Tag: retro

The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle (1989)

Every time I look at this title I feel compelled to correct it, but no, this is THE Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. The sequel is too! Not the third or fourth though, those are just Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 3 and…Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4? In? Featuring? These naming conventions are crazier than the castle itself!

This is neither the time nor place nor author to regale you with the entire history of Crazy Castle and its various brand affiliations. Someone else on the internet can do that for you. I’m more interested in focusing on the game itself. Believe it or not I’ve never actually sat down and played any of these for more than a fleeting moment on a system I did not own. You absolutely knew someone who had it, probably played it on a bus ride or something, but the rate of exposure was far higher than the rate of actual direct play. Extremely cousin-core cartridge.

This game, hell this entire series, has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Omnipresent and immediately recognizable, yet difficult to discern from one entry to another. Never loathed, rarely loved. I knew just how many of these were ahead of me so I figured I should get through one relatively early on in this project’s life, y’know? Figure out where I stand in the Crazy Castle Discourse. Turns out? Pretty alright! If you were purchasing a Game Boy in the year of our lord 1989, I’d even go so far as to say that this’d be one of the better choices!

The game design here is leaner than rabbit meat, to the point where our titular Bunny can’t even jump. Super weird! Bugs is forced to hoof it through 80 levels of slightly increasing difficulty, Scooby-Doo-ing his way through connected doors and pipes to collect all the carrots in the stage. Several other marketable mascots try to prevent him from eating his veggies. What does all of this have to do with the rescue of Honey Bunny, the stated motivation in the manual? Fuck if I know! She’s not even shown in the game at any point. I gotta imagine she was abducted for sinister Lolafication purposes and Bugs was just too slow to save her. Or maybe…maybe he didn’t want to? Gasp!

I said I wanted to focus on the game and here I am writing Lola Bunny fanfiction, exactly what Al Gore built the internet to do. It’s fun! It plays well! Movement isn’t exactly snappy but it is responsive, and little touches like continuing to run straight when you finish ascending or descending stairs by holding the same input shows a level of attention to detail in the execution that many games of this era lacked. I didn’t even mind the small set of jaunty little tunes that repeat throughout the thing! The levels are as varied as you could reasonably expect given that there are so many of the fuckers with so few mechanics, and I was surprised at how rarely I felt screwed by the fact that you can only see what lies ahead by scrolling the screen.

You know who deserves an entire paragraph? Sylvester. There are a handful of enemies and they all behave a bit differently in a Pac-Man ghost kinda way, but none of them compare to the Blinky-esque purrsuit this tuxedo’d toolbag puts you through. Once he has your scent he’s going to follow you at a reasonable pace forever. Much like a mall cop who spotted a teenager pillaging an unattended free sample tray, avoiding him is mostly a matter of having marginally better cardio and not getting distracted by the siren smell of Auntie Anne’s.

It’s somewhat telling that an enemy who can actually follow you represents the zenith of Crazy Castle 1’s difficulty. There’s a bit of reputation for challenge with this one, but I have to imagine those are childhood memories talking because it’s kind of a breeze. I never lost enough lives to require a password and only found myself using them to take breaks, because 80 floors is just too crazy for one sitdown, and the game saw fit to top my lives off when I did! Anybody could make it through this if their attention span holds. Admittedly this thing is repetitive and I wouldn’t fault anyone for dropping it, but I’m weak for arcady progression and there’s just enough tension in these carrot heists to make pulling them off satisfying.

Anyway, yeah! That game your weird classmate owned turned out to be pretty good, no matter how unmemorable it may be! My hottest take from it is that I’d rather play this than Lode Runner. In conclusion I just want to inform you that upon clearing level 80 Bugs just waddles onto a mostly blank screen from nowhere before exclaiming, and I am presenting it verbatim down to the formatting:

CONGRATURATIONS !!

YOU ARE

GOOD PLAYER !!

And you know what, Kemco? I am. I am good player. Thank you for noticing. I think this game has made me dumber.

3/5

02/13/2026
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
02/05/2026
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
Boxxle (1989)

Can we address the homunculus in the room first? I hate looking at the cover of Boxxle so much it’s unreal. No one has ever been so face-warpingly overjoyed to be pushing boxes. Blink twice if you’re being exploited, man!

It is time to introduce The Sokoban Clause. The Game Boy’s library is chock full of these damn things, especially early in its life, and I have a horrible Sokoban allergy that’ll see me breaking out in hives if I play them for too long. That’s not to say I’m incapable of enjoying it or its offshoots (as we’ll see in later entries), but I generally prefer it as part of a larger design as opposed to pure unadulterated crate pushing. Going forward, massive Sokoban collections like this are going to necessitate some degree of level skippery, generally by way of passwords. I still intend to beat most of any given crate-shover for the purpose of thoroughness, but I can only shove so much crate before the splinters make it hard to type.

And boy, Boxxle really offers nothing else to enjoy beyond manual labor. Aside from the cute little arcade game-esque interludes every 10 levels there are no ideas beyond “get back to work, asshole”. You don’t push different boxes. The levels are never anything but brick warehouses filled with wooden crates – the literal only thing that might surprise you is how the game zooms out to a smaller sprite set for big levels so you can still see the entire board. There are no obstacles beyond walls. It’s the same thing 108 times. The background music never even changes from the same 26 second loop! Yes it’s a whole 26 seconds, I counted. Because I had nothing else to think about.

There are some considerations taken that make Boxxle marginally more tolerable than earlier Sokoban riffs. Restarts are quick. There is technically an undo button, though don’t give them too much credit as it only works for a single step. Anyone who’s played enough of these will tell you that you’re most likely to realize you botched your 100 step plan back at step 49 upon reaching step 78. Concluding our positives, there’s an incredibly crusty “YEAH” voice sample upon completion of each level that would make an excellent addition to any soundboard.

You want proof that this game is too much of a bland thing? I used a YouTube playthrough to source my passwords because I don’t trust search engines or the internet at large anymore, and cheat sites were never reliable in the first place. After nearly passing out from exhaustion in world 5 I decided to skip a couple levels. Apparently the game’s fatiguing influence doesn’t just affect me, because after the post-world interlude the video includes 4 minutes of literally nothing. No menuing, no input, just a union-mandated 4 minutes of rest before mustering the spirit to continue on. The music kicks back in, the next level starts, and our hero just kind of sits there for a moment longer, contemplating quitting at the halfway point before eventually getting back to the grind. And despite that, this video is still the only valid speedrun I could find that wasn’t a TAS! Not even speedrunners want to touch this! Do you know how soul-sucking a game has to be to have a single run go unchallenged for nine years?

This game’s credits end on the words “SEE YOU AGAIN” on an otherwise blank screen. I consider this to be a targeted threat, and if it wasn’t for this project I would be beyond excited to tell it no. Alas, Boxxle has a direct sequel and we are far, far away from escaping Sokoban’s gravitational pull on this system. Next time I talk about one of these it’ll be an example of how to do them right!

1.5/5 vile demons in human guises sentenced to box pushing for their crimes

01/26/2026