Tag: nintendo

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

02/02/2026
Yakuman (1989)

“Oh here we go“, you’re probably thinking. “Western writers always dismiss Mahjong games. Let’s see how he clowns on it. I bet he doesn’t even know what furiten means!“

Guess again, pessimistic reader I’ve invented in my head! I love Mahjong! Especially riichi! Many years ago I learned another variant from an auntie as is tradition, then got into riichi over lockdown and never looked back. I was legitimately excited to try this one as it’s been a minute since I’ve clacked some tiles. How was this implementation?

Ehhhhhhh.

Yakuman’s fine. The problem isn’t the quality of the interface, presentation, etc. Honestly it’s all laid out pretty well! Everything’s visible on a single screen and while not having color is a downer it’s manageable, and the inputs are intuitive. The bot opponent makes choices pretty quickly too, which is a rarity for early Game Boy board games! No, the issue is that this is exclusively 2 player Mahjong and that’s just not the best ruleset. I’m not even a diehard 4p or bust kind of guy in matters of Maj’ – I actually love playing with 3! 2p just doesn’t cut it for me most of the time, not without some wacky rule variants, different yaku, something to spice up the I-go-you-go. There are so many better 2p rummy-adjacent options out there!

Though y’know, I say that now with the benefit of hindsight, but how many competitive options existed in ’89 beyond just playing Gin with an actual real life deck of cards? 2p riichi via a link cable is legitimately a pretty cool use case for the DMG and it certainly beats Nintendo’s previous attempt at standalone virtual Mahjong. I would not be shocked if this killed it among the grandma set in Japan, though I bet the eye strain required to read the characters on the original screen may have scared off more than a few. I appreciate this thing for what it does, even if it’s not all it could have been.

2.5/5

Bonus zone because apparently I like to do those when I find extra material – there’s an English translation patch! I didn’t touch it so I can’t vouch for the quality, but there’s very little text in-game so I’d be surprised if it wasn’t sufficient. What it won’t do is teach you Mahjong, but the game already didn’t really do that. Hell, even its manual spends basically no time on the game itself as much as how to operate it. Tile-curious folks will still want to look elsewhere, this one’s for those who are A) already in the know and B) current year Game Boy enthusiasts. Pretty narrow venn diagram, but know that if you fall into it that we are kindred.

01/30/2026
Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

Ok. Deep breath. C:TA is one of Those Games, the particularly notorious kind. I’ve heard people say this is the worst Castlevania game, full stop. Of course it has its defenders – what doesn’t? – but I’ve seen so much bile spewed in this thing’s general direction over the years that I just assumed this game was going to hang out with Marble Madness on The List.

Spoilers: nah! I thought it was fine. Incredibly uneven and punishing to the point where I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone who doesn’t share my particular strain of brain poison without heavy use of save states, but fine. Its issues are myriad, both design and technical, yet the vision is evident and it almost, sort of, kinda works. It’s an early Game Boy game, is my point.

In tepid defense of this cart, you’ve got to look at the other games the DMG received in ’89. Beyond Mario Land there wasn’t a hell of a lot of NES-style action to be had on the platform. Konami was going for it, and I respect that! Granted they fucked it up to the point where some of the staff went on to form Treasure so they could make a good video game for a change, but the attempt was made!

From first impressions alone you’d be forgiven for thinking they nailed it. The sprites look great, the whip feels snappy, and most importantly they managed to cram 80’s Konami music into a Game Boy and it sounds sick. Everyone talks about Battle of the Holy and justifiably so, but my standout was Revenge because I am eternally weak for Alberti bass or any kind of funky arpeggio, especially when I’ve got a whip in hand and a Dracula that owes me money.

