Pocket of Horror: Lighthouse (Game Boy Color)

 This is a demake of World of Horror, a game I haven't yet played (though I'm sure I will eventually), but which drew me in simply for the novelty of being a horror game made for Game Boy Color. Because I haven't played its inspiration, I can only judge it as a game in its own right, and am unable to compare the two. 

 

It uses a few elements that it seems like a lot of the new wave of Game Boy Color games use, no matter the genre: full-screen pixel art, abstract menu-based gameplay, and tastefully restrained colour palettes. I don't know if that's because the tools being used to make these games favour them, or if it's some kind of leftover resentment from western GBC-owning kids from the olden days of never getting to play the likes of Sakura Taisen GB or Hana Yori Dango: Another Love Story in English, now driving them to make their own GBC adventures with their own fancy pixel art.

 

So, how Pocket of Horror works is that you choose one of four mysteries to investigate. Then you'll be told a little story, through full screen art, little "investigating" animations, and text. Sometimes, you'll get to choose on of two options, and sometimes you'll find yourself fighting enemies. These battles feature yet more full screen art of your foe, and you have a bunch of options to pick, such as attacking, defending, trying to restore your stamina or reason, and so on. Whenever you pick an action, a bar at the bottom of the screen fills up a little bit, and when it fills all the way, he enemy attacks. You can usually just attack wildly and kill the enemies before they do the same to you, though since I died partway through the fourth mystery, that might be a poor plan in the long term.

 

After each mystery's solved, you get a key, and all four are needed to open the way to the lighthouse, where the final mystery lies. I can't spoilt the details of that final mystery for you, because I haven't been able to survive all four mysteries. You've got three numbers to keep track of as you play: stamina, reason, and doom. Stamina and reason obviously represent your physical and mental health respectively, and if either reaches zero, it's game over. Doom, however, is more mysterious. It's a percentage that goes up or down a little bit every time you do something. It was in the mid-forties when my playthrough ended, and I'm left curious about what might happen if it gets to a full hundred.

 

This is a decent enough little game, and definitely worth a bit of your time. I'm really interested in the rennaisance that the Game Boy and Mega Drive in particular have been going through in recent years, so there'll probably be more coverage of both consoles here in the future. It's not a 100% correlation, but it's interesting that a lot of new Mega Drive games are action titles, and a lot of new Game Boy games are like this: adventures that focus on making decisions and really pushing quality of presentation above all.

Undercover Cops Gaiden - Hakaishin Garumaa (Game Boy)

 It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel unfortunately, but it did get this: a Game Boy exclusive spin-off that's a kind of board game/RPG thing.

 

So, you pick one of the characters from the original game (but let's be honest: everyone's going to pick Rosa. Can you even remember the names of the other two guys without looking them up?), and you traverse a board game world with branching paths and differently-coloured squares and a few special squares here and there. Movement takes place in the same manner that would be used in Sonic Shuffle years later: you have a hand of cards bearing different numbers. You pick a card, and then there's a roulette that can land on a number up to that of the card you picked, telling you how many spaces you'll move. White squares do nothing, grey squares give you a little money, and black squares result in a battle (or occasionally a whack-a-mole minigame).

 

The battles are turn-based, and a little more complex than you might expect from a 1993 Game Boy game. First, you and your opponent will pick a card, with the highest number determining who is the attacker for the current turn. If that's you, you pick a body part, then pick another card from your hand, and you might do some damage, or maybe nothing will happen. If you're the defender, you only have to pick the top or bottom half of your body to defend, and again, you pick another card. Then you might take damage or you might not. This carries on until someone runs out of hit points, which can take ages, since it seems to be completely randomly determined whether or not damage is dealt each turn. It doesn't take much strategy to ensure that you're almost always the attacker, at least. Especially as you level up, which puts higher-numbered cards in your deck.

