Tag: game boy

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (1991)

Let me head off a question at the pass: why this game in particular? It’s a sequel and I haven’t played the original. What gives?

When I was a kid we had a local drug store down the street. A corner of it was eventually converted into a fairly weak video and game rental kiosk with some of the weirdest offerings you can imagine. They rented Game Boy games, which is kind of a terrible idea! My Mom was kind enough to snag a game for me to try now and then, and this was one of ’em. I played it for a weekend, got my ass beat, and we turned it in. After Cubix I figured hey, why not stop by while I was in the licensed game neighborhood?

I’m a 90s kid, which means I was born too late to care about TMNT in its heyday and born too early to care about any of the reboots. None of these goobers mean anything to me. I don’t even know who any of these characters are beyond the titular turts and their rat dad. Apparently someone I beat to death in this was named Baxter Stockman? That’s ridiculous.

You know what I do hold in high esteem? 90s Konami, baby. If there’s one thing you should take away from this writeup, let it be that this game’s soundtrack is yet another collection of impossibly catchy drumlines and kinetic treble. No other company of this era was so reliably producing 8 bit jams that make you want to beat the shit out of people like Konami. I have a working theory that they’re going to end up being one of my favorite entertainment conglomerates as I keep playing these. There are other games of theirs on this confounded handheld device that I already know to be bangers, and I haven’t even played GBC Metal Gear Solid.

I’ve gotten this far in and I haven’t even talked about the game itself yet. This is for a very simple reason: there’s not a lot to talk about. This is a pretty middling arcade-style beat ’em up, and by that I mean it’s full of sequences that feel like they’re more designed to munch quarters than provide much for challenge. It’s not excruciatingly hard, though the last level’s a bit of a bastard. Instead the anchor around your neck will be those shell boys kind of sucking at this whole “ninja” thing.

All 4 turtles are playable here, only differentiated by their weapons on account of the lack of color. Donatello’s stick is the best one and it isn’t particularly close. Barely any non-boss enemies have more than 1 HP, so the extra reach and slower swing speed is basically never a drawback. By contrast we have Raphael, who attacks with a dinner fork and cannot be bothered to extend his arm past 90 degrees. He just does high speed curls with the damn things and that makes him almost useless against bosses, who get i-frames after each hit. I ended up using him a lot, not because I liked him, but specifically because I hated him and used him to eat damage while scouting new levels instead of the boys I actually wanted to use.

Bizarrely, these heavy shell-havers are amazing jumpers and awful walkers. Note that I said “walk”, not run. You don’t do that here. Every level that isn’t an autoscroller is paced at a slow trudge, frequently flipping back and forth to slap baddies on both sides. There is an interesting mechanical detail where you can hit left or right while swinging and the hitbox remains active, which you’ll need to get the hang of immediately because this game constantly throws dudes at you from all directions. This is, unsurprisingly, easiest to accomplish with Don’s bigass stick.

The levels themselves are reasonably varied, but that doesn’t go far when the challenge mostly ramps up by way of just putting more shit on the screen. Why are there so many chompy robot dogs and Chopping Mall drones endlessly streaming out of every crevice? Konami knew damn well what they were doing too. So many sections end with an apology ‘za, often obtained by interrupting a goon’s succulent Italian meal with a stabbing. In true beat’emup tradition it can be completed hitless through liberal applications of jumpkick, but the margins are razor thin. I did no such thing. Shit, I popped two continues on the last level (which just dumps you back to the start, but like hell I was starting over to keep my score) because I never got the hang of not getting shot in the head by turrets. Raph’s just gonna stay in jail forever, and frankly that just means more pizza for the turtles that matter.

2.5/5

01/07/2026
Cubix: Robots For Everyone – Race ‘N Robots (2001)

I’m being informed by The Board that it is too late to get my domain fees back for this website. My request and its subsequent rejection were the result of the realization that I will have to play so much licensed trash. This was an era where most were farmed out to studios that were geared for speed and quantity. Not all of them could be Acclaim!

In what must have been some sort of cosmic joke on the whole of South Korea, Cinepix ended up having 3DO publish the adaptations of their ReBoot-looking-ass cartoon. 3DO promptly went into its death throes, though not before coughing out a second Cubix game and one last Army Men spinoff. I’d like to think the show itself was somehow responsible, like a particularly shitty Ring situation with a much longer turnaround. “You will die in 547 days” just isn’t quite as haunting.