Then you actually start making progress and the cracks begin to affect the property value. Chris Belmont moves exclusively at a tiptoe and is oddly unresponsive aside from the whip button. I found inputs getting eaten upon starting and landing jumps. He also doesn’t know what a subweapon is – this game doesn’t have ’em! Hearts even heal you, which required more of a mental adjustment than I care to admit. Instead you pick up orbs (aka THE CRYSTAL per the manual) to give your whip some extra oomph and reach, then again to add a fireball projectile ala any Zelda game with the laser. Keeping that comparison going, if you get hit you lose your fireball. Get hit again and you’re reduced to snapping your belt at demons. Not ideal!

You can imagine why they would’ve thought this change in system might work. Keep it simple for the Game Boy, then design the levels around those limitations. Sure, in theory! In practice every level past the first – and there’s only 4 in total, by the way – is an exercise in wringing blood from this already dry stone. Level 2 throws several pixel perfect jumps at you, some of which are on falling platforms that don’t always like to let you jump off of them. Level 3 is Oops All Autoscroll, chock full of traps that’ll just kill you if you don’t already know what to do. Level 4…is basically just a Mega Man level? Lots of single screen figure’em’outs as opposed to heinous insta-death trickery. Challenging for sure, but never as obnoxious as what precedes it. Game has good bookends, I suppose!

These levels and their constraints wouldn’t be so bad if the game was more solid on a technical level, but C:TA chuuuugs. You can feel the sludginess increase with each individual moving sprite added on the screen. Chris by himself is fine, one enemy feels worse but manageable, and everything past that will slow the game down to the point where you’d think you were playing an overambitious shmup, even though you’re just trying to whip a bat while a zombie hits the griddy in the background. This is demonstrated especially well by the Punaguchi, an enemy that solely exists to attack your frame rate by wiggling in place and firing a bouncy ball that’s faster than literally everything else in the game. This bottlenecks the performance something fierce, which isn’t great when the game just turned into Breakout and you’re the brick!

Compared to the levels they’re in charge of, the bosses feel like they’re intended to be a victory lap. The first is the classic “guy who gets demoted to normal enemy” scenario, second is a swarm, third is a bird man who can’t figure out how to actually hit you, and fourth is Dracula, complete with a second phase, neither of which are hard once you die to him once or twice to learn his pattern. Bosses being chumps is a pretty common thing in a linear ‘Vania and I get that Chris’ moveset is too simple to allow for much complexity, but I was surprised at how little these required of me.

Don’t think I wasn’t very done with this game once I finally yanked Dracula’s wallet, though. C:TA is frustrating. It feels closer in spirit to an arcade quarter muncher than an NES ‘Vania, constantly introducing new ways to send you back to the start of the level that you have no hope of figuring out on your first couple attempts. The entire middle of the game just kind of being ass really hurts it, and as much as I’m complaining, it is still disappointing that this thing only has a whole 4 levels. I haven’t covered Mario Land 1 yet but I am familiar with it already, and I can tell you that Nintendo’s attempt to Game Boy-ify their NES flagship went far better.

…so why the hell did I loop it?

I could have stopped! I whooped Dracula’s ass! I beat The Bad ‘Vania! There’s no reason for me to subject myself to th-wait, I know why. It’s because this is actually a Ghosts ‘n Goblins game, and I have a sickness.

Think about it for a sec. The upgrade system, lost piece by piece? The diabolical instant death traps? The rock and a hard place enemy placement? The performance not keeping up when things get hot and heavy? The fact that you can, in fact, loop? The amount of enemies you’re better off just ignoring? I know GnG when I see it, and that’s GnG! Forget the lack of subweapons – we should be grateful that the Konami top brass didn’t insist on adding poorly-placed pickups that replace your whip with a pool noodle! There is just something about this kind of brutal Capcom-ass design that works for me, even when it’s absolutely not at its best, and this is very much one of those.

The internet loves a reevaluation. “This Game is Good, Actually”, “This Classic Sucks, Actually”, “This Game I Grew Up With is Actually a Secret Peak Game Design Masterpiece and You Just Don’t Get It”, take your pick. That’s not my scene. I just want to play these games and rank ’em, y’know? I won’t lie to you and say C:TA is great, but it is nowhere close to the worst game on the system. This isn’t even the worst time I’ve had playing a Castlevania game! I liked it enough to play it past completion and that’s worth something. Not a lot, granted, but something! You don’t need to play this, but if you’re ludologically curious or a ‘Vania completionist I have trouble believing you’d loathe it. Sure it’s a bit of a disaster, but it muddles through despite that, and we should all aspire to do the same.

