Battleship (Game Boy)

Another oldie but goodie: Battleship... for the Game Boy.

I love the sound effects, I love the items (the feeling when you use the 2x2 radar and it finds something, and the little scanner bar goes wonky and the little sound goes blip instead of myeeenh, so awesome), and I just like having someone to play Battleship with.

One thing I think was fairly progressive for a game this old is the password... every time you beat a level, it gives you a password that you can save, and on subsequent plays, you can enter the password at the beginning and skip ahead to a higher level. Pretty cool.

I won two rounds before I got tired (I was simultaneously staying up late to watch football).

Donkey Kong (Game Boy)

This was one of the first Game Boy games I owned. I probably got it at the same time as my Game Boy. I don't remember; it has just always been in my collection, as far as I can tell.

And I do not like it. At all.

It is frustrating, the sound effects are annoying, and maybe I've just been a little hipstery my whole life and didn't like it because EVERYONE likes Donkey Kong, I don't know.

My mom would play my Game Boy from time to time, and I know she liked Tetris (possibly more than me, which is saying something) and I think I recall her liking Donkey Kong, too. It certainly explains why I didn't just get rid of it 25 years ago.

Super Mario Land (Game Boy)

This is actually one of my favorite Mario games, because it's quite different from most of the others. Some key differences:
- The music is really good (not that the typical Mario music isn't, but it's nice to have a change) and I really like the sound effects.
- When you have the fire flower, your fireballs can pick up coins for you (that's what I'm doing in the photo on the right, above)
- There are some mobs unique to this game (as far as I know) that are REALLY satisfying to jump on. In particular, the jumping spider thing, the flying bees that drop arrows, and the little Sphinxes in the first dungeon come to mind.
- The turtles, when you jump on them, turn into little bombs that flicker a few times and then explode, so you have to move away or it'll hurt you back. I don't know if they did that in any of the other games but it's not the typical situation where you can kick or grab the shell.
- At the end of every level, there are two doors you can go through. If you get to the one at the top, you get a bonus round that can give you more lives. (I know this isn't entirely unique to this game, but I like the way this one is done).

All in all, a very satisfying game. And as I've been finding with several of these old games, I am amazed by the staying power of muscle memory. I find hidden blocks because I jumped at the right time without knowing why I was supposed to jump there. Pretty cool. Also a little creepy because it's like being on auto-pilot.

Buster Bros. (Game Boy)

I had completely forgotten about this game. I love this game. I'm terrible at it but I love it anyway.

To be entirely honest, the premise is, at best, silly. There's some sort of war motif going on... I get strong Vietnam War vibes from the aesthetic. But what you do is shoot things at the ceiling in an attempt to break large bubbles into smaller bubbles and smaller bubbles into nothing. If the bubbles touch you, you lose a life. There are different types of guns (one has a suction cup so it trails a line and sticks to the ceiling and stays there for a second, and if the bubble touches the line, it breaks) and one is more of a machine gun so you can shoot more frequently but no line... etc. etc.

I don't think I've ever made it very far in the game, but it is still really fun.

Tamagotchi (Game Boy)

Yeah, they made a Tamagotchi game for the Game Boy. And I've owned it all these years. It's... not very good. But I played it anyway.

The shiny black egg was always my favorite.

Look at little Rafael, jumping around so happy!
Well, until the last, like, half-second.

They grow up so quickly, don't they?

So, it's a lot like a real Tamagotchi... you feed them to boost Life, you play with them to boost Fun, one of the games is math-based so that boosts IQ, one of the games is sports-based so that boosts Body. When it poops, you wash it away, when it's sick, you can give it a shot or a pill (I honestly don't know the difference in-game), and when it's sleepy, you turn off the lights.

It's all really straightforward, except the games suuuck. The Smile Game, I think, is based on one from the actual Tamagotchis? (Forgive me, it's been about 17 years since I carried mine around.) But you guess whether it's going to look left or right, and you get five tries in a round, so you want to get at least three right so it's happy. There is a little skill to it (it wiggles back and forth until you choose, so once you figure out the rhythm, it SHOULD be a little easier) but sometimes it's off. It's really frustrating.

Also, the second night is SUPER long. There are three slots so you can be raising three Tamagotchi at once, but if you stick to one, you will be sitting there probably 15 minutes or so while you wait for your now-older Tamagotchi to wake up. I guess it's supposed to be like, a commentary on teenagers and how they can sleep in a lot? I don't know.

At any rate, I lost patience and Rafael is going to be stuck in adolescence for a long, long time, because I'm not coming back to this game anytime soon.