Can you tell I don’t want to talk about this? C: RFE – R’NR’s most notable quality is that horrendous acronym. What do you want me to say about a Micro Machines clone this lousy? I whipped my fat metal bee around corners for a total of about half an hour, and a dozen races later I was informed that I was Number One Super The Best at doing so. The closest thing to an interesting design decision is the game’s item system. If you touch a blue balloon you immediately get a powerup. If you touch a red one the game kicks your robot in the lugnuts. Cool! Good! Cool and good!

Cubix is nothing. This is a nothing game for a nothing property made by a soon-to-be-nothing publisher and flashed onto nothing cartridges that are now so cheap they see use as wall insulation. Every party involved accomplished more interesting things than this. 3DO’s history is so long and storied that I can’t even get into it here, Cinepix got to work on an Appleseed adaptation, and did you know Blitz Games is also at fault for Fuzion Frenzy? I’d say that explains a lot if I knew what the fuck that explained. Maybe they just hated video games and mirth.

1.5/5

01/07/2026
Super R.C. Pro-Am (1991)

What? You thought this would be a SNES game? Ha ha! That Super ain’t load bearing, you silly billy! Fuck you! It’s the Game Boy!

R.C. Pro-Am rules. This is known. R.C. Pro-Am 2 eventually sacrificed just a bit of the first one’s focus on blistering speed due to zooming the camera out, but more than made up for it with better track design, wackier hazards, and shopping. Super lands in the middle, which is to say it has the former’s simpler courses, the latter’s slower speed, and of course no shopping. It also feels a smidge more slippery than I remember the other two being. It’s a testament to how perfectly Rare nailed the original that this is as enjoyable as it is despite that.

GB Pro-Am is a pretty lean offering. You fire it up, it throws some splash screens at you, and the game just kinda starts. The objective is the same as the original: race while collecting things, because Rare couldn’t help themselves even before the N64 arrived and the Collectivitus metastasized. Here that means Scrabble tiles that spell Nintendo, upgrades on the track, and weapons to ruin your fellow racers’ expensive R.C. cars. I saved my allowance for a month to finally get this thing and you, what, shot it with a missile in my first race? What the fuck, man? How’d you even install that? Why don’t we have those?

Anyway yeah, that’s all you do. Eventually you’ll spell NINTENDO like a good lil consumer and get a new car, fully stripped of upgrades of course, so you can just keep doing it ad infinitum. I say that like I haven’t done this plenty of times – turns out even when R.C. Pro-Am is at its worst, it’s still quite good.

3.5/5

01/07/2026
Galaga: Destination Earth (2000)

Hey, quick question for Pipe Dream Interactive: why? Why this? Why any of this? Galaga is basically a perfect video game, why would you do this to it? Hasbro was going to approve whatever you turned over, that much was clear, but have you no pride? Failing that, no shame?

This is a godawful Space Invaders game with a spotty Galaga coat of paint. If it wasn’t for the tractor beams and double ships it would be unrecognizable as Galaga. You still shoot vertically, but the play field scrolls horizontally so you can’t see all the enemies at once, there’s a moderate amount of sprite jitter only when it can do the most harm, the technicolor background jpgs look like shit and are so visually busy that they make it hard to see the bullets, and every time you finish a wave it does a stop/start transition that makes the whole thing just feel awful.

It’s not even satisfying once you adapt to how rickety it is! If you get a double ship it’s a breeze, if you’re down to a single it’s a Sisyphus reenactment on crutches, and either way you’re going to want to fling yourself down that hill. There’s just no fun to be had here beyond poking fun at its ugly-ass menus and stage transitions. I’m sorry I said Backloggd users don’t actually play games, alright? Y’all got this right on the money, this sucks ass.

1.5/5

01/07/2026
Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. (1999)

1.7? One-point-seven average score on Backloggd, and that’s after my rating??? Do we not actually play the video games we rate on there? When Mario kills a thousand turtles it’s “cute” and “peak” and “formative game design”, but when Acclaim/NEON has you shoot a couple dozen it sucks? Boris Triebel was the director on this, did you think one of the creators of P. P. Hammer and His Pneumatic Weapon suddenly forgot how to make a damn video game?

A terrible opinion that I earnestly, sincerely hold is that Acclaim was overall a good publisher. Good, not great, but good! Sure they were a license farm for the most part and stuff like Chef’s Luv Shack is indefensible, but a lot of their output represented better attempts at adaptation than most in their heyday could manage. Armorines, though, may as well had been one of their original IPs for all it mattered. Even Valiant doesn’t consider Armorines worth remembering; you have to hit up the Wayback Machine to see it acknowledged on any of their sites. These people want you to remember Bloodshot and they can barely be bothered to add this to their long-ass list?

