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.

Card Captor Sakura: Sakura Card de Mini Game (Game Boy Advance)

 This isn't the first Card Captor Sakura game I've covered, and it definitely won't be the last. One interesting quality it has, though, is the amount of unique graphics it uses for each stage. I think it's worth mentioning up here in the first paragraph because the show itself is well known for Sakura wearing a different costume in every episode, preventing the producers from saving money by reusing animatons and requiring new reference sheets for every episode. Kind of like how here, it requires a whole new set of sprites for every stage, which is pretty inefficient, especially on a cartridge-based system like the GBA.

 

The game's set during the second season, when Sakura's already tamed all of the Clow cards, and is then using her own power to turn them into her own Sakura cards. That's not really important, though. The game's format follows that of the show, where rather than engaging every card's spirit in battle, Sakura has to best them in some kind of challenge. As such, every stage is, like the title suggests, a different mini-game. They're generally about  a minute long each, and they're pretty varied.

 

There's a rhythm game stage, a Bubble Bobble-like single screen platformer, a racing game where you have to rhythmically tap the A button to build up speed on your rollerblades, a stage where you use the sword card to cut chains that are trying to capture Xiaolang, and a bunch more. Some of them are moderately fun, some of them are tedious, none of them particularly stand out as being especially bad
or good, though. That's a problem in itself, but it's not the biggest problem the game has.

 

The biggest problem is for almost all of the mini-games, there's no score, they play the same every time, and a lot of them will even last the exact same amount of time every time you play them. So once you've played a mini-game once and performed well enough to get past it in the story mode, there isn't really anything driving you to go back and play it ever again (and none of them are exciting enough to lure you back intrinsically, either). Since they're about a minute long each, that means that even including the cutscenes (told using text boxes and very tiny screenshots of the TV show), the game's about an hour long, and you're unlikely to ever go back and replay it, unless you happen to be in the target audience of a very young child with very indiscriminating tastes and a small library of games to play. There is also a pretty pointless paint program included too, I guess in an attempt to address that problem.

 

Though none of them ever got released outside of Japan (despite the show being pretty popular in the UK and North America), there were quite a few Card Captor Sakura games released during the time the show was on the air, and out of the ones I've played so far, this is definitely the worst. You really aren't missing out if you pass this one by. The best things I can say about it are that it looks okay and the language barrier isn't going to be a problem.