Reviews of Star Wars, Motocross Maniacs, Duke Nukem, GB Genjin Land Viva! Chikkun Oukoku & Peetan.

My name is Ray Larabie and I’m talking to you from Nagoya, Japan. Welcome to episode number 49 of Game Boy Crammer. Today I’ll be reviewing Star Wars, Motocross Maniacs, Duke Nukem, GB Genjin Land, Viva Chikkun, Okoku, and P-Tan. Let’s start the show. Star Wars, developed by NMS Software, was released in the U.S. in November of 1992 and June of 1993 was not released in Japan.

This is based on the 1991 NES game. It was originally released on the Famicom in November 1991. This is not the same as the weird 1980s Star Wars game that came out only on the Famicom. And there were ports of this game. It came out on the Master System, a year after the Game Boy version came out on the Sega Game Gear.

The original version was developed by Victor Interactive, that’s JVC. In this game you start off playing Luke, you’re driving your land speeder around Tatooine, so you have an overhead map and you can drive around. Use your B button for a speed boost. Once in a while you see a cave or a sand crawler.

You drive in there and then you go into side scrolling platform game mode. You are Luke with a gun, running and jumping on platforms. Hold the B button down, the shoot button. Hold it down to run. You’re going to need to do a lot of long jumping in this game. In these caves you’re going to find Obi-Wan Kenobi, who gives you a lightsaber, and you’ll also find a better gun that shoots faster.

There’s a sand crawler in the top left part of the map. I recommend getting the faster gun before you go in there. It’s a very hard level. You’re going to be jumping on these moving platforms that kind of launch you. And there’s one part, if you don’t time the jump right, it just sends you right back to the beginning of the level.

R2-D2 is in this level, and if you don’t get R2-D2, you can continue through the game and then you’re going to get stuck. So you have to get R2-D2 before continuing. You also absolutely have to get Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan has a lightsaber. I didn’t find the lightsaber very useful except for fighting the Dianoga in the trash compactor level on the Death Star.

It’s the only time I used it. Otherwise it kind of gets in the way. Because you’re using your attack button to run, you end up doing a lightsaber sweep when you’re trying to do a run and jump. The enemies are very dumb in this game. They just walk back and forth, so a lot of the enemy combat involves luring the enemy to the edge of the screen and then just shooting at it from a distance.

Almost all the combat in this game is that sort of thing. If you hit select, you can see different characters that you’ve collected and you can change weapons. Now be careful with Obi-Wan Kenobi. If you get Han Solo or Princess Leia, they only have one life each. The big advantage of using Han Solo, he has a really good gun.

But once he dies, he’s gone. But talk to Obi-Wan on your select screen, he’ll revive Han Solo or Princess Leia up to five times. You get five revivals. Princess Leia, now this is much later in the game, but Princess Leia is functionally the same as Luke. I can’t see any difference. So it’s like getting a few extra lives, I guess.

Once you’re ready to move on, in the bottom right side of the map, sort of, is the Cantina. But it’s not obvious. You don’t just see a Cantina. You’re going to see a bunch of little round buildings and then there’s a path between a bunch of round buildings. Now, meanwhile, when you’re driving around Tatooine, stuff is trying to kill you all the time.

And you’ve got a health bar on the left for this game and you’re going to see it ticking down. So it helps if you’ve played a few times and you kind of know where to go. There’s no overall map to help you navigate. Once you’re there, you’ll see the Cantina. Go straight into the Cantina. If you keep going right, you’re going to get to the hangar.

But it’s too soon for that. You got to go talk to Han and watch it. Some of these guys in the bar are indestructible. All around Tatooine, you’ll find these little things that look like miniature Millennium Falcons. These are shields, which are going to come in really handy later. Shields for the Millennium Falcon, not for you.

So off you go into an asteroid belt. You’re going to get a cockpit view and you can move a cursor around. Now, at this point, you can’t fire. You’re just avoiding asteroids. Just go down to the bottom left or right and you’ll avoid everything. And it’s a long ride. You’ll think, oh, am I supposed to do something?

No. Wait a long time and you’ll get to the Death Star. In the Death Star, there are elevators all over the place. And there are stormtroopers with gun turrets. They are instant death if you touch them and you can’t shoot them in the back. Your bullets will do nothing. This level is a big maze. There’s elevators going up and down and all over the place.

You’re looking for these black doors, basically, and try not to go back the way you came. They’re not very clear about this, but after you take out the shields, you want to rescue Princess Leia and get to the Trash Compactor, but nobody tells you where it is. The Trash Compactor is one level down from where you got Princess Leia.

