I am aware of how many games exist on the DMG, Game Boy Color, and so on. Loosely. It’s a whole heck of a lot, and funnily enough the number isn’t even entirely agreed upon*! Trying to play every Game Boy game – and I mean all of ’em! – just isn’t realistic. It’s arguably not even possible!

    What I do intend to do is use this site as a place to put a whole lot of games writing focused on a single, central concept. I’ve been at this thing for a while, and am actively at it elsewhere for games that are typically a bit bigger than 160×144, but I keep finding myself overwhelmed with the state of the modern games industry and marketplace. My Kirby’s Block Ball piece kind of elaborates on that, among other things.

    I like the Game Boy. I like that it’s wholly disconnected from the Internet Gamer Experience that makes my brain hurt. I like that indies are developing for it and that it’s easier than ever to get into the platform no matter what devices you have access to. Most of them are even backlit! Sick!

    So what I’m gonna do is play as many of these things as I can, see, then I’m gonna rank ’em. With all due respect to Jeff Gerstmann’s established scientific convention, I don’t think the touch’n’rank methodology is gonna cut it. Unless stated otherwise every game featured on here is gonna be completed. We’re keeping it super lean too: title image, text, done. I am not going to pay WordPress extra money just to store all my screenshots when I can do that myself, for free.

    This site will run as long as it stays fun to do so. Its entries will be on the short side, as the games tend to be. There will not be a schedule, because this is entirely based on my own personal interests, whims, and free time. If you have a Game Boy game you want me to play, you are more than welcome to tell me so in the comments or via wackgameboyzone at gmail! I promise nothing!**

    With apologies to Gunpei Yokoi, welcome to the Wack Game Boy Zone.

    *Backloggd is not a real source of anything beyond fun writing, but I wanted a third link for the bit.

    **Unless you send me a review copy of something new and I accept it, of course. This may not be a professional website, but I am still unfortunately a professional.