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

Tag: jaleco

  • 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

  • Bases Loaded (1990)

    Bases Loaded (1990)

    Wait, it only took a year to make a baseball game that’s this much better than 1989’s Baseball? Are you kidding me? I’m starting to think this “Nintendo” company doesn’t know what they’re doing!

    Bases Loaded was a long-running franchise on the NES, so it stood to reason that Tose (and by extension Jaleco) would want to get a version out quick for their first western release on the Game Boy. America was surely craving quality baseball on the brick at this point, especially after Nintendo struck out the previous year, and Tose delivered exactly that.

    There’s no twist to this writeup. I was genuinely surprised at how well this played! Responsive batting, deeper pitch mechanics where you set the target location then adjust your pitch type, and fielding that doesn’t feel like you’re playing on the moon! Bases Loaded’s big thing was showing the game from the pitcher’s mound rather than the plate and that makes its way into this port too. Later NES games in the franchise went so far as to flip the positioning of the field while on defense, which my muscle memory hates, so I’m glad that’s not what we’re doing here.

    Where this differs from its NES counterpart is mostly the presentation. Lack of color aside, you’d be forgiven for not realizing this was Bases Loaded at all! Players are chibified, though not quite to the extent of a Power Pros bobblehead, and the perspective swaps depending on if you’re batting or pitching. This is peak link cable “each player gets their own screen, we can actually show them what they want to see” gaming for 1990! Sure we lose out on the crunchy voice samples the original game had, but that’s a small price to pay for a game that arguably plays a bit better than its dad!

    There are some funky omissions from the actual sport, most notably not being able to bean a batter with the ball. It just phases through them and counts as a ball! That’s weird! I also didn’t manage to get an infield fly to happen despite intentionally popping a few awful hits entirely on purpose. Quality dingers, though? Very much on the menu. Lofting the ball past the screen’s boundaries and watching the fielders scramble to the wall brings me such joy when it’s done even halfway decently, and BL does it just a bit better than that! You can adjust your swing with up and down, meaning every at bat is an opportunity to hold down and send that ball to the parking lot. There’s even a proper home run celebration! Sure it’s not a blowout, but they tried!

    I may be feeling a bit too generous in the wake of how rough Nintendo’s first party offering was, but I really enjoyed this port of Bases Loaded! It does everything you’d expect a baseball game of this era to do and not an iota more, but does it well. Snatching a stand-bound ball out of the air inches from a child’s hands makes me feel powerful.

    3.5/5