Tag: nintendo

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
Mario Tennis (2000)
Look – I hear you. The Game Boy/GBC had so many excellent RPGs, yet my list thus far has been devoid of any. Don’t worry! I got you! First RPG down, and it’s one of the best on the system. Classic single party member ala Dragon Quest I, even! Just a bit of an unconventional battle system is all.

My history with Mario Tennis is involved but not especially complex. I played the 64 version to death, always heard this was great, and never tried it until now. Every MT entry after the year 2000 was worse. Shame, that. Camelot, on the other hand, I have plenty of experience with, and I don’t just mean their iffier sports entries. Consider how confident they had to be to make both versions of Mario Tennis only to barely feature any Nintendo properties in one of them! That confidence is earned. Oh my god did they earn it.

As an aside, one of my weaknesses as a reviewer is that I’m better at taking things apart than building them up. It’s easier to praise a game when you have criticisms to use as a springboard, you know? This review will likely be a bit weaker written than some of my others for this project because, spoilers, I barely have anything negative to contrast the positives with. The best I can do is note that I don’t like the font choices, or more specifically the shadows behind them, on a tiny Game Boy screen. I also find myself missing the ridiculously crunchy serve sounds from the 64 version; I swear hitting a Nice! serve in that sounds like a horse chomping into an apple. The Game Boy can’t really do that! These things don’t matter much, not really. The closest thing to a genuine issue is how the game handles leveling/stats, but I’ll talk about that later.

This game has some of the best spritework on the entire GBC. The sprites would have been top notch on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, but they’re here! On the god damned Game Boy! Every player sprite is incredibly expressive, chock full of characterful details, to the point where they’re entertaining just to see in motion. Combine that with the smooth scrolling of the court in play and little to none of the fake 3D depth issues thanks to the immaculate spriting and lack of slowdown, and you’ve got genuinely excellent handheld tennis.

Any game with Motoi Sakuraba music is going to be a joy for the ears and this is no exception. So many quality jams. This version’s rendition of Break Point is simpler but still gives me chills, especially when the rally goes long. Rare is the game that gives you your own boss music, but Camelot was operating on an entirely different level. Music that makes you want to black out and spike the ball directly into a child’s schnoz. Powerful stuff.

God this game’s tennis plays so well, too. Almost everything I internalized from years of the 64 game was immediately transferable. You can steal so many points with an angled serve, drop shot, and crosscourt shot combo. Admittedly that’s true in real life too! What surprised me most in the gameplay itself isn’t its quality, it’s how different the opponents manage to feel. They nearly feel adaptive, even though I know that’s likely not the case. The way they shift to an easier center serve after hitting a fault or start running to the baseline more after getting schooled at the net feels more convincingly Tennis-y than some sim games I’ve played.

The RPG elements are light but certainly felt. Speed ends up being the key stat because you always need to cover the court, but you will need another specialty to close out the tournament arc. Each level lets you boost one of the four areas of your game, but they often come at the expense of others, leading to some awkward break points where you’ll be more interested in what does the least harm VS boosting what you actually want. It’s not perfect, but it is interesting and forces you to adapt to your weaknesses rather than grind them all to dust. Levels don’t come the quickest from just playing matches, so after a few wins in the junior league I entered the Hyperballic Tennis Chamber that is the training building and climbed some double digit # of levels by whacking the ball into a wall 200 times. I made my PC a speed demon with a downright devious net game and my doubles partner became a nuclear gorilla who could barely move, but could plant the ball anywhere on the court at Mach 3. Not that I played much for doubles, mind. I will generally avoid having 3/4 of the game’s participants be bots if I can help it.

In terms of escalation it goes intro, team rank/promotion arc, tournament arc, and The Post-Credits Introduction and Subsequent Destruction of Super Freakin’ Mario. Despite characters being chatty and full of personality there really isn’t much plot to speak of. I’m fine with that, to be clear! I suspect I wouldn’t be a huge fan of there being even more talking between matches. Some folks have complained about said matches being too long, which is a funny way to say you just don’t like Tennis. I do, which means I want to play the titular sport, and Camelot understood that they couldn’t have both words in the title be disingenuous.

I do kinda love the Mario Section though. Spoilers? I guess? Do we really care? Have a courtesy warning, but I will think a smidge less of you if this is a legitimate cutoff.

After the award ceremony ends and credits roll you find yourself back at the academy standing in the headmaster’s office. Out of absolutely nowhere he informs you of the following facts:
- Mario exists in this setting. He has been offscreen, watching from the shadows the entire time.
- Mario is the single greatest tennis player to ever do it.
- Mario has taken an interest in you specifically, because your defenses are impregnable and your style is impetuous.
- You must take a flight to Peach’s Castle immediately. The headmaster will not take No for an answer. I tried.
Once you arrive it immediately becomes clear that you’re out of your depth. There is some kind of political situation going on, and I don’t mean the kind where the video game has women in it. The room has been split into factions, good and evil specifically, and the latter is absolutely intent on having your character play and defeat Mario on the court upon arrival as they haven’t managed to. Bizarrely, the imperial side informs the villains that Mario actually just invited your character there to chill post-tournament, which…isn’t true? As far as we know? This is clearly an attempt at deescalation, truth be damned.

Anyway. The brothers Wa and Bowser insist that you do battle on their behalf. I accepted, of course, because I know where my loywalties lie. Mario was destroyed in straight sets and it wasn’t particularly close. The game ends abruptly afterwards, presumably due to committing the equivalent of a tennis-themed Franz Ferdinand assassination. My love of the game transcends my general aversion to causing international incidents. Obey Wario. Destroy Mario.

4.5/5
01/07/2026
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

01/07/2026
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 batteries 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.

01/07/2026