Tag: review

Dexterity (1990)

In the How to Play section of Dexterity’s manual SNK calls this a “jigsaw puzzle, maze, and labyrinth game“. That’s a pretty unhelpful description, so I’ll give you mine: Dexterity is a Fucker Game. For the unfamiliar, FUCKER GAME, DEFINED: “a game that involuntarily makes you call it a Fucker frequently and with increasing intensity.” Alumni of Fucker Game University are not necessarily bad, but they are typically frustrating, obnoxious, or both. Dexterity just happens to be all of the above! FGU! FGU!

I would love to tell you what Dexterity is about, but SNK didn’t manage to figure that out before manufacturing the cart labels. In Japan it was called “Funny Field” which still doesn’t explain why this little boy is trapped in a series of increasingly horrible grids. The manual’s story page ends on “So find the magical key to unlock the door to not only Dexter’s but your own wonderful imagination!”. I tried, but a beetle sat on the key until I died of exposure.

The goal of the game is to flip all the floor tiles to their other color before the timer runs out. This works similarly to Reversi, by which I mean if you flip a tile and there’s another flipped tile in the same row or column, it’ll flip every tile in-between to the same color. Please don’t get the impression that this is a cerebral, abstract affair. The game’s called Dexterity, y’know? It isn’t as much of a puzzle game as it is a real time scramble with enemies that’ll unflip your tiles, forcing you to double back to fix them. At first this is fairly simple to the point of being a bit dull, but eventually the stages transition to a particularly shitty maze game filled with enemies that hate the board, hate you, but most of all, hate predictable behavior.

Games like this always involve variance but Dexterity’s luck factor is way out of whack. Enemies may or may not bother to flip tiles in any given direction or at any given time. Their movement styles are predictable in that some are slow, some are fast, some tend to turn, etc., but what they actually do is known only to them and god. If I voiced my opinion of that goddamn snowman I would get in trouble. This is exacerbated by the powerups. These range from giving you a few worthless points to all but winning you the level, but what you get is mostly random as far as I can tell, beyond the good ones being rarer. Because of course they are. Most of the time you’re playing from behind, trying to play Reversi uphill despite Wesley Snipes’ warnings, but it’s just as unsatisfying when the game occasionally just throws you a win for free!

I was so convinced that this game was fucking with me that I swapped to a save state-capable device and started testing. Some of the enemies pretty much always do the same thing, and you can semi-reliably route some sections, but as I reran annoying levels again and again I noticed irregularities. Sometimes the enemies did practically nothing, other times they would go so far as to hold chokepoints and just refuse to move, wasting upwards of 10 seconds or getting me killed outright. Success isn’t earned in Dexterity, it’s eventually granted.

Even the bonus game is borderline random! At first it looks like it’s just a memorization challenge, flashing a bunch of tiles on an otherwise empty board that you need to remember and flip, except one of them is secretly a skull that’ll kick you out with no extra life to your name. I think these patterns are preset and if you memorize the placements you’ll be able to 100% them, but that’s a level of time-sadism I simply do not possess, says the guy who’s playing all of these.

By the time you manage to hold onto your continues long enough to get to the end you’re confronted by King Tojo, a bigass ghost boss who’s basically from a different video game with mechanics to match. The fight involves picking up and throwing enemies, a mechanic that doesn’t exist until then, meaning if you don’t immediately get the hang of it and successfully land the dozen or however many hits Tojo demands there’s a very real chance you have to play the entire video game over again. Did you know this game’s Nintendo-assigned designation is DMG-FU-USA? You cannot make this shit up! They know what they did!

I like the jaunty little tunes. I guess. Half a point for those. Fucker.

1.5/5

02/25/2026
Heiankyo Alien (1990)

It takes an enviable amount of confidence to call a game “THE JAPANESE MASTERPIECE” on your print ads, but Meldac had it like that back in the 90s. You don’t localize a game like Zombie Nation without being totally convinced it’s a good idea, and they were absolutely right to do so. Everyone say “Thank you, Meldac”.

