DMGs are expensive now.
get a gb boy colour
I’ve taken 137 screenshots of Sword of Hope, beaten two bosses (out of a presumed four?) and opened 2 of the 3 gates. I am stuck currently but…this game rules.
I cheated and played the English version which was released in '91 not '89, but y’know. I think it counts.
Kind of a mix between shadow gate and dragon quest, i guess? It’s not really a dungeon crawler, since it feels much more JRPGish, but then it has this first person navigation + light puzzles. It’s an odd mixture.
Mechanically it’s pretty simple - walk around, enemies appear, then you murder them. But there are lots of little wrinkles that make it funny/interesting.
First of all, the random numbers in this game have huge variance. For instance, the boss I just fought would do attacks that did 1-8 damage OR 25-40 damage. Considering I had a maximum of 40HP, that’s absurd. I just fought an ape whose spells did 15-45 damage. What the hell!!!
It’s very funny.
It’s also very funny because the penalty for dying is almost nothing. You go back home and have to heal for a small amount of gold. At level 1 you don’t even have to heal because you respawn with max HP and MP for level 1. You don’t lose any progress, items, exp, etc. It’s very nice!
Another mechanical thing is that everything you do is more or less likely to start a battle - including just examining your surroundings. But it feels pretty fair - just looking around only starts a battle about 10% of the time. However! Sometimes when you try to move to the next screen, it starts a battle, and afterwards you’re still at the same place, and moving to the next screen starts a battle again. Sometimes it starts two battles in a row without any input from you! My record is 5 battles for a single move.
Honestly it’s still pretty funny. The battles are brief and breezy and easy…unless you get murdered in one hit, which can happen.
Also! Spells are not guaranteed to hit the enemy! And this is true for enemies as well, who seem more likely to hit themselves than you!
Also also! Enemies can show up in the middle of a battle, but different types of enemies will fight amongst themselves instead of attacking you!! Nothing like a goblin showing up to murder the skeleton head you were fighting before turning on you.
Also also also! The Fireball3 spell targets everyone all the time…including yourself! So the tradeoff is just Taking Damage, it…rules.
The real star is the writing though, which is phenomenal. The conceit of the game is that all the people in the kingdom were turned into trees, which means you can actually talk to most of the trees and get little hints and flavor text and stuff. It’s such a good idea because they didn’t have to use any memory for sprites of people, but they could still cram a shitload of text in the game.
(I missed a bunch of text boxes here but he was very heroic before he just fucking died)
Also, there are three omnipresent options that result in various bits of text:
LOOK
OPEN
HIT
And you can do that to anything including people. Here’s what happens when you try to open the Shaman:
And hitting people/things often results in these hilarious onomatopoeias
The shopkeeper lady beats the shit out of you too:
The few actual people you meet all have shitloads of weird dialogue as well. The shopkeeper lady will give you a secret item if you visit enough times. The first time you meet Martel he’s a huge dick:
but then later
ALSO HE HAS A PIGEON
AND THEN YOU TALK TO THE PIGEON
BONG
IT’S SO GOOD
Anyway there are also mimics and slugs and treants and they will all kick your fucking ass
I can’t recommend this enough. It’s very breezy so far and each level feels Falcom-ish in how big the jumps are. I’ll see if I can figure out what to do next because I really want to finish this game.
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The prices are climbing, but DMGs aren’t too too bad yet.
Unmodded you can probably still find one for $60
here’s a backlit modded one on Etsy for just over $100
Backlit Original DMG Gameboy Green and Purple | Etsy
Most are more heavily modded and more expensive, but that might be a good option if someone here wants something sort of in-between an original and something more heavily modded.
The buttons on DMG Gameboys are great!
I don’t find I really notice it to look at them, but most portable game consoles have small buttons. The DMG has home system sized buttons. They are interchangeable with the buttons in the NES controller.
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I don’t know that I think it’s good, but it sure is interesting.
Being able to arrange different sort of troops in different formations and upgrade and change things in mid-stage shops is plenty unusual for a shooter.
My brain kinda lumps it together with Aerostar, Solar Striker, and VAS.
as ‘those Gameboy shooters’.
Aerostar stands out as by far my favorite.
I love the ‘jump’ gimmick, and I think aside from that it’s just very well made.
Solar Striker feels like it was designed for a system less powerful than the Gameboy.
It’s very simple. It’s very straightforward, and it’s also very good.
VAS conversely pulls out all the stops and looks amazing. I recently revisited it, and found it better than I had remembered, but it’s not my favorite of these.