 

There is a kind of mindless compulsion that can keep you playing this game. Like it's mostly luck-based, but there's also a lot of really nice pixel art in here, and there is even a plot running through the game. But that's all there is, and if you're going to play on real hardware, you won't have access to save states or a fast forward button, which will also really dampen the game's appeal. What really killed my enthusiasm for it, though is the fact that the branching paths don't lead to different routes or even alternate storylines. What they lead to is dead ends. You can't scroll ahead, so if you do end up going down the wrong path, you have no choice but to go back and then go down the right path. 

 

The problem here is that the process of moving is incredibly slow. As described above, you pick a card and then you spin the roulette and then you move. And then if you land on a grey square, you've got long seconds of reading the line of text telling you about the tiny amount of money you've picked up. And the black squares don't go away after you've landed on them, so the incredibly slow and random number generator-based battles are something you'll be enduring again and again. 

 

The pixel art in the battles and cutscenes is really nice, and near-miraculous when you consider this is only a couple of years into the lifespan of the original Game Boy. But unfortuantely, that's really all this game has going for it, and the mountains of tedious timewasting through which it puts the player is unforgivable. I'm glad it got a translation patch, because it was a game that had caught my attention and my cuiosity a long time ago. But I don't recommend actually playing it.

Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Raging Fighter (Game Boy)

 I was going to review a different Game Boy fighting game this week, Fist of the North Star: Ten Big Brawls for the King of the Universe, but I thought covering three anime tie-ins in a row might have been a bit much. Luckily, Raging Fighter (Released in Japan as Outburst) actually provides an interesting contrast to that game in a few ways, and the two can serve as examples of how and how not to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy. Well, almost. Fist of the North Star isn't that great. But it is better than Raging Fighter, and it's specifically a better Game Boy game than Raging Fighter.

 

I won't talk about the other game too much, since I probably will give it its own post some day, but the big, most noticable difference between the two is found in the character sprites: FotNS has small character sprites, but they're full of character and detail, all very distinct from each other, and their animations are simple but quick. By contrast, Raging Fighter might have been the first to fall into the trap that Game Boy ports of Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games would also fall into: its character sprites are large and detailed, and they look great in still screenshots, but their animations are stiff and they slowly flicker their way around the screen in a way that varely feels better than a cheap, low quality LCD game.

 

There are some good things about Raging Fighter, of course. Like I said and like you can see, it does look pretty good in screenshots, with its big sprites and detailed backgrounds. Also, and this might seem like damning with faint praise, but it has special moves and health bars that work like you'd expect them to. You'd be surprised at how some developers in the early post-SFII years would get one or both of those wrong. Finally, it might have secretly invented a staple feature of fighting games, a year before it's popularly-acknowledged advent.

 

There's two single player modes on offer, the first being tournament, which sees you pick a character and gradually work your way up a very MK-esque tower containing every other character in the game, topped off with a fight against yourself. The other mode is story, which sees you playing as the three good guy characters (or the Five Major Star Generals, as the end credits collectively calls them), and you fight in an elmination team battle against the three bad guy characters (or the Four Shadow Star Generals), with character health carrying over between rounds. As far as I know, this kind of match is generally considered to have first appeared in King of Fighters 94, which came out a year and a half after Raging Fighter!

 

Going back to the topic of fighting games on Game Boy, and how to do them, it would coincidentally be the port of King of Fighters 95 that provided the blueprint for it a couple of years later, showing that if developers did their best to get the feel of the game down, even if it means heavily simplifying the graphics, that it was possible to get fun fighting games running on even this hardware that was so vastly overpowered by all of its contemporaries. I don't recommend playing Raging Fighter, even taking into account its historical significance. If you really want a good figting game on the original monochrome Game Boy, Takara published a ton of them later in the system's life, and a lot of them can be found on actual cartridges for a pittance. So get those instead.

