Final Fantasy X: Fantasy War (Game Boy Color)

Firstly, this game doesn't have anything to do with Squaresoft's PS2 game Final Fantasy X, so I guess it can be assumed that the X in the title is the letter X and not the roman numeral. What does the letter X signify in this case? Nothing, it's a chinese pirate game, they aren't supposed to make sense.
In this case, it's a beat em up, and to be fair to those crazy pirates, it does keep to a general Final Fantasy theme pretty well: the player characters look like they could be sprites from the battle screens of the pre-32-bit era FF games, and some of the enemies are very recognisable as coming from the series too, such as the goblins and the tonberries (The first appearance of the tonberry, shortly after the second boss is the furthest I've managed to get, as it basically turns up and make short work of stabbing you to death in just a couple of hits!). The plot (as far as i can tell from the textless intro) is also in the vein of the old FF games, having 4 big elemental crystals being stolen or destroyed or something.
There's four playable characters in this: a sword-weilding knight-type guy, a rubbish wizard, an androgynous archer and a chocobo. Unfortunately, only the knight is worth playing as, since he's significantly stronger and faster and just all-round better than the other three. The wizard is the worst, he's slow and weak and crap looking. The archer is almost good, if they were just a little bit faster at moving and attacking, they'd be a lot more fun to play as. The chocobo is obviously just there for novelty value, and though it's fast, it's also weak and its attacks have a very short range.
The game is really nicely presented, other than the rubbish cheap-looking title screen. The character sprites and backgrounds are excellent, and as I said earlier, the player characters would look right at home in the older FF's battle screens (though I must admit, my knowledge of the series isn't deep enough to know whether the sprites are original work by the developers, or just rips from one of the official games. Same goes for the backgrounds, which are very nicely drawn, probably some of the best I've seen on the GBC.) The music is pretty good too, but I know for sure that it's stolen, as it's been ripped from the (surprisingly playable) Game Boy port of King of Fighters 95.
As for the game itself, if you play as the knight, it's a lot of fun! You go from left to right beating up monsters, and even getting experience points that increase the length of your health bar as you level up. Every character has the usual combo attacks, plus a running attack and a special attack that's done with a quarter circle forward plus the attack button, which reduces some of the red bar that appears below your health, and is replenshed bit by bit as you use normal atacks on enemies. If you play as the other characters, it's not so fun, and it's really difficult to get past even the first stage. But it is a really fun game when you play as the knight.

Dino Wars - Kyouryuu Oukoku heno Daibouken (SNES)

So, this game is based on an early 90s kids' movie that no-one remembers: "Adventures in Dino City", which is about a couple of kids who get sucked into the world of a TV show. Though I'm sure I remember the movie just being called "Dinosaurs: The Movie" when I saw it. Strange.
The game itself is a platform game, but going against the trend of licenced kids platform games on the SNES, it's actually not awful.
The game looks and sounds pretty nice, with the backgrounds on the outdoor stages standing out in particular, being very well drawn and colourful.
It plays great, too: the stages are pretty varied, and you can get pretty far into the game, and it'll still be throwing new gimmicks and obstacles at you. Although there are quite a few stages that follow the formula of "ride a moving platform across a long bottomless pit while stuff tries to kill you", but while the later incarnations of these stages get frustrating very quickly, it's a credit to the game that there are at least three types of them (rollercoaster, jetski-type thing, and large mode 7 rotating wheel thing with platforms on it) that all play quite differently to each other.
To fight enemies, you can choose to either jump on their heads, or punch them. Neither are especially great: the punch is very short range, and there are a fair few enemies (especially later on in the game) that like to jump around, and they can do it almost as high as the player character. Despite the combat in stages being poor, the boss fights are actually a lot better, and all very different to each other.
This is a good game, and I'm somewhat surprised it isn't more well known, considering it got a worldwide release. If you're wondering why I reviewed the Japanese version when it got a worldwide release, the reason is that whoever was in charge of localising the game for the west partook in that most hated 90s habit: they messed with the difficulty and made the JP version's hard mode into the western version's normal mode.