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have you played nemesis/gradius ii? as a kid, it was easily the best-looking game boy game i ever saw. and obviously, it’s a pretty good shooting game, too
1989
The three games that jump out at me from the launch year are Super Mario Land, Alleyway, and Tetris.
Super Mario Land is Gunpei’s take on Mario.
The sprites are super tiny. The physics are different!
After his jump arc Mario will drop like a stone!
If you jump on a turtle it turns into a little bomb that explodes shortly afterward.
Mario is going on sort of a world tour visiting Ancient China, Easter Island, and Egypt.
There are shooter levels with different theming: Mario uses a submarine and a plane.
I’m convinced the ‘power ball’ thing that replaces the fireball was probably loosely inspired by pachinko, but I don’t know why I’m convinced that’s the case.
It’s a great Mario. I grew up with it. I love it.
Alleyway succeeds where a surprising number of Arkanoid ports did not by making a paddle game that is actually playable on a d-pad. Still not as fun as Arkanoid with a paddle though.
Tetris! Tetris could be it’s own thread.
Tetris is my favorite game in the action-puzzle genre commonly called ‘puzzle’ games.
It’s almost everyone’s! My Mom likes it!
The Gameboy version of Tetris is a great version of Tetris, especially aesthetically.
A lot of care went into the look of this version. Except for the long piece every tetromino can be seen to visually be made up of little squares, but not just squares. There are squares with little squares inside them and squares with big squares inside them. Every tetrominio looks different and distinct from the others but never in a way that visually clashes (which can not be said of all or even most versions of Tetris).
There are also curiously two brick walls on either side of the playfield, so I guess the developers took the idea of Tetris being ‘in a well’ very literally.
The HUD on the right of the playfield is simple and easy to read.
There are two cute little endings if your score is high enough.
Down + Start on the title “1 player / 2 player” screen gets you the heart mode.
I probably have, but I don’t really remember it. Maybe I’ll revisit it sometime this week when I get a chance.
Slightly jelly that you actually played shooters on the Gameboy as a kid.
I had a Gameboy as a kid but discovered shooters later on.
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Anyone ever play the (recently, kinda… translated) great mini-rouge, CAVENOIRE?
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This is more than I could have ever asked for. I am verklempt.
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I was the first (as far as I know) person to talk about the game in English 
. And introduced GideonZhi to hacking it.
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I just survived a fight with 2 HP and 0 MP after a three way battle between a giant slug, a mushroom man, and a weird lion snake thing broke out. I only lived because the myconid hit itself with lightning 3 times in a row. This game rules
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I played Shanghai just so I could see those openings and endings for myself. I didn’t stop until I was able to go from beauty to dragon. It’s a little strange to play the game now compared to when I was 5 because now I can read the tiles. I can’t tell if it’s my age or my new knowledge of the Chinese language that helps, but it’s much easier to find matches. Is it more relaxing than other forms of solitaire? Maybe a little! I still don’t know the heuristics that would help me avoid trapping tiles. Still, this game inspired Sigmar’s Garden, so I’m grateful.
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i used to have my own names for the tiles back then “rose” “the stinky cheese man” “guy riding a camel”, and so on
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it’s mostly just two things
- prefer to free tiles which free the most other tiles, such as the very top tile and the two on the right and left, as well as the bottom and top row endcaps
- if you see two tiles on the same row, or if you see tiles you need to remove but don’t see matches for, wait as long as possible to use any matches for those - two tiles on the same row will get you stuck if you can’t dig to both tiles and you’ve already used the other match)
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a third tip which is kinda the second tip again: try to do all your “safest” matches first. assume anything you can’t see is buried at the deepest layer and will only see the light of day at the very end
in shanghai II there are options for both wild tile (one free wildcard match) and winnable game (so the game is always winnable if you make the correct moves)
it also lets you shuffle a failed game’s tiles so you can still complete it
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the famicom version of shanghai II (jp exclusive i think?) has incredible music, maybe the best music of any version
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That flourish with the ritardando is everything! Oh and it just keeps shifting, nice!
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I played a bunch of Tetris because I wanted to see rockets lift off and people dancing. I got what I wanted.
I never really touched Game B when I was a kid, but it’s a neat little variation. It turns Tetris into this immediate, high intensity workout. I really love how you gradually fill out the band as you move up levels. There’s a secret, hard difficulty you can select that will hide upcoming pieces from you. I can’t play like that.
Ultimately, this is not my ideal Tetris. It’s stiff and sticky. I want to move the pieces as fast as I think of where to put them, but my thumb doesn’t jam hard enough.
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My ideal Tetris is just this Tetris with hard drop and lock delay
Which thankfully exists,
I <3 Rosy Retrospection so much!
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