Anyway, Acclaim realized the Armorines squabbling with their handlers in D.C. wasn’t going to make for much of a video game and opted to just make Dollar Store Satire-Free Starship Troopers for the 3D consoles. The GBC game developed by NEON took the same tack, but turns it into a top down shooter that’s far better than most on the system. The criticisms I’ve seen of it are that it’s easy to get lost, is annoyingly hard, looks ugly, and repeats itself. I’m here to tell you that exactly one of those is true.

Armorines GBC sees you playing as an exterminator named Sgt. Snider having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The escalation of said day is fairly gradual and your power scales to match. At the start of the game you’re using a glorified bug zapper, weak and limited in range. The enemies are similarly tiny, both in size and number. Not the best first impression! Fortunately you get guns fairly quickly, the enemies get more dangerous, and the reasons to complain start to fade. You even get to destroy a few oil derricks midway through! Armorines confirmed based!

Your inputs are movement, A to shoot with free aim while moving, and B to shoot while strafing. Being able to swap between both is a godsend as several rooms demand that flexibility, though for whatever reason you can’t strafe while aiming diagonally. The last button of note, select, pulls up a reminder of your current objective in case you took a bit too long of a break. Nifty! It’s a simple control scheme without any kind of movement tricks and the gameplay is built around that, opting to gradually increase the difficulty of its combat encounters rather than do too much with level hazards until the late game. There’s even a nice QoL touch where enemies announce their awareness of you with various squawks, even when entirely offscreen, so you almost always get a heads up before things get spicy.

Environmental interactables only require you to walk into them, so you’re unlikely to miss important items or objectives. This is further assisted by a color palette that makes good use of the GBC, meaning it’s the polar opposite of its 3D counterpart, which loves nothing more than dumping you into the darkest bug-filled caves this side of an Earth Defense Force game. It’s surprisingly easy to parse for a Game Boy game, and I never found myself unsure of how to progress with one exception in the second to last area, which was only because I needed to walk up a cliff and just kind of assumed I couldn’t because it was the same color as the walls. Look, I’m dumb as hell and got through this, you can do it too.

Odds are if you’re on this website you won’t struggle either. Armorines is honestly pretty easy past like, level 2. I didn’t lose a life until I touched an instant death trap in the last area, and was shocked when the game informed me that I had 11 more banked that I ended up not needing. Health pickups are generous, enemy placements are fair, their respawns are nonexistent for the first 3/4 of the game (in a nice touch they wait until there’s a thematic justification for doing so), and your weapons get crazy powerful by the end. I was a particularly big fan of the short ranged plasma gun and the laser, and the game likes to hand you special weapons for boss encounters so you’ll never be stuck with something that doesn’t work. The greatest sin this game commits in terms of its gameplay is having a fairly weak spread gun, but you’ll make do. My only piece of advice is to break out the Ghouls & Ghosts tactics and skip picking up the lightning gun whenever it shows up, that thing never gets meaningfully better.

The only notable criticism I have for this is fairly obvious – all you’re ever really doing is moving through levels and shooting guys to secure the prize. I’d be more annoyed if the areas weren’t varied or if the game wasn’t so short. We’re talking a couple hours tops here, and while they aren’t amazing or anything they’re hardly dull unless you just don’t like the gameplay in its own right. If this came out on the NES it’d be heralded as a “hidden gem” on every retro YouTube channel, but instead it was a Game Boy game with an Acclaim logo, which means it can’t possibly be good, right guys? Like and subscribe so you won’t miss when your next opinion arrives!

I will always advocate for playing games past the first level. First impressions aren’t everything, especially when you’re sampling seemingly-infinite roms for games that were meant to be stuck with, not taste-tested back to back. I just wanted to play an action game a bit better than Annihilator – imagine my shock when I was actually having fun! There’s a very real chance this is the best piece of Armorines media that’s ever existed, and you know now that I say that, maybe Valiant was right to chuck it into the memory hole.

…seriously though, Acclaim released some of the best games of the era. All the Turoks are good, even Rage Wars, and Shadow Man is better than Ocarina! I’m not afraid to say it! Fuck you, nostalgia police! Re-Volt is better than Mario Kart 64! I liked Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls! Get your hands off me, you pigs! Just wait until I tell you how South Park Rally isn’t even a bad game! AIIIIIIIEEEE!

3.5/5

01/07/2026