Pocket Pro Wrestling - Perfect Wrestler (Game Boy Color)

 Its strange that though handheld consoles in the nineties were often treated as lesser systems aimed at kids, and filled with licensed games of wildly varying quality, wrestling games were relatively rare compared to home consoles. In fact, GameFAQs only lists six wrestling games for the Game Boy Color, and one of them is WWF Betrayal, which isn't even a wrestling game, it's a beat em up starring wrestlers. 

 

Pocket Pro Wrestling is the only one of the six that isn't a licensed tie in to a promotion that now belongs to WWE, so there's no tie-ins to Japanese promotions, nor are there any Fire Pro games. But that's okay, since the wrestlers in this game are all thinly-disguised stand-ins for wrestlers popular in Japan in the nineties, and it plays kind of like a Fire Pro game. Like in Fire Pro, you perform moves by pressing a button at the exact right frame in the lockup animation that occurs when the wrestlers walk into each other.

 

There's a few differences to Fire Pro, but they don't do much to make Pocket Pro stand apart. The most obvious is that the ring is shown as a regular square instead of a diagonal one, and that doesn't really affect game at all. The next most obvious change is one that actually kind of harms the game: there's only one button for moves, as opposed to at least two, sometimes three, in the Fire Pro games. I guess this is linked to the fect that there aren't actually many moves in the game overall, with each wrestler having six main standing throws from a pool of maybe ten or so? 

 

Another thing there's a conspicuous lack of is match types, as there's actually only one: singles match. There are a few modes: there's a championship mode where you fight every other wrestler, and can continue or use passwords to pick up where you left off if you lose, a survival mode, which is the same but without continues or passwords, and a King of Fighters-style team battle mode, where two teams of three wrestlers fight one at a time. I think I'm being a little too harsh on a low budget Game Boy Color game, but when a game is so similar to an already-existing series of games, it's hard not to compare them, and to point out the ways in which the imitator falls short.

 

But, in its historical context, Pocket Pro Wrestling actually comes off a lot better. While the modern player in search of handheld wrestling fun would just put the Playstation's Fire Pro Wrestling G on their emulation device of choice, that wasn't an option in 2000, when this game was released, and there wouldn't be an actual handheld Fire Pro until the following year, on the GBA. So, at the time of its release, Pocket Pro Wrestling was actually the best handheld wrestling game money could buy (as far as I can tell, at least). So while there's not much reason to play it now, besides historical curiosity, at the time, it would've been a great game to get your hands on. Shame it was never released outside Japan, really.

The Shutokou Racing (Game Boy Color)

 I think I've mentioned this before, but I really like the simple top down racing games that have SEGA's Monaco GP as their patient zero. Zippy Race, Rally Bike, Mad Gear, that kind of thing. It was very much a genre of the eighties, though, and 1998 seems like a very late time to be releasing one, even on the Game Boy Color. This is only conjecture, but I feel like The Shutokou Racing was probably a passion project by someone who was themselves a fan of the genre, and wondered to themselves how it might be modified, and made into a longer, more "console-like" experience.

 

I'm sure that last sentence has struck dread into the hearts of some readers, and I have to say your suspicions are correct: this game is a grinding festival. Basically, there are four races, and the place in which you finish one race is your starting position in the next race. You've got a number of lives that deplete every time you crash (the starting number determined by your equipment), and running out of lives is the only way to get a game over. Instead, finishing a race, no matter where you place in the ranking, gets you some prize money. If you aren't in first place by the end of race four, the season restarts, but your money and equipment carry over. So you're expected to just keep failing until you're eventually rich enough to get the upgrades needed to go fast enough and win the season. 

 

Then you can play the second season, which is harder, faster, and more exciting, though it still relies on the cyclical grinding structure. There's also a "Classic Mode", which is a much simpler game, harkening back to the original Monaco GP, with enemy cars just mindlessly bouncing left and right off the sides of the track. Unfortunately, it's a lot slower than the original, even on hard difficulty. Another thing to note is that the game's main mode even has the "ambulance of death" that occasionally zooms up from the bottom of the screen, wrecking all in its path, which is also very specifically a Monaco GP reference.