But you don’t just get to drop down. It’s like a complicated convoluted path to get there, but that’s where you want to get to. The Dianoga just takes a couple of swipes with your lightsaber, but it can kill you really quickly. So you got to be careful. It’s hard to predict how it’s going to move. Then you’re in an insanely hard level.

Death is everywhere. It’s all memorization. I don’t think there’s any possible way you can play this level first time through. You just have to play it over and over. Luckily, you’ve got, I think, nine continues, but it goes fast. I mean, you die really easily in this game. In this level, you have these gonk droids, which seem pretty harmless in the movie.

You know, the little walking battery. They kill you instantly. You touch them, you die. There’s a lot of stuff in this level that you just touch and you instantly die. It’s incredibly, incredibly difficult. If you manage to get through that, you’re going to go to another space level. Now this time you’re back in the Millennium Falcon, except now you can shoot TIE fighters.

Your cursor will actually shoot. So you just keep shooting, shooting, shooting. Once in a while, you’ll see a little spark. That is a laser coming towards you so you can shoot those down. This is actually not that difficult, but it just goes on forever. I mean, you’re so excited that, wow, I actually got to this point in the game, but then they ruin it by just milking it for so long.

More difficult platform jumping. Then you go into the X-Wing cockpit and you get to shoot down more TIE fighters. Forever. Then finally, the Death Star Assault. It’s a top-down scrolling shooter. So basically everything’s scrolling from the top to the bottom. TIE fighters will come at you from behind all the time.

Most of the danger is from behind in this thing. There are turrets firing, but usually they’re not really the problem. It’s stuff hitting you from behind. And you have to go down these narrow corridors and use your other button, not the laser button, and you can fire proton torpedoes. There’s no limit to how many you can fire, so you can just keep firing them.

But you’ll see an octagon that’s kind of obvious, but you’ve got to do it quick. And then a comically bland Death Star explosion. I read some reviews on this game just to see what other people thought. I think people are afraid to just say it. This is a bad game. The difficulty balance is way off. The only thing good it has going for it is the jumping is pretty good, but the level design is just so sadistic and it just feels really unpolished.

Here’s an example. You’re down to one health bar and you’re falling. When you’re falling, there’s a certain distance you can fall where you’re going to hurt yourself. So you start falling fast. You grab a ladder. Oh, great. I’m fine. You can stand on that ladder all day. As soon as you step off that ladder, you die, like the momentum was stored in your body.

There was a table, the big mound of money, and they said to the developer, okay, this is the money you’re going to need to make this game. And then George Lucas walks in and then stuffs some of it in his shirt and just puts his arms around the big pile of money and walks out. Some of it falls. Some of it falls on the table and on the floor, and the developers run and pick it up.

That leftover money is the money that was spent actually developing this game. And despite its crappiness, it’s kind of expensive. You can’t get it in Japan, so whenever you see one in Japan, the price is cranked way up. If this game didn’t have the Star Wars license, like if it was in some kind of clown world with exactly the same gameplay, it would have been completely ignored.

But I did like the music. Even though it was bad, it was still kind of funny. You get this Cantina music that starts playing. And then even when you’re in space, the Millennium Falcon, it’s still playing, but it’s like a weird pop version of the Cantina song. For the US or European version, look for DMG-WS.

If they shoot Star Wars, please let these Star Wars stay. And hey, how about that nutty Star Wars bar? Can you forget all the creatures in there? And hey, Darth Vader in that black and evil mask, did he scare you as much as he scared me? Star Wars goes near it. Star Wars! My seventh winner up here! Star Wars!

Motocross Maniacs, developed by Konami, was released in Japan in September of 1989. One of the first Game Boy games. It was released in the US and Europe in 1990. Motocross Maniacs is a racing game. It’s a side view racing game. A little bit like Excitebike in that you can tilt back and forth, but completely 2D.

A button is your accelerator, B button is a nitro boost. You’ll see at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see these canister icons. That’s your nitros. When you run out of those, you can’t do nitro boosts anymore. It’ll indicate up to 8, but you can actually have more than that. And there’s a time bar, as well as a tire indicator.

Left or right on the D-pad tilts your bike back and forth, so if you go left, it does look a little wheelie. If you go right, you can kind of do an endo sometimes. Since this is a 2D game, there wouldn’t be much of a game if there wasn’t some vertical stuff to do, so you’re going to have ramps all over the place, loops, sand, and lots of power-ups.

The most important one is T, time boost. Don’t ignore those, you’ll run out of time. N is your nitro boost. When you start each race, you only have four nitros. Careful with the nitro button, because you can actually fire off a whole bunch of them really quickly, which can be useful for doing some really far jumps.

The tire boost is the letter R power-up, so that only affects you if you’re driving on sand. S is a speed boost. This increases your top speed, but you’ll lose that when you crash. There are eight courses you can select at the beginning, and there are three skill levels, A, B, and C. The skill levels only affect the time limit.

