Reviews of Kattobi road, Parodius da!

Game Boy Crammer Episode 2! I’ll be reviewing a driving game called Kattobi Road and a shooter, Parodius Da! In Game Boy News this week, Hacker combines Game Boy, Wii Remote, and Android to create a portable Nirvana. This is at NintendoLife.com, Alpine Delta took a Wii Mote, put it inside a gutted Game Boy case, and turned it into this great little Bluetooth Android phone holder so you can play emulated games on what feels like an original Game Boy.

See it for yourself, go to j.mp slash Game Boy Nirvana, j.mp slash Game Boy Nirvana. A German design student a couple years ago made this for his semester thesis, created a book about the Game Boy. I wish I could buy it, but I can’t, but you can still look at it on the site, it’s pretty cool. It’s a lot of close-ups of Game Boy graphics and just a really nice tribute to the Game Boy. So you can see that at j.mp slash birthday Game Boy. And finally, Game Boy musician Nitro2k01 is launching a weekly Game Boy project series. For the first week, he’s taking a color photo of a little kitten and putting it on the Game Boy screen. The Game Boy only has four shades of gray. You can see there’s kind of a software trick to coax 13 shades of green out of it. See for yourself at j.mp slash four shades, that’s the number four, four shades. A little correction on last week’s episode, I was talking about changing batteries on Game Boy cartridges and I mentioned there were four welds on top. I should have mentioned there were two welds on top and two welds on the bottom of the battery clip. Anyway, let’s get on with the episode.

Game Boy. Kattobi Road is a racing game developed by NOW Production, published by Namco. It was released in Japan in 1993. The word Kattobi doesn’t really translate to English directly, but it kind of means like a quick start or like a sudden opening up. Kattobi Road. This game has a battery for one thing. So if you do get this game, you will have to change the battery because it’s 100% dead. This is a very old game now, so there’s no way that battery’s still alive. That’s 20 years.

You see right on the front of the cartridge, it says BB and has a little barcode. That means this is a barcode battler game. Barcode Battler was this electronic gaming device where you would take barcodes from anything. You could take it off a soup can or anything you want. You cut the barcode out and then you could run it through this machine. It would generate a character for you and you would battle this character, basically, you know, rolling the dice, trying to beat some other character based on those stats generated by this random number seed, basically. In Japan, you had this weird thing where there was a certain kind of soup that everybody knew was a strong character and people were just buying that soup just to get the character. It was a very short little fad and I don’t think a lot of people are barcode battling now. Maybe they still are, but Game Boy came out with a barcode reader just for these barcode battler games and Cat Toby Road is one of these. Now, I don’t have a barcode reader, but I can still play the game without it. You don’t have to have barcode battler to play this game, but it’s kind of the point.

Let’s get into what kind of game this is. You know, micro machines, top-down racer. Basically, the landscape scrolls around, your car turns. That’s what this is. As racers go, it’s not bad, but you’re not really racing against anyone. There’s a drag race where you just try to race in a straight line, but it’s shifting, so there’s some skill involved. But generally, it’s about… The whole point of this game is to compare stats. The whole point is to have…

It’s not really about driving skill so much as how good your car is. And if you don’t have the barcode aspect and friends that collect barcodes and want to play with you, there’s really not much fun to be had. However, it’s not a bad little driving game. What you get here is you get a whole bunch of cars that are pre-made, so you can pick a truck or you can pick a Porsche, a little K car, all kinds of stuff. And some of them have different names, but you know what kind of car it’s supposed to be. And then you can race those cars around a whole bunch of tracks. The racing part is not bad. It’s not great. I think if you were doing the barcode thing, you would think it’s good enough for that. You know, without that, you’re really just trying to drive different cars around the same tracks. There’s like 20 cars to choose from. You can change their names if you think that’s fun. So I’m going to say, if you see Cat Toby Road, I think you should probably skip it unless you’re into collecting every Game Boy racing game. It was fun for a few minutes, I gotta say. But hey, if you can get the barcode scanner, you try it. I mean, I haven’t seen them around, but I also haven’t been looking. I looked online and it’s like, they don’t seem to be that expensive. I don’t think they’re that much in demand. Yeah, go for it. And if you’ve been watching Game Center CX, they’ve been doing a thing with the barcode battler recently.

Basically, what I’m saying is probably skip barcode battler Cat Toby Road. Parodius Da! is a Japan-only game, but there was a European version called Parodius..something else. If you’re trying to find it, look up DMG-PVJ and you’re going to find information about Parodius. It says parody right in the name. Parodius, right? Gradius was a side-scrolling shooter.

I just happened to play it about a week ago on the TurboGrafx. I played it before, but I actually got to the end of it, which is really hard. It took me a couple of days of going back to it and playing it. It’s a tough, tough shooter to me. I think even shooter fans would say it’s still, it’s pretty tough. There’s parodies of other Konami games. So this is like a Konami nerd paradise.

You’ve got Twinbee, you’ve got Castlevania, you’ve got Lethal Enforcers, and there’s an arcade game called Sexy Parodius, which sounds so good. So it’s a side-scroller. The graphics are nice. They’re scaled for the Game Boy screen. Instead of the black background, you get a light-colored background because it’s just too hard to see any games with black backgrounds because the blurring of the pixels on the Game Boy screen. Very sorry to you people who never played Gradius, but in Gradius you have a spaceship and you go sideways and you shoot stuff coming at you. And you get power-ups and you can spend those power-ups on different things. So if you want to have lasers or double shots or a shield, all kinds of stuff. So you get to choose.