 

Though I hate grinding in action games as much as any other sane person, in this case, I don't think it's a gamekiller, at least. The fact that the game's on a handheld makes it a nice little thing to occupy the mind while semi-watching some mediocre TV or something. I'd have preferred something closer to the arcade games mentioned up at the start of this post, but The Shutokou Racing isn't a total write off.

Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird GB (Game Boy)

So, I was attracted to this game due to it being a vertically-scrolling shooting game on the Game Boy, which is pretty unusual. The Game Boy does have some surprisingly great shooters, of course, but they tend to scroll horizontally, like Nemesis II, for example. It's also interesting because instead of a ship flying up the screen, you're piloting a giant robot, walking up the screen.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do a very good job of representing vertical shooting games on the Game Boy, on account of it being rubbish. The problem is not just that it's easy, but it's also boring. You trudge up the stages, easily killing the occasional enemies (that mostly don't even really look like anything besides abstract shapes). You can take eight hits before getting a game over, but after you've taken one or two, you can rely on a nice convenient power-up to come along and restore you back to full health.

As a result, I completed Taiyou no Yuusha Fighbird the first time I played it. Then I completed it again to take screenshots for this review. The thing is, before you start playing, there's a character select screen, with two characters to pick from, and the title "select your level". Whichever you pick, there doesn't appear to be no difference at all, either in the character you're controlling or in the difficulty of the stages. Mysterious. Either way, the game's about ten minutes long, and they aren't even ten particularly exciting minutes.

I don't recommend wasting any time on this game, unless you really need to play every Game Boy shooting game, or if you're completely obsessed with the anime on which its based and need to experience everything to do with it. Otherwise, don't bother.

Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen (Game Boy)

Videogames based on Kaiju and Tokusatsu properties can be a mixed bag, though I'm probably not alone in thinking that the 2014 Godzilla game on PS4 is probably the best. And while its true that a lot of these games have got a worse rap than they deserve due to critics not really understanding their appeal (the common opinion of the Dreamcast's Godzilla Generations, for example), I might have found the worst of them all, by some considerable margin.

How Gamera - Daikaijuu Kuuchuu Kessen works is kind of like a turn-based fighting game, with no menus. Every turn, you're asked to input a command, then both monsters' maneuvers play out, and that carries on until one of them runs out of health. The closest thing to which I can compare it is probably the weird FMV fighting game Battle Heat on PC-FX. Except it's on the Game Boy, so you don't even have the visual spectacle of lavish full-screen animation to liven things up. Though if you're playing on a Super Game Boy, there are some nice borders to look at, I guess.

There are really two problems with this game, and they're both massive ones. The first is the inconsistency: it seems like pressing the same button combination on different turns doesn't always result in the same action, and furthermore, performing the same action won't always produce the same results, even if the enemy does the same thing, too. So the game boils down to you watching little animations of Gamera and his current opponent doing seemingly random things at each other until one of them suddenly gets hurt. This repeats over and over until one of them runs out of health, and to make things worse, you have to win two rounds against each monster.

And that leads nicely into the second problem: this game is unbelievably slow! Honestly, it took me a few attempts to get past the first fight, simply because it was sapping me of the will to live, and when I did finally get past it, it took over twenty minutes! And that's without losing any rounds! Then you get to the next stage and are faced with the prospect of this carrying on. Apparently this game has a total of five stages, but I can't imagine anyone having the patience to play through them all. I definitely don't recommend trying to.

Initial D Gaiden (Game Boy)

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Initial D, but for the few that aren't, it's a comic/TV/movie/videogame franchise that started in the 90s, and it's all about people with badly-drawn faces taking part in street races down twisty mountain paths, mainly at night. If you were reading English-translated manga around the turn of the century, you might remember it being advertised in the back of seemingly everything Tokyopop published for about two years. Anyway, Initial D Gaiden is a Game Boy incarnation of it. Oddly, I think it might also be the first ever videogame adaptation of the series, beating the Saturn game Initial D: Koudou Saisoku Densetsu by three months.