Once in a while, you’ll see a ramp that’s not quite touching the ground. If you do a wheelie and hit your nitro just as you’re going past it, somehow you can kind of catch the edge of that ramp. Be very conservative with your nitros, because very early on in the game you’ll find that there are places you will just get stuck.

You’ll get stuck because you can’t jump up to one of those loops, and you’ll just sit there and wait for your time to run out. I wish they’d let you abort mission, because you just have to sit there and wait for your time to run out. While you’re waiting for your time to run out, you can kind of have a look at the weird kind of physics.

If you push the A button repeatedly, like rapid fire, you can kind of get your bike to hover. Like, let’s say you’re going up a ramp, you can kind of hover away from it and float in midair. Later, Konami released Motocross Maniacs 2 for the Game Boy Color, and Motocross Maniacs Advance for Game Boy Advance.

They’re both basically the same idea. Apart from the single player mode, you can play with a link cable against another player, or you can play against the computer. Although this game is flawed, I like it. It’s not difficult to learn, the controls are really simple, but it takes a little bit to master it.

And you really have to think about the power-ups. Don’t just collect every power-up you see, or you’re going to run out of nitros or run out of time. There’s no reason not to get the Japanese version. If it’s cheaper, it’s exactly the same as the US version. There’s no save game on this, no battery to replace.

For the Japanese version, DMG-MXA. US and Europe, DMG-MX. If you plan to buy the Konami GB Collection Volume 2 for Game Boy, or Volume 3 for Game Boy Color, it’s included on both of those. Let’s do a quick review. Duke Nukem by Taurus Games, published by GT Interactive, was released in the fall of 1999.

The US and Europe was not released in Japan. This came out on the Game Boy Color, but only for the Game Boy Color. You can’t play this on an earlier Game Boy. This is a platform game. Now, you may know Duke Nukem 3D. It was a huge hit, kind of in the tail end of the ray-casting engine-based shooters.

It actually came out in 1996, a few years after Doom. It was a huge hit. In my opinion, it was the best multiplayer experience you could have in one of these ray-casting shooter games. It’s one of my favorite first-person shooters of all time. It goes Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem. So before Duke Nukem was 3D, there was just Duke Nukem, which came out in 1991.

It was an MS-DOS game. You can actually play it now in Steam. It was a platform shooting game, very crude graphics. It had 16-color graphics. There was scrolling, but it was really chunky scrolling. Like, it wasn’t smooth, per-pixel scrolling. If you think about MS-DOS machines in 1991, they were not really equipped for scrolling, smooth graphics.

It was a shareware game, like lots of PC games were at the time. In 1993, Duke Nukem 2 came out. Again, a platform shooting game. This time, a little more advanced. It had more colors. The chunky scrolling was still there, but it was, like, really over-the-top. Explosions, fireworks, and stuff going on.

You can actually get this one on iOS or Steam. According to Wikipedia, this Game Boy Color game is a port of Duke Nukem 2. But from looking at both, I would say that it’s not. It’s comparable to Duke Nukem 2, but it’s a different story. You have different weapons. The levels are different. You can’t really call it a port of Duke Nukem 2.

It’s Duke Nukem for Game Boy Color. So even if you play Duke Nukem 2 for DOS, you’re going to find most of this is new. Duke Nukem has been captured by aliens, and he has to save the world. Don’t worry about the misogyny that was in Duke Nukem 3D. It’s not in this. It’s just violence. But just monsters and aliens.

You can jump and shoot. And unlike Duke Nukem 2, you can jump on a platform and grab onto the edge and pull yourself up. You can shoot upwards, and you can shoot upwards on a diagonal. Your basic weapon, which has unlimited ammo, is a shotgun. Sounds good, but it’s pretty weak. When you collect a weapon power-up, you can hit the Select button.

Use the D-pad to choose which weapon you want. It doesn’t give you a count of ammo, but there’s a little bar beside the weapon that you’ll see get smaller and smaller. When you run out, it’ll automatically switch back to your shotgun. The kind of weapons you’ll find in this game, you’re going to find a machine gun.

It’s a lot more effective than the shotgun. Flamethrower, but it doesn’t affect certain enemies. Grenade launcher, very useful, and they bounce around. And a rocket launcher. There are health power-ups all over the place. They look like little red crosses or large red crosses. I’m surprised that was allowed by Nintendo.

I remember when we submitted games to Nintendo, they wouldn’t accept that as a health symbol. You had to use a heart or something else because it’s a religious symbol. So you’ll see your health bar down at the bottom. You have a limited number of lives. Once in a while, you’ll see a letter that you can collect.