Now when you start this game, you can play in auto mode, which will automatically pick the first best power-up, or you can manually use your other button to choose which ones you want. So you can save up your power-ups and get the one at the end as opposed to just getting in the room. It’s pretty generous with the power-ups, so you can just keep grabbing power-ups and shooting and not paying attention if you like using the auto mode. And then when you get better at it, go and try the manual. You can choose your skill level in this, which is kind of nice. You can kind of train your way up to playing some of the harder levels. It does get very hard. One thing I found was there’s a boss on the second level, end of the second level, I think. And it’s this woman who’s walking from side to side, and you have to go between her legs. It’s really hard. After you finish it, you’re like, oh, that wasn’t so hard. But the first couple of times, until you kind of get the rhythm of where you’re supposed to put your ship, you get stepped on a lot by her pointy little feet. There’s lots of funny things. I don’t want to tell you everything that’s in it, because then it won’t be a surprise. Part of the fun of this game is you get to the boss and some weird funny thing. When you start the game, you can choose from four different characters. You’ve got this kind of regular Gradius ship. They call it Vic Viper. And it’s got a little cruise missile that shoots out. That’s one of the power ups. And when you get the double mode, you get two laser blasts, one forward and one on a 45 degree angle. So when you get the laser and the missile power up, you’ve got a really wide slot. So it’s really good. And the laser mode, you get a really thin laser. Very much the same as Gradius. You can choose it. Octopus, it’s got a couple of bombs that fall up and down. So it’s got like a two bomb shooter or you’ve got like a tail gun and you’ve got this laser that shoots out big rings. So you get this big wide gun. Then you get TwinBee.

If you’ve played TwinBee, TwinBee is this really cute shooting weapon. We’re going to be reviewing that because I just bought that yesterday. TwinBee. TwinBee is a top down shooter. It’s very adorable. And one of the wonderful things about TwinBee is you have these power ups that happen, these bells.

And if you shoot the bell a certain number of times, it changes colors. And if you can grab that bell at a certain color, you get a special thing. Anyway, getting off topic, going back to TwinBee, when you pick up the missile power up, you get like a really wide impact punch. If you get the double weapon, you get like a tail gun. So it’s similar to the octopus. And then the fourth character you can choose is a penguin. And penguin is very powerful. It’s got this weird echoing gun that bounces back at you. And you’ve got like a, if you pick the laser power up, you get like a weird ring that shoots in front. It’s actually my favorite one. It’s very powerful. So I don’t know if it’s easier to finish the game with a penguin, but it feels like it. It feels like you can mow down more enemies with it. Now, it’s hard to tell what color the bells are because you’re playing on a Game Boy and it’s black and white. Or even if you’re playing the Game Boy Color version, you can’t really tell what color the game’s bells are, but you kind of get used to them. So you’re going to see there’s like a lighter bell that gives you, you’re going to kind of get used to the different bells and what they do. Just try collecting different, there’s a striped bell and a dark one and a light one. And you just try collecting and see what happens. That’s part of the fun is figuring out what this stuff does. You’re allowed to continue your game. Here’s one nice thing is you have, you can do the, as many people know, there’s something called the Konami code, which is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. That’s up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. At the beginning of the game, if you pause and you do that code, you get all the power-ups to the top. Now it’s not that hard to get all your power-ups to the top, but it’s nice to have. However, once you die, you can’t do it again. And if you continue your game, you can’t do it again. So this is a once per game kind of cheat. So it’s not like if you’re really lucky, you can get right to the end of the game with that, but you probably won’t. So you’ll catch a bullet somewhere and you’ll be like, Oh, starting from scratch. So it’s a nice little boost, but what I haven’t tried is I don’t know if you don’t enter the code and you play the game without continues. Can you enter the code later? I think you probably can. So give that a shot. I’ve read online. Some people really complain about this saying it’s kind of boring, but I don’t know.

You got a picture. It’s 1991. There’s not a lot of shooters you can play on a handheld that are any good. Um, I think for 1991, this is a very good shooter. And to me, I think it’s one of the classics because first of all, you’re playing Gradius basically. So, you know, that’s like the Super Mario of side shooters. And then it’s a parody of it. So it’s funny. I mean, there’s some really strange stuff. I won’t even tell you what’s going to happen in this thing, but there’s, you’re going to see some wacky, wacky bosses on the Game Boy Color. It looks great. I very much recommend the Game Boy Color. You can see the bullets a little easier. Um, I tried it on the old Game Boy a little bit and the blurring is a little hard to take. Like it’s hard to play with the blurring. So, you know, pop it in a Game Boy pocket or one of the later systems. When you turn on the game, if you hold A and left, you’re going to get a much cooler color palette when you play because it, otherwise you get the standard Game Boy Color palette. There’s no battery in this game.

It’s, uh, there’s no level codes. It’s just all continuous. You can start on a different stage and set up. So you go to set up. You can start in any stage you want. However, if you want to see the final ending of the game, you got to play this thing all the way through, you know, play the other stages to get used to them and, you know, get more accustomed. And then one day you can blast through the whole game and get to the final ending. You’ve got to get this one.

It’s not that expensive. I’ve seen them for pretty cheap. If you look around, you can get something called the Konami GB Collection Volume 2, and it comes with that.