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| Konami GB Collection,
Gameboy |
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| Games,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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Epoch making stuff, my first Gameboy game in years! I bought heavy into the hand-held console thing because social interaction was becoming a bore. How was I supposed to know that 99.9% of the titles cranked out for the Colour Gameboy were cheapo licensing knock-offs ripped from the same platform scrolling blueprint. For games developers, the Gameboy has become a nice little earner where you create a shoddy spin-off version of your big N64 project or recent movie release – go check out the appalling ‘Rugrats’, ‘Toy Story’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Armourines’ cartridges for proof of this. What really put the boot in is the 25 pound price tag they hang on these abominations. Add to this the fact that GB’s sworn enemy, the Neo-Geo is a LOT better, with better games, well ‘Metal Slug’ anyway.
Rant over. I wanted to buy ‘Pokemon’, buy I got confused by the Red and Blue business, I’m waiting for a cross-over purple version. I’d buy ‘Zelda’, but I’m working on snatching a guy at works copy. So I bought this because it’s a VFM thing. Four games! – and all of them re-writes of old SNEs classics, and SNES for me is still the Holy grail of console gaming.
The presentation sucks, theres no cute intro stuff, it’s all been removed in order to squeeze the lot onto the cart. None of the games take full advantage of the 56 colour GB palette – they’ve all been rushed through the conversion from their old B&W counterparts. And the music is the same old ear-piercing stuff you always get, looped endlessly to irritate other passengers on the bus. All shame so far then.
‘Gradius’ is a grown up ‘Scramble’, but baby ‘R-Type’. It’s damnable hard and fiddly navigating through those squadrons of alien buggers, but the power-up stuff is a blast as always and I’m a sucker for the kind of end of level boss-types that games like this throw at you. ‘Castlevania Adventure’ is a bit of a slowcoach horror platform game where the badguys come crawling toward you in a tag-team one at a time style, but makes up for the dull periods by conjuring up the occasional fantastic creepy obstacle – check out the giant rolling eyeballs!. ‘Konami Racing’ is a nice leisurely-paced top down racing game, which plays nicely, but once you’ve realised you can’t crash into the other cars you feel a bit cheated. Finally ‘Probotector’, which is probably the best of the bunch, another platform game, but a lot more hectic, and with bigger guns.
All in all, a nice bunch of tube time wasters, but clumsily tranferred to the small, small screen. The proof will be if I’m still playing them in a month – I’ll get back to you.
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