N-U-K-E-M. If you collect all those letters and spell Nukem at the end of the level, you’ll get an extra life. And you’re going to need it. This game is hard. It doesn’t seem like that at the beginning. You start the game and it seems like… I mean, when I first started, I was very disappointed. I thought, well, this is very sparse.

Just a lot of metal hallways and ladders. Kind of boring enemies. Not a lot of different elements. But don’t worry, it gets crazy. It’s not one of these games where they put all the good stuff at the beginning and keep repeating it. You’re going to see a lot of stuff. The weapons balance is pretty good.

They really keep you starved for the cool weapons. So when you do get them, you really appreciate it. You know, there are some games where you have so many special weapons that you’re not even sure which one to use. In this one, you are desperate to hold on to those good weapons because you’re going to need it.

Enemies don’t just keel over and die in one shot. They take a lot of shots. And it’s hard to dodge their attacks. They usually shoot at waist level, so you can’t really duck under their shots. Even though you have a crouch, it’s not that useful for avoiding shots. So you have to jump over. But this is not an instant kill game.

You can take a lot of bullets. You’ll probably find that you can regularly get hit a little bit and have enough health power-ups to keep you going. Enemies will regenerate, so be careful. Sometimes you just walk off the screen a little bit, come back, enemy regenerates. But it doesn’t happen all the time.

When you’re climbing a ladder, you can shoot from the ladder. Same goes with elevators. To operate elevators, you just move up and down. There’s no button to hit. You will be collecting key cards and using them to open doors in this game. Sometimes the doors are just like an electricity field, sometimes an actual door or an elevator.

There are four main stages in this game. If you count the four bosses, that’s 22 levels altogether. The bosses are interesting, not that hard to figure out, but they’re not obvious. They don’t just reuse the same thing every time. They’re all different. There’s a lot of really funny stuff in this game.

The final boss is one of the funniest bosses I’ve ever seen. Once in a while, you’ll find a yellow ball. That makes you invincible for a short time. Occasionally, you’ll see a blue armored vest. Pick that up and you can replenish it with armor. They look like little blue shields. Each weapon has specific ammo that needs to be picked up.

For example, the rocket launcher has sort of blue little suitcase things filled with rockets. At the end of each level, you have a chance to save, and here’s something I haven’t seen on a Game Boy game before, 10 save slots. Sadly, when you get to the next level, you don’t get to keep your weapons, but at least it starts you with full health.

Occasionally, you’ll find a power-up. There are a lot of power-ups that give you points, but occasionally you’ll find this thing looks like, I don’t know, to me it looks like a fortune cookie. These are important later on because you’re going to get to ride vehicles, and these will determine how many lives you get with those vehicles.

I think that’s how they work. The vehicles are not a big part of the game. It just happens a couple of times, but it’s fun. These levels don’t progress in a completely linear way. You will find yourself getting lost. You’ll find yourself getting to a key card slot with no key card, so you’ll have to backtrack.

That gives this game a lot of longevity. It took me a long, long time to get through this game. Sometimes when I review a game, I play it for a few days and just do my review. This is one I’ve been going back to for a while to try to get through. You can’t just run through this game and expect to just blast through it in a speedrun.

You have to shoot an enemy a little bit, back off, shoot, jump the shot. Each enemy you encounter takes a lot of time, and if you get lost, you’re going to be backtracking. You have to shoot those enemies over and over. Occasionally, it’s really nice when you’re backtracking. You’ll see, oh, some health power-ups have regenerated.

Health power-ups come just exactly when you need them. The level design in this is really good. I wish there were more landmarks to keep me from getting lost, but that’s my thing because I get lost in these games like you would believe. The story cinematics are beautiful. The ending is incredible. If you’re not very good at platform games, you might have trouble with this one, but with the save games, you can kind of chip away at it over time.

If you’re expecting something like Duke Nukem 3D, you’re not going to get it. On Game Boy Advance, there is something that’s a lot like Duke Nukem 3D, so that might be more your thing. Of course, this game has a battery. It’s from 1999, most likely. It’s dead, so you’ll have to replace that battery. Duke Nukem, the US version, CGB-ADI-E-USA, European version, CGB-ADI-P-EUR.

Next to a big review! GB Genjin Land VIVA Chikkun Okoku, developed by AI, published by Hudson, was released in Japan only in April of 1994. This was the third installment in the GB Genjin Land series. You may know him as BC Kid, you may know him as Bonk. Chikkun is a character that appears in the other games.

Sort of a dome head with big eyes. And Okoku is Kingdom. A little kanji lesson, if you look at the symbol on the box, you’ll see “O”, which is King. It’s three horizontal lines with a vertical line through the middