Video Game Collecting

Anyone who has played Moon Patrol, particularly in the arcade back in the day must have been stunned.  Parallax scrolling.  Addicting beat.  The moon!

Moon Patrol is one of those games that cannot afford to be screwed with.  If your company is going to port it than it better do a good job.  All I can say is holy crap! 

This game is near arcade perfect.  The music is off a little bit but the beat is still there.  The resolution is a little bit smaller but the sprites are identical to their arcade counter part.  If you play it on a Game Boy Advance than you’re playing the arcade dream.  Super Game Boy doesn’t recognize the extended palette.  The original Game Boy has struggles with being blurry and enemy missiles are hard to see.

All in all this game is perfect and is probably the best you’ll find outside of that MAME filth.  If you’re not familiar with the game it takes place on the moon.  You’re a security guard on patrol and you’re attacked by ufos.  Press the kill button to fire missoles about you and infront of you.  Make your moon buggy leap over craters and blast rocks out of your way.  MAKE THEM PAY!

This is what an arcade game ported to a portable system should feel like!

Once upon a time I wrote about fixing the lines on my original Game Boy.  Well, these two videos below detail how I fixed the vertical lines on a $4.99 near perfect Game Boy I found at a Savers thrift store.  I show step by step how to take the Game Boy apart, the tools that you need to fix the lines in the screen, and how to do the actual repair.  I fast forward the boring parts like unscrewing the screws to keep the videos to the most important details.  I hope the videos are beneficial to you but keep in mind I am not liable in any way for you following these steps.  If you don’t know what you’re doing or you’re too timid to do it on your own system then don’t try it!  On the flip side if you have questions let me me know in the comments.

Part 1: Game Boy Screen Repair Part 1 of 2

Part 1: Game Boy Screen Repair Part 2 of 2

Namco single handedly ruined game compilations.  After five astounding collections on the PS1 they somehow decided to release a classic compilation on every system with the same old Pac Man, Galaga, and Rally X franchises.

So the Konami Arcade Advance is a welcomed compilation.  I am confident Namco could have released a better GBA compilation with hits like Rolling Thunder but they didn’t and instead we can enjoy a change of scenery.  The games included in this collection may or may not be emulated.  They might be emulations of modified roms as some od the games act differently.  For instance Frogger was originally designed for a vertical screen.  This version scrolls after crossing the road to show the river.  Some other changes include an enhanced title screen for Rush N Attack.  The games play exact to their arcade counterparts with music that is dead on.

Another cool feature includes entering the Konami code and enjoying enhanced versions of the games.

Everything about this game is great, but I suspect when it was released it was mostly ignored since Contra, CastleVania and the other more popular Konami franchises were not included. Thus perhaps the lack of a volume two.

You would think porting The King Of Fighters ’95 to Gameboy would be a disaster, especially when you consider the abortions that Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II, and Killer Instinct were on the portable. 

The game has a huge cast with 15 playable characters.  All of the favorites are here.  And even with only two buttons all of the moves are here.

Rather than trying to make identical sprites which would have bloated the Gameboy down (like Mortal Kombat) Takara decided to redraw them to only the essential pixels.  This works well with both the animation and the chosen pallette for each of the colors.  As you can see in the scene above and below the green screen loses nothing in terms of appearence.  It’s actually quite an impressive acheivement.

There are several different fight modes, backgrounds, and special moves.  The music is Gameboy perfect to the Neo Geo counterpart.  The game has plenty of replay value, and is a shining example of what could be accomplished on the Gameboy hardware.  It’s too bad that Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II, and Killer Instinct sold only by name alone.

Paperboy for Gameboy is an excellent conversion… sorta.  As mentioned in the Double Dragon for Gameboy post, Gameboy developers eventually learned how to fully used the hardware to make some fantastic games, and in some respects Paperboy for Gameboy is an excellent game… compared to the NES version.  But if you compare junk to junk how could you ever expect to rise above… junk?

The port has everything the NES version has right down to the music.  The obstacles are the same, the timing is the same, everything.  Perfect the NES version and you’ll easily perfect the Gameboy version of Paperboy.  It’s that simple.

But compared to the Arcade original, Paperboy for Gameboy (or NES for that matter) lacks what made the arcade game unique.  Like Guitar Hero or Cooking Mama, I consider Paperboy to be work.  I’ve never understood why some games that emulate real life become popular.  Why play Paperboy, when you can become a real Paperboy and make real money deliverying real papers?  Some people might pipe up and say “But you don’t have the crazy obstacles!”

And it’s true, that was really what made the arcade version of Paperboy so cool.  You never knew what kind of crazy or obscene happenings would appear on Easy Street.  You have people break dancing, a rapist trying to break into a house, a dog attacking you, etc. etc. etc.  The Gameboy and NES versions were so stripped down from the crazy obstacles that it had nothing to really look forward to.  Sure sometimes the crazy lady with the knife would chase you or the random tire tube rolls out into the street, but thats about it.  Boring!