2.5/5

– – –

Bonus section! This won’t affect the placement on The List, but I do want to shout out the incredibly cool ReBalance created by Bofner. Chris gets the lead out and upgrades to a legitimate Belmont Strut! Your whip isn’t nearly as fragile! You get a checkpoint right before Dracula that doesn’t suck! It’s just fun start to finish, even on level 3! It’s also notably easier, arguably to the point where it compromises the original design intent, but given that even Masato Maegawa isn’t a fan I suspect no one involved would mind. If you’re Adventure-curious I’d definitely give the original a try first, but more so you’ll appreciate the changes made than anything else.

01/19/2026
My Descent into Marble Madness (1991, 1999)

Brother, I have seen some shit.

There are a lot of folks who will tell you that a Marble Madness without a trackball is not worth playing. I disagree! Not enough to deny that the bigass spinny ball is obviously better, I’m not the kind of guy who buys Golden Tee home ports, but NES Marble Madness is a fine way to spend 5 minutes! One afternoon, and I honestly could not tell you why, I was struck with the urge to play some proto-Monkey Ball and popped the GBC game on.

I wish I’d waited until this project had fully burnt off my novelty synapses first.

Marble Madness GBC (1999)

Woah, what the fuck? Why is it like this? Home computer joysticky versions worked fine in the 80s, as did NES MM in ’89 despite the dpad. Why in the year of our lord 1999, when portable video gaming technology was advancing at an unprecedented rate, did Digital Eclipse release a version of a then-fifteen year old game that works this poorly?

GBC Marble Madness looks fine visually, but not to the point where it justifies this performance. This game chugs like a frat pledge that just lost his girlfriend and controls like a frat pledge that just got a new one. I thought things might be salvageable until level 3, then the faux 3D fully kicked in and my hopes were kicked in the marbles. I scooted the ball behind a wall and the game panicked like an anxious baby in a high stakes game of peekaboo, sprites flickering and frames dropping to single digits as it desperately tried to show me that there was in fact a marble on screen somewhere, somehow. It’s also a much twitchier game than other versions I’ve played, with the Marble having basically no weight, meaning you can fly off the stage far more easily and in sections that wouldn’t normally present a problem.

If the only issues were iffy framerates and a subpar control scheme I’d still give this a begrudging pass based entirely on my preexisting biases, but no, it gets worse! The respawns are scuffed. I had several occasions where I made an oopsie and the game just dropped me into the same pit a few more times for good measure before finally allowing me to recover. If you know anything about Marble Madness, you know that means the run is basically over! You need to finish stages with as much time as possible and in better versions of the game there’s enough margin for error, but in this port? Nah. I never saw any of the magic wand time extensions in this version either, which is a bonkers omission.

Getting through this was like pulling teeth: painful, repetitive, but not exactly the lengthiest torture. The last level is more a timer check and test of patience than anything else, and I suspect my first trip there was literally impossible, which isn’t great! Again though, this game takes 5 minutes to beat, retries are speedbumps. Eventually I ascended to top of the High Rollers board and switched the game off. I do not intend to defend my title.

1.5/5

—
I could have left it there. That should have been enough. Instead, this is where things went off the track. Out of truly morbid curiosity I figured hey, why not try the even older version while this one’s fresh in my mind and thumbs? The version without color from eight years prior! Maybe it runs a bit better, somehow? Maybe it isn’t missing entire gameplay elements? Maybe it won’t be the single worst game I’ve played for the website thus far?
—

Marble Madness GB (1991)

I did not know how good I had it. Jesus christ.