The history of Heiankyo Alien is as interesting as it is lengthy, a consequence of its original design emerging in the late 70s from a team at the University of Tokyo’s Theoretical Science division. That version is included on this cart as a bonus for the ludologically curious! It’s…definitely a game from the 70s that isn’t Space Invaders, but it represents a niche within a niche and predates the likes of Pac-Man by a year, so that’s neat.

What immediately struck me was the sheer amount of personality contained in the new game’s rendition. The sprites are goofy and expressive, the movement is snappy, and the music, my god. HA has some of the best jams found on the system, combining traditional Japanese instrumentation in bloop-heavy Game Boy form with a modern edge that suits the retro-sci-fi-ness of the whole affair. Just phenomenal music to dig holes to.

Oh yeah, that’s what this game is about! Aliens have descended in Heian era Japan and are scarfing down people in the streets. For whatever reason our little Kebiishi is only armed with a shovel, but he’s about to make it every alien’s problem. Gameplay sees you running through various mazes, digging holes, then burying aliens alive when they stumble into them. Any contact with them will see you devoured whole! The sprites for this are kinda fucked for the Game Boy, honestly! I guarantee at least a couple children had Heiankyo Alien Nightmares. God that’d make a good album name.

So you’re playing a game of territory control. Your first order of business on any given board is to establish a safe zone that’ll prevent an ambush, then gradually expand it by filling and digging new holes further out, shifting from defense to offense as you gradually thin the aliens’ numbers. Placement of holes is critical as aliens won’t stay in them forever, and if another alien runs into a partially-buried pal they’ll immediately free them, which can see you getting chomped from what appeared to be a position of strength. Combine this with the alien movement behaviors being kinda random until the last one, who will immediately speed up and chase you to the ends of the screen, and you’ve got a game state that’s always comprehensible but never solved.

Outside of a few environmental quirks like walls that open and shut or a boat you can scoot across sections of the level with later on, that really is all the rules to Heiankyo Alien. Yet from this simple foundation is built a game that I find fiendishly moreish. Approachable, moderately challenging, a bit lucky but always achievable, just perfectly calibrated arcade action. I’ve cleared this thing several times now – not an extraordinary feat, it’s pretty short – and my best run thus far saw me only losing 1 life. I want, no, need to perfect this thing eventually. I’ve got the alien brainworms and they can have all the gray matter they want.

Transparently, Heiankyo Alien was going to top the current list no matter what. I’ve got a backlog of completed games to write about and keep trying to plug away at more, but unlike literally every other game I’ve played for this project I keep going back for more rounds of this instead, and that’s the strongest endorsement I could give. I’m not always gripped by arcade style games on console as they often lose something for the lack of quarters, joysticks, and secondhand smoke, but Heiankyo Alien fully transcends all of my preexisting hangups. It grips me in the kind of way only the best arcade games can, perfectly aligned with my brain chemistry, and I couldn’t be happier to give it its flowers 25 years later.

That’s essentially the complete writeup. My original intent was to give this just shy of a perfect score given how slight its scope and completion time is, even though what’s on offer is excellent. Can I tell you what bumped this up to full marks, though?

I traveled across the country to visit family recently, and was fortunate to get to spend a few days with my nephews and niece that are really little and love video games. If they aren’t playing some sort of big Nintendo release in the living room, they’re on their tablets playing games that even their parents have described as brain rot. At one point, after they expressed interest in the funny brick I was traveling with, I handed them my Game Boy with Heiankyo Alien ready to go and let them take turns figuring it out with minimal guidance.

They were fascinated. It gripped them like most games don’t. They were actively experimenting, giving each other pointers on where to dig, how to dodge aliens, trying to predict their behaviors, and getting eaten over and over until bedtime. No ad break interruptions to earn resources, no connectivity issues, no distractions, only pure unleaded video game. They were so engaged that they even managed to share without fighting the entire time! That’s a small miracle!

There’s just something about Heiankyo Alien that works on a level most games don’t, a true It factor, and for me that overcomes any complaint I could level at it. Heiankyo Alien forever.

5/5

02/16/2026
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
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