I’d love to see Paperboy remade.  I’d like to see it where you deliver papers in a bad neighborhood.  Imagine trying to deliver papers in the cross fire of a drive by?  Or waking some tweaker stumbling out of a meth house?  But it just wouldn’t work.  Do drive by victims read newspapers?  Do meth addicts use newspapers for anything but toilet paper?  It seems I’ve deviated off topic.

Paperboy for Gameboy is excellent in small doses… very small doses.  It’s not the greatest game ever made, but there are plenty of crap titles on Gameboy as it is, and this game you can play from the get-go.  It’s a no brainer!

Double Dragon for Gameboy is one of my most favorite games for the Gameboy and for any game system for that matter.  Let’s find out why…

By the time Double Dragon came out game developers appeared to learn how to fully use the Gameboy hardware to create some fantastic games.  Despite its small screen this Gameboy version is on par, and in somecases better than it’s Nintendo NES counter part.  Above Marian suddenly got hotter, but yeah, she still takes one to the gut!  I think I like her better as a blonde with the goods spilling out of the shirt.

Graphically there are several improvements over the NES version including Billy having slick black hair and more pronounced eyes.  The levels all have the same theme as the NES and arcade versions.  Alley, Industrial, Woods, and Hideout.  There are a few extra areas including the bridge that wasn’t in the NES version. 

In this version the Lindas have become hotter as well!  No more of the Raggity-Ann in coveralls from the NES version.  These Linda’s dress as skanky as Marian and they’ve tied their hair back.  Too bad they don’t have any eyes.

After entering the door in the first level you run into the same room where you first encounter Abobo in the NES version except there is no conveyer belt and no Abobo!  Instead after killing the Rowpers you have to enter another door where you face Abobo in a room with no other obstacles than him.  To some degree he is now easier to kill.  A few punches and upper cuts will dispatch him, except… Abobo suddenly has remembered his arcade moves where he’ll grab you by the neck, pound your liver, and toss you to the dirt!  Sometimes he’s just a little bit quicker and it feels impossible to avoid this punishment!  Another thing to look forward to are the Chin-tais who now have an extra move as well.  In the NES version they had a punch, and this nasty move where they’d kick your ankle and you’d fall.  Now they will do a jump kick backwards to avoid your move, then jump back towards you and kick your chest.  When two of them are on the screen its total chaos!

So all in all this is a fantastic version.  There is no more ‘heart system’.  You have all of your moves from the very beginning.  The moves are more balanced and the hit detection is a lot better than the NES version.  Especially for the elbows.  You can now punch or kick an opponent, turn around, and punch again to deliver a finishing elbow.  You wouldn’t dare try that on the NES version.  If there was a complaint though it would be the jump kick.  Its so slow and labored and will generally miss your opponent.  And Abobo will just grab you out of it and feed you knuckles anyways.  This is probably a good thing since jump kicks were rarely used in the arcade version, and over used in the NES version.

And finally… the music.  It has all of the tracks of the NES version, plus the full track of the Intermission.  Which surprisingly the game doesn’t have intermissions!  In the NES version the intermission was about ten seconds long and therefore you heard only ten seconds of the Intermission track… this track is one of the best gaming tracks ever, and in the Gameboy version you’ll get to experience the track as part of the game play in the later levels.

I once believed that Gun.Smoke was the most creative shooter ever made where by you are a human and not an aircraft. Boy was I wrong. Mercenary Force for Nintendo Gameboy has squashed that perception.

Review and praises for this game coming soon!

21 years ago Nintendo’s Gameboy was released. 20 years ago I received it as a gift from my mother. I was 13 and my mother was at the beginning of her end. It was by far the most significant gift I received as a kid and I kept it all these years.

Around 1999 when Pokemon was all the rage and Gameboy pockets were popular I checked to see if my Gameboy which was ten years old at the time still worked. It did except for vertical lines through the screen. I took it apart and realized the ribbon to the screen could be pressed and sometimes the lines would return. Never was I able to get all of them to return however. So that, like most of my projects were abandoned and forgotten.

Recently with www.videogamepriceguides.com I have had a growing interest in Gameboy games. With Nintendo 3DS right around the corner it’s hard to believe the original Gameboy is two decades old. In that time we’ve fought three wars have had four different presidents two oilspills two Transformers movies and an awesome A-Team remake!

But ten years in a plastic bin had not fixed the broken screen. But the power of the internet and Youtube I found some helpful (yet scary) information to fix it. It involved using a soldering iron on a delicate piece of plastic. I was dog tired this evening when I started this project but decided to sleep and work on it tomorrow. But the damn Gameboy haunted me. So I got up and tried the methods I saw online.

I was able to fix all but one critical line. I called it a night and pushed the Gameboy away from me. Magically the last line reappeared….. EUREKA!

I reassembled my childhood treasure. Good as new. Two decades old.