It's a pretty simple game, but I consider that to be one of its strengths. You just pick a car, then participate in a series of one-on-one races until you get to the end of the game. Obviously, drifting around corners is a big part of the proceedings, and luckily the devs made that fun and easy to do: you just have to let go of the accelerator, tap the brake, then go back to holding the accelerator down. Just like Outrun 2, which came out about 5 years later! There's no car tuning or parts replacement or any other complications, you just go from one race to the next, with a little skippable dialogue scene between each one.

Mention has to be made of the game's presentation too, which is generally excellent. It must have taken a miracle, but the developers somehow managed to give a racing game that plays out on a tiny four-colour screen atmosphere! Even though the road seems to be  floating in a black void, it and the cars still look great, and the backgrounds really do give the feeling of driving down a mountain road at night, with the city lights shining in the distance. The only real problem the game has presentation wise is the lack of music, having instead a constant low buzz representing engine sounds punctuated with high pitched beeps when you're drifting.

There's not much more to be said here: Initial D Gaiden is just a really good racing game, on a system that isn't really known for them. It's a shame that the license precluded it from getting a worldwide release so more people might know about it. But without the license, would anyone have taken any notice of it today, including me?

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban (Game Boy)

You might already be aware of Bikkuriman as a franchise, but if you're not, it's a line of snacks that were popular in Japan from the late 1970s onwards, that also had stickers in the packets. The characters from the stickers were popular enough to have been featured in various anime and videogame tie-ins over the years, the most well-known in the west probably being the PC Engine game Bikkuriman World, which was an altered port of the arcade game Wonderboy in Monster Land. As far as I can tell, though, this game is completely new.

Like most licensed games from the early 1990s, though it is a platform game, and coming from 1992, it's actually an early example of a problem I associate with the later years of the Game Boy's life: developers being way too ambitious with the size of their sprites. Like you can see in the screenshots, the sprite in this game are huge, which doesn't give them a lot of space to move around the screen, and limits the distance you can see. And that does cause a lot of problems with leaps of faith and so on. Luckily, though, it is ambitious in other ways, and they at least make it an interesting game, if not a good one.

Firstly, your character's lifebar is split in half, with the second half being a power meter that goes up as you attack enemies, and down as you take damage. However, the less life you have left, the higher the maximum amount of power you can store gets, like in Psychic Force 2012. Once the meter reaches a certain level for the first time, you can press start to take on a more powerful form, who looks cooler and can fly and shoot projectiles. In this form, once the power meter reaches a certain level, you can press start to use a super attack, summoning a phoenix or a dragon (depending on which character you're playing as, and they seem to alternate stage-by-stage) to smite your enemies. So brave players might want to try sacrificing their health so they can easily perform this attack twice in a row as soon as they reach the boss (though this is both brave and foolish, as the game's massive sprites make it pretty hard to dodge attacks a lot of the time).

It's nothing ground breaking, but it's more complexity than you might expect from a licensed Game Boy platformer in 1992. And there's more too! As well as the main game, the developers have also included a little beyblade-esque spinning tops minigame accessible from the main menu, presumably as a way to shoehorn in a multiplayer mode. Before you start, you choose whether to emphasise power or speed, and whoever runs out of speed frst loses. So go with speed every time and you'll win. I can't imagine this sold many more copies of the game, and I honestly wonder if two Game Boys and two copies of this were ever connected together, even once. But it was probably a request from the licensor or the publisher that they had to include some kind of multiplayer thing.

Super Bikkuriman - Densetsu no Sekiban isn't anything revolutionary, and I definitely don't recommend going out of your way to track down a copy. But if you ever happen upon a loose cartridge on sale for practically no money at all (like I did), it wouldn't hurt to pick it up.

Cardcaptor Sakura - Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundokai (Game Boy Color)

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, Cardcaptor Sakura was a very popular show in Japan and around the world. Being a popular kids anime meant that obviously, it got a bunch of videogame adaptations, too, though since it's a cartoon with a female lead, and western companies inexplicably hate cartoons with female leads, none of them got released outside of Japan (in fact, there was barely any western merchandise in general). Testament to exactly how popular the show was is the fact that though it only ran for a little under a hundred episodes, it got ten games across six formats in that shot time. And while most of them were as you'd expect: games about magic and action and so on, this one more than any of the others, I think, shows just how popular the series was: it's a game about Sakura and her classmates participating in a school sports day.