Can I tell you how the sausage is made real quick? Despite my affection for the DMG I play all of these games on some kind of modernized hardware. Usually it’s the Analogue Pocket, sometimes it’s my backlit GBA. Both look pretty great, I’d say! They help smooth out the early Game Boy roughness a bit, especially the Analogue, and are easier on my aged eyes. My point is that I’m playing these games in much better conditions than any kid in ’91 would have been, and despite this playing Marble Madness for the Game Boy still felt like I was Sam Neill in Event Horizon.

This abomination should not have been put on store shelves, full stop. You can’t fucking see anything, and it performs worse than the GBC version somehow! Every technical issue I called out previously is exacerbated, plus now the sprites clip and flicker in disorienting ways. I dare not even imagine how horribly this would have performed on the old pea soup screen, afflicted with ghosting and poor lighting. God, imagine giving this to a child to amuse themselves on a car trip! You would be entirely within your rights to call CPS, even if you’re currently in your 40s. Get a retroactive adoption. They owe you one.

Game Boy Marble Madness is so horrid that I quit after a couple attempts and booted up the NES version, terrified that I had somehow brainwashed myself into long-term Marble Apologia. No! That port is still pretty good! The courses are far more navigable thanks to notably weightier marble physics, which allows for better turning without sacrificing speed. The clock is also a bit more forgiving on the home version. Once I recalibrated to playing a good video game for a change I was able to get through it just fine! Do you know how bad a game has to be to result in a sanity check long enough to clear a wholly different port?

I don’t want to write about this any more than I have to. This is a truly odious piece of software, and its cartridges would be better served by having other games flashed onto them entirely at random. Congratulations on making the very bottom of The List, Mindscape! I can’t wait to play your Game Boy port of Klax, you hack frauds!

1/5

01/16/2026
Baseball (1989)

My current play pile has been taking a bit longer to get through than anticipated, so this afternoon I figured hey, why not play a quick game of stickball? Hahahaha, “quick”.

I feel like I should be more lenient with this cart. It was a launch title after all, even Nintendo didn’t really know what they were doing on the DMG yet, and its main draw was multiplayer which I have not touched. I know the history, I know the score, but…

…wow this is some awful baseball. This was a new experience for me, because I’ve never played by telegraph before!

Look, I’m not a “sportsball” snob or whatever. I may be a nerd, but I’m the kind of nerd that participates in torpedo bat discourse, reminisces over the steroid era, and watches everything Ohtani does like a hawk. I like sports games! Especially baseball! This is a just a terrible baseball game!

GB Baseball is agonizingly slow. Pitching, fielding, changing sides, almost every animation feels like it’s playing at 0.5 speed. Compared to NES baseball that’s honestly not too far from the truth! Watching fielders and runners alike trudge as the ball jutters across the sky frame by frame is excruciating, and you can barely see the field much less the ball if it gets some loft, so you’re forced to trudge players you can’t see towards a drop spot you don’t have. One of the benefits of digital ball is speeding the boring parts up, but this version feels like participating in a real life pickup game in the Ambien League.

The one area that has some merit is the batting, which offers the bare minimum of acceptability. The camera swaps to behind the plate, you can reposition in the box, and the swing is pretty snappy. I ask for so little, and in this singular area Baseball manages to deliver, but surely we could have aimed a little bit higher?

As bad of a time as I was having, I was willing to forgive a fair amount due to the age and legacy of this cart. Then I managed to smack a home run and all my good will vanished like an unsupervised box of Uncrustables in the dugout. The ball sloooooooowly drifted into the stands, a rectangle that said HOME RUN sleepily scooted its way from the bottom of the screen to the middle, and the scoreboard ticked up 1 by 1 to show the runs. Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? We don’t even get to see the runs??? It should be against the law to make a baseball game where sending one over the fence is this underwhelming! I did the fucking Thing, I demand satisfaction!

I’m all for giving old games their due, and a lot of them are great, but the nicest thing I can say about Baseball is that I like its cover. Big Al wouldn’t tolerate such disrespect for dingers.

1.5/5

01/11/2026