Marie no Atelier GB (Game Boy Color)

 I've been vaguely aware of the Atelier series since the PS2 era, though they've been around a while longer than that, but this is the first one of them I've actually played (well, I did play the spin-off Mana Khemia on PSP many years ago, but they're different enough that I can call this the first). With that in mind, I don't know all of the dfetails, but I think this is a sequel to another Marie no Atelier that was on consoles, and has you playing as the eponymous alchemist in her post-adventuring days.

 

Marie now runs a little alchemy shop (or Atelier, if you will) in a nice walled city with European-style buildings, making the whole affair somewhat reminiscent of Kiki's Delivery Service. One day, she's given custody of a little fairy boy, who she's going to teach alchemy and generally look after for four years. So, rather than a traditional RPG, this is, like the in-game alchemical syntheses, something like a combination RPG, business management, and even a tiny bit of Princess Maker. There are dungeons and combat, but you just send the fairy out to do those things (you can hire bodyguards and buy him better weapons and armour to help him though) and fetch back items for you.

 

So what do you actually do, if you're outsourcing the dungeons and combat? You go to the bar to accept requests for items, then you either have to get the required items from a dungeon, or synthesise them in your Atelier. Despite Marie presumably being a veteran of the business, and the one you're controlling, you can only syntheise items up to the skill level of the fairy. This is advanced by making the recipes to which you do have access, by handing in requests, and by buying textbooks from the local university.

 

Sometimes certain special events happen, like Marie's birthday, or the fairy going off to celebrate fairy new year with his family. There's also more unique and dramatic events too, like the fairy nursing an ill Marie back to health, or the fairy becoming depressed and surly, gradually being brought back to his normal cheery self through the aggressive application of love and care from Marie. Those descriptions might sound a little cynical and dismissive, but those moments were actually really nice, and I feel like this kind of emotional warmth isn't something you often see in videogames, especially ones on 8-bit hardware.

 

This is a fun and engrossing little game, that's definitely worth your time. You can tell the developers really tried their hardest to get the best game they possibly could out of the Game Boy Color, and their work totally paid off. This is easily one of the best games on the system, and while it's understandable why it never got an official translation on its release, it's still a shame that that didn't happen. Fans have, of course, stepped in to correct that mistake more recently. At the time of writing, I've only played through three of the game's four years, and once I'm finished, I'm probably going to look into the series' main entries too. It's especially recommended to those kinds of people who talk about wanting "cosy games", as it's definitely one of those.

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball (Game Boy Color)

 The first thing that needs to be addressed in this review is the game's title: yes, it will make your dad laugh if he asks what you're playing and you answer "Pocket Billiards". Don't worry about it. The other thing is that GameFAQs lists this as being published by Tamsoft, which struck me as odd, since they're more of a developer, and the only games I know of that they published were also developed by them. My suspicions were correct, and this game was published by a completely unrelated company called TAM, Inc., and the people maintaining GameFAQs are incompetent buffoons.

 

Anyway, this is a billiards/snooker game, but not only should you cast out of your mind the image of boring men wearing tuxedos and chainsmoking, but it's been specifically designed with the intention of casting those men out of your mind! Instead of a traditional look, Funk the 9 Ball instead takes its aesthetic cues from vaguely contemporaneous rhythm games, like Parappa the Rapper, Beatmania, and so on. The devs must have had their fingers on the pulse, too, as the first game I was going to mention in that list was SNK's Cool Cool Toon, which didn't come out until six months later! But anyway, there's lots of cute/weird characters, the place in which you play isn't a smoky bar but some kind of brightly-coloured night club with a DJ, and not only can you collect cans of paint to recolour the club and the table, but you can collect Minidiscs to give the DJ more BGM selections to pick from!

 

The game itself, as far as I can tell (as someone who has never played snooker), is mostly a fairly normal game of nine ball, and controls in a fairly traditional manner, in which you aim the cue ball, and then use a timed power meter to shoot. I say "mostly", because while it uses the rules of that game, it's also in the now pretty much dead genre of silly sports games. While playing, various creatures will use their magic powers to effect the course of the game in various way. Some of the creatures live in the pockets, and their powers activate when a ball goes into the pocket they call home. Other creatures are put inside the balls somehow by the players pre-match, and their powers activate when you hit their ball after holding the button down for a few seconds.

 

The creatures in the pockets will have powers that equally help or hinder both players, like destroying one of the lower-numbered balls, or making all the balls invisible. The ones in the balls, obviously, use their powers to specifically help the player to whom they belong (because there is also a vague aspect of monster collection in here too!), and they do stuff like give you the ability to re-take a foul shot, make a ball jump into the nearest pocket, and that kind of thing. They also all cause a little animation to play when they're activated, and not only are these animations all weird, but the way they come into play is amusingly over-dramatic: just before the cueball hits its target, time will stop, and the screen will cut to a strange cutscene of like, a chorus of angels in heaven, or a little guy drinking tea, or something. I think it's meant to evoke a kind of sports anime-esque drama? It's silly and time-consuming, but I do like it.

 

Pocket Billiards: Funk the 9 Ball is a decent enough game. I don't think I would ever want to play it on a TV screen, but on a handheld, it's a fine way to keep your hands busy while watching TV. It also has an English translation patch, which you wouldn't really expect. If it appeals to you at all, you should give it a try! Definitely don't pay £400 for a real copy though. Four hundred entire pounds! Madness.

Bionic Battler (Game Boy)

 It seems like the release of the Game Boy, an incredibly popular system that was also significantly lower-powered than most of its contemporaries, was seen as something of a challenge to some developers. Games like X and Faceball 2000 sought to do things that conventional wisdom would tell you were impossible on there. And they were pretty successful, technically at least. Whether these achievements resulted in something that was actually practical or enjoyable to play is a little less clear.

 

Bionic Battler (also known as Vs. Battler) isn't quite as ambitious as the games listed above, but it is still a game that's attempting to do more than you might expect a Game Boy game to do. It's a first person deathmatch game, though it can't quite stretch as far as the incremental movement of Faceball 2000. Instead, it's got dungeon crawler-style blob movement: the map is a grid, every character always occupies exactly one square on the grid, you can only face the four cardinal directions, and you always move one space at a time.

 

So you're in the maze (the layouts of which are either selected or generated at random when the stage starts), and you and a couple of CPU partners have to hunt down your opponents, who are trying to do the same to you. You've got two weapons at your disposal: a punch that obviously only works at point blank range, and a missile that can be fired in a straight line ahead of you, but takes a few seconds to charge. Annoyingly, though, to win, you have defeat every member of your opponent's team, while they only have to defeat you. If it was too difficult to have you take control of a teammate upon defeat, they could have alternatively had a similar "captain" on the other team who needed to be defeated for an immediate win.

 

There are five difficulty levels to pick from, though there's no progression of any kind, and as far as I can tell, no way to complete the game. You just pick a level, and then either win or lose at it. I assume this means the game was actually designed with versus play in mind, which, considering that I've never seen anyone play an original Game Boy game via link cable that wasn't Pokemon, seems like an Ozymandian display of hubris. The one thing you do get when you win a match is a little cutscene where your pilot disembarks from his robot, goes into the next room, and shakes hands with a general, who gives him a laughably small amount of prize money (though there's no item shop or anything in which to spend this money).

 

Bionic Battler, unless you cajole someone into playing it against you, isn't much more than a temporarily amusing display of technical achivement. I guess that if it was one of only a few cartridges you owned as a kid in the actual early nineties, you'd probably get a lot of play out of it, and you wouldn't have a bad time doing so, either. But in the year 2024, you're going to play it for a few minutes, and then probably never think about it ever again.

Panel Ninja Keesamaru (Game Boy)

 Despite having a translation patch, this is a game that I've never seen mentioned before, anywhere. I only found it myself because I was copying Pipe Dream over to the Game Boy folder of my RGB30, and decided to copy over some alphabetically local games that caught my eye alongside it. Also, there's almost no text in the game, and what little there is wouldn't present any barrier to progress, so it's an odd choice for having a translation patch.

 

Each stage is a single screen puzzle, in which you have to literally leave no stone unturned in seeking out the exit door and the key to open said door. Your main action, other than moving, is to flip floor panels. When you do this, you flip the panel in front of and behind you, toggling those panels between two positions: blank, upon which you can walk, and shiny, upon which you can't. So you have to flip tiles in such a manner as to make your own way through the stage, and also to leave blank spaces onto which stones can be rolled. There's also enemies wandering about in some stages, that can be defeated by flipping the tiles they're walking across.

 

After fourteen stages, you'll also face your first boss fight! The boss wanders back and forth at the top of the screen, shooting at you, while you have to roll stones into pits, looking for the switch to step on that kills the boss. Interesting that they'd make the boss fights into puzzles, when there are (mostly pointless) single-use weapon items hidden around the stages. Obviously, this is the kind of game where everything has a clear and specific purpose in the world (a quality I've referred to in the past as "purity"), and every stage is an arrangement of those elements that tests your understanding of them, with new elements being introduced every couple of stages. It's a surprise that it doesn't have a stage editor, actually, since similarly constructed Game Boy games did, like the pirate cart classics Pitman and Hyper Lode Runner.

 

Unfortunately, while I was enjoying this game for a couple of hours, disaster eventually struck! Eventually, you'll "level up", and instead of just flipping the tiles directly in front of and behind you, you'll flip the four tiles orthogonally adjecent to you. I feel like this might have been implemented without it having been properly tested, as it mostly makes things more difficult, rather than easier, and I eventually reached a point, almost twenty stages in, where it just made progress impossible, as it prevented me from making a space to roll a stone, and then clear a path back to the other side of the stone to do the pushing. So, I'd recommend the game, were it not for that one small, but devestating flaw. Never mind.

Lil' Monster (Game Boy Color)

 

 Also known as Gem Gem Monster, this is a kind of monster-raising RPG, but without the RPG part. The world map is more of a fancy menu, and most of it's non-functional. According to a guide I read online, you can give items to your monster and that'll open up new map areas, and even a whole side quest about collecting five special items. But whenever I gave the requisite items to my monster, nothing happened.

 

So what does happen? The game starts with you being told that you can make a monster by putting a gem in a can and shaking it. Surprisingly, this is actually the case! From there, the main thing you do is go to the arena to enter four tournaments of increasing difficulty, and also grinding to get strong enough to win the tournaments. There really is an insane amount of grinding in this game, and I strongly recommend you have a fast forward button mapped to a convenient button (since I assume you'll be emulating it).

 

It's not a completely mindless grind, though, and this is thanks to the relationship between monsters, gems, and moves. Gems are turned into monsters, that's already been established. But gems are also moves, and there's a bit of proto-deckbuilding in here, since you've got to maintain a deck of twenty moves for your monster to use in battle. Every turn in battle, you can pick from your current hand of four, and the one you choose will be replaced by another random one from your deck.

 

When you're not at the arena, you can also go to the fields, and turn a gem into a monster for your current monster to fight. Most of the early gems will just drop a copy of themselves after you beat them. This is useful if you want to build up a bunch of useless gems to sell, but it gets more interesting a bit later, when gem-summoned monsters start dropping slightly more powerful gems after you beat them. So, this improves the range of moves you can put in your deck, and it also gives you access to better monsters. 

 

I think that your monster is actually just an incorporeal spirit, as when it's defeated in battle, it dies, and you pick a gem from your inventory to turn into your new monster. But your "new" monster has the same name, experience, and maximum HP as the old one, so it's more like reincarnation? Their attack and defence stats will be determined by their new form, though. Frustratingly, you don't ever get to see what the attack and defence stats are, though, so you just have to assume that a gem that represents a stronger move also represents a stronger monster.

 

Lil' Monster is a game that's all about boring grinding with a little bit of strategy, and a clear path of progression to string you along. Being on a handheld definitely helps its tolerability, but honestly, there are many more interesting handheld games about grinding if that's what you want, and plenty of even more interesting handheld games that aren't about grinding, too. It's better than Wolf Simulator, at least, but that's not saying much. The main reason I stopped playing after several hours, though, is getting eternally softlocked in a battle where my opponent healed every turn, and my own monster wasn't taking any damage at all for an unknown reason. So if you do decide to look into this game, save often.

Return of the Ninja (Game Boy Color)

 So, all I knew about this game going into it was that it was supposedly a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Ninja, which is a great game from the late eighties/early nineties ninja platformer craze, and also that it got a licensed reprint in 2020. But the licensed reprint completely went under my radar, and since I don't think it's a game I've ever heard anyone talk about, I assume it went under everyone else's radar, too. But my assumptions based on the above were that it'd be more of that old-style action, maybe with some more modern "quality of life" additions.

 

What I got was a mix of old and new, and while I was right on the "old" part being the aforementioned ninja-themed platformers, the "new" part was actually something more akin to a 2D interpretation of Tenchu Stealth Assassins. Human enemies will patrol back and forth on their little bit of territory, and only attack if they spot you, and you can actually sneak in and stab them from behind (though there's no cool little pixel animation Tenchu-style executions, unfortunately). So there is actually some stealth in this ninja platformer, something missing from the older games from whence it claims lineage.

 

The Tenchu influence doesn't stop at the stealth kills, either! After the first stage, you're told about various pieces of ninja equipment, that can be found littered around the next few stages. There's stuff for jumping higher, digging underground, clinging to ceilings, gliding, and more. Stages two to five can be tackled in any order and revisited after completion. Furthermore, if you find equipment and finish a stage, you keep it. But if you die, you lose all the equipment you've got (but completed stages stay that way). So I'm sure with a lot of experimentation, you could figure out the optimal order to complete the stages. Assuming you don't die, which is unlikely, as you can only take four hits, and health items are rare drops from enemies.

 

It's a shame they went with this kind of scavenger hunt structure, as I think the game would have been a lot better if you had access to your complete moveset at all times, and the stages themselves were designed around that. Generally, I just don't like this kind of progression in action games that restricts the player's control options. (I'm not a big fan of ability progression in action games generally, but especially when it's like this.)(Of course, I have to point out that there are always exceptions, or I'll get a bunch of "what about" comments in certain places.) A third and final piece of influence from Tenchu is that you're graded at the end of each stage on how stealthy you were, and rather than being given new weapons and stuff as rewards like in Tenchu, you're given cute little pixel art ninja trading cards! They don't actually do anything except have cool pictures and facts on them, which only serves to make them more charming!

 

But getting past the stuff I don't like about the game, I'll move onto what is easily its best aspect: the way it looks. I'm not sure how well this will come across in still screenshots, but this game looks amazing, and is definitely one of the best-looking games on the Game Boy Color. The colour palettes are all excellently chosen, the sprites are all full of character, and there's an amazing sense of place and atmosphere in every stage. The haunted woods are spooky, the caves are dank and cold, the big ship is full of life, and so on. The haunted woods especially make me think there's a lot of untapped potential for horror games on the Game Boy Color, with skilled enough developers.

 

Return of the Ninja is a game that's definitely worth giving a try. The only explanations I can come up with as to why it flew under the radar on release are that 2D platformers were seen as old hat at the time, and also maybe 2001 was a little late for getting anyone interested in a Game Boy Color game. But still, it's a game that really shows off the potential of the system, and it's full of both ideas and charm. But as always: don't give a penny to the ebay scalpers.