A fantasy-action show getting a videogame that totally eschews both of those in favour of the characters having some light-hearted fun seems like a big risk to me, especially releasing it on a cartridge-based console in 2000, rather than as a simple download in 2018. But anyway, it exists, and it's a Track and Field-style button-annihilation game in which you pick either the pink or blue team and take part in various events. There's normal sports, like the 100m dash and the relay race, there's sports you only see in school sports days, like the three-legged race and the "assault course" that ends in sack racing, there's sports you only see in Japanese school sports days, like the one where teams of three kids carry around a fourth kid, and the kids on top have to steal each other's hats, and there's some slightly weird stuff, like a colour matching puzzle game and a thing where you race over bumpy ground, running behind a giant ball.

As for how it plays, it's alright. A lot of the events are about pressing A and B as fast as you can, with a few extra little twists for each one too, like handing the baton in the relay, or crawling under obstacles in the assault course. The hat-stealing game is the most fun, as it sees you trying to knock your opponents off their balance to so you can easily grab their hat, while also trying to avoid your own hat getting taken as you lean in to do the pushing. Of course, like all TaF-style games, I'm completely terrible at every event, and in a couple of hours' play, haven't managed to win a single one. But that's where the game's secret weapon kicks in: the license.

Of course, Cardcaptor Sakura is an all-time classic show, that doesn't get quite as much recognition in the west as it should, for aforementioned reasons, and this game captures (ho-ho!) a lot of its charm. The actual in-game character sprites are pretty nice, and between events, there's lots of big, luxurious pixel art of the characters, and it all looks excellent, brightly coloured, and super-cute. Though it's clearly a case of just applying a license to a generic game, it's still very effective and adds a ton of charm.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd definitely recommend tracking this game down, as it's pretty fun, really captures the show's feel against all odds, and would generally be a cute addition to your collection. If you're a fan of the genre, I'm not really sure what might make a good or a bad Track and Field game, and there's probably plenty of others that are a lot more easily available for you to get your hands on, and provide just as much of that arm-tiring action you crave.

Soreyuke! Amida-kun! (Game Boy)

So, I'm sure you've all seen the Amida lot-drawing system somewhere at some point, whether it's in the bonus stages for Super Mario Land 2 or Psycho Fox, or that episode of Cardcaptor Sakura where Syaoran gets picked to be the princess in the school play. In case you haven't, how it works is that there's a bunch of vertical lines with different results at one end, and all these lines are connected at random by vertical lines. Normally, the middle area with all the vertical lines would be covered up while everyone chooses a starting point. After everyone has chosen a starting point, they go down the path they've selected, with the twist being that every time they come to a horizontal line, they have to go across it, and since they were all hidden when the paths were chosen, no-one knows where they'll end up.

In Soreyuke! Amida-Kun (also known as just "Amida"), you control a sentient, mobile vertical line. There's a round Kirby-like creature on each stge who wants to get home, and you have to get them there, while ensuring they don't walk into any skulls, which are at all the ends of the vertical paths that aren't home, as well as on some of the horizontal paths too. Obviously, you do this by moving around and actng as a bridge so that the creature crosses at all the right places.

The stages start out pretty simple, with only a few vertical paths and regular old horizontals dotted about. As the game goes on, though, more vertical paths get added, as well as different kinds of paths joining them, starting with diagonal paths, which act the same as horizontals, but take up more room. Then later there's paths that just send your little blob back the way from whence they came, and others that teleport them to a different part of the stage, and so on. Like most fixed puzzle games, it starts out simple, and gets more complex and difficult by scaling up the size of the problems and adding new elements. It actually gets pretty difficult surprisingly quickly, once you get past the first few stages.

There's not really much more to be said about this game. If it sounds interesting, give it a shot, but don't expect anything spectacular.

Parasol Henbee (Game Boy)

So, this game is based on an anime I've never seen, and had never heard of before playing the game. And I wouldn't have even heard of the game itself had it not happened to be one of the 66 games built into some models of the excellent Game Boy Color clone, the KongFeng GB Boy Colour. So what kind of game is Parasol Henbee? It's a platform game with an incredibly sedate pace and feel, akin to going out for a leisurely stroll.

You play as the eponymous Henbee (or possibly Henbei, depending on the romanisation), and you literally just got from left to right on each stage, avoiding enemies and hazards until you reach the end. You do have an attack, but it's awkward to use, and it depletes your health almost as much as getting hit by an enemy does. You start out with pretty low health, though there is a reason for that: your walking speed and the height/length of your jumps has a correlation with the state of your health bar, and there's lots of little items floating around that increase your health a tiny amount. Of course, this means that in later stages, when the platforms start getting smaller, and the gaps between them bigger, if you take a few hits, finishing the stage becomes basically impossible. And there are points in those later stages that require military precision to avoid touching the enemies.

There's not much else to say about the game, mechanically speaking. There's no bosses, very little variety, and you can get through most of the game without feeling any sense of progress or achievement. There are some interesting things to say about it aesthetically and thematically, though! Firstly, Henbee looks like a Mr. Saturn from Earthbound, though this game and the series on which it's based is older than that game. Also, the first couple of stages, which are set in what's clearly supposed to be a friendly Japanese suburb look more like a feral city, left to rot by uncaring corrupt politicians, as the streets are lined with piles of uncollected rubbish and populated by packs of wild dogs and cats. Maybe I'm wrong, and the creator of Doraemon did make a series that was a biting social commentary that somehow got a licensed Gamy Boy game made out of it, but I'd be very surprised if that were the case.

I don't recommend Parasol Henbee. It's not interesting enough to bother hunting down, and even if you do have a GB Boy Colour and no actual cartridges to put in it, there's plenty of much, much better games on the built in list you can enjoy while waiting for your ebay-purchased carts to arrive.

Volleyfire (Game Boy)

Long-time readers will remember a few times in earlier posts where I mention having a 32-in-1 pirate cart for my Game Boy as a kid, which, along with a few mainstays like Tetris, Tennis and Alleyway, also contained a whole load of lesser known Japan-only games that I otherwise would have never heard of, of which Volley Fire is one. I think the title is supposed to suggest a kind of volleyball, but played with fire, and I can kind of see where they're coming from with that, but it's more like a more advanced version of the 1975 arcade game Western Gun/Gun Fight. But with spaceships instead of cowboys.

The game's setup for the first stage is like this: you control as a spaceship on the bottom of the screen, and there's an AI-controlled spaceship at the top. You have to shoot each other and avoid each other's shots, while shot-blocking indestructible asteroids float by in the middle. Now, when I played this back in the ancient past, I saw this simple first stage, and got bored and moved on before bothering to get past it. Playing it again as an adult, I learned that I was wrong to give up on Volley Fire so quickly.

After the first stage, it quickly starts introducing new elements: destructible scenery, mirrors that reflect your shots back, an array of different power-ups, battles taking place in scrolling mazes, bosses fights, and so on. As the game goes on, it also starts to combine these things together. It also looks pretty nice for a 1990 Game Boy game, and it's got decent, catchy music, too.

Based on my old memories of it, I really thought I'd be telling you not to bother with Volley Fire, but it looks like I proved myself wrong, and it's definitely worth a look. It's not the best GB STG (that'd probably be Nemesis II), but it's still a lot of fun, and fairly unique, too.

He Jin Zhuang Bei II (Game Boy Color)

I don't know what the title means, or if there's actually a  He Jin Zhuang Bei I, but what I do know is that this is an unlicensed beat em up themed around the Metal Gear Solid games. Despite it's worldwide popularity, Metal Gear Solid doesn't seem to have inspired many pirate games, compared to the likes of Street Fighter or Dynasty Warriors. In fact, before this game, the only previous MGS Pirate I'd seen was a Russian Mega Drive pirate, that was just a quick hack of Crack Down with only the title screen changed.

The game starts with a codec conversation (in Chinese) between Snake, Mei Ling and the Colonel, before dumping you on an RPG-esque map screen. From this map, there are two stages the player can visit, in whatever order they like. There's an incredibly tedious bridge stage, that feels like it goes on forever, and sees Snake fight various kinds of soldiers and also what appear to be martial artists dressed in raggedy jester costumes with sacks on their heads. The other's a kind of warehouse district that doesn't have the jesters, though it does end with a boss fight against a big robot, that towers over Snake (who himself must be about seven feet tall, being significantly taller than most of the human enemy types). I dont know if there's some kind of copy protection that hasn't been cracked, or if there's some I was meant to do but never knew about because I can't read any of the text, but after completing these two stages, I could only play them again, the game didn't open up anything new.

Mechanically, it's very mediocre. Like a lot of other unlicensed GBC beat em ups (especially the many Dynasty Warriors games, and Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War), it has a levelling up system, and for the first few levels of experience, you do very little damage to enemies and every fight is a boring slog. You have a button to attack (doing Snake's punch-punch-kick combo from Metal Gear Solid!) and another to jump. Pressing them together performs a gun attack that drains your health and hardly ever hits, so don't bother with it. Other than that, there's really nothing about the way He Jin Zhuang Bei II plays that's particularly uniue or interesting.

Unless you're a rabid obsessive for either unlicensed games or Metal Gear Solid, there's unfortunately not really much to recommend about He Jin Zhuan Bei II, the various Dynasty Warriors GBC bootlegs are mostly better than it, and it definitely doesn't hold a torch to the excellent School Fighter.

School Fighter (Game Boy Color)

So, for years this unlicenced Chinese game has been sitting in the Game Boy Color romsets, mocking us all with the promise of educational pugilism. Booting the rom would let the inquisitive player see the intro and title screen, but nothing more. Until, that is, earlier this week, when long-time friend and ally of this blog Takashi partially cracked School Fighter's copy protection. Only the first two stages are playable, but that lets us see the game in action, and get a good grip on its mechanics and design.

So what's it like? It's a single-plane beat em up, with some occasional platform elements, and it's clearly heavily influenced, both aesthetically and mechanically by SNK's King of Fighters games and by Technos' Kunio-kun games. The plot, as far as I can tell (there's no text in the intro, and if there was, it'd be in Chinese, and I wouldn't be able to read it anyway), is that all the school's sports teams have been taken over and corrupted by appropriately-themed monsters. So in the first stage, you fight baseball monsters, the second has volleyball monsters, and the title card for the third stage promises judo monsters. Judging by the number of monsters that appear in the intro, it looks like there's six stages in total, with boxing, kendo and a final stage lying in wait.

You get three characters to choose from, though as far as I can tell, the only differences are aesthetic: a girl, a boy, and Gowin's dinosaur mascot, who for this game is cosplaying as Kyo Kusanagi. The game manages to get a lot of different actions from the GBC's d-pad and two buttons, too. A and B are punch and kick (though oddly, the girl's standing kick is a crouching punch, albeit a different-looking one than her actual crouching punch), and pressing the two together jumps. The d-pad works mostly as you'd expect: you walk left and right, and press down to crouch, but this is where the mechanical influence of The King of Fighters comes in: pressing up performs a very KOF-esque dodge move, and double-tapping left or right performs a short dash. Furthermore, you can jump while dashing to go further and higher.

The three characters, while they play identically, as I already mentioned, they do each have their own personalities, the male character especially. They really went all out to make him look like a tough Bancho (yeah, though it's a Chinese game, it does seem to be heavily influenced by Japanese high school culture). He walks with his hands in his pockets, his standing kicks are the kind of casual forward thrusts you see in the likes of Rival Schools or Kenka Bancho, and his dodge move is a nonchalant shrug out of the way. The enemies, on the other hand, are mostly just really cute: there's little green bean guys, flying guys who look like Tails, but with his spinning tails replaced with dragonfly wings, little tiger cub people, and so on.

School Fighter is definitely a pleasant surprise: it's a strong contendor for the title of "best Game Boy beat em up", as well as one of the best pirate games I've played on any system. I only hope that someday the copy protection  might get fully cracked. Or I somehow manage to track down an actual copy of it myself. Apparently, it's also the third game in a series that started on the original Game Boy called "Binary Monsters", so I guess I should take a look at those games sometime too.
This game is also known as Binary Monsters III and 熱門高校 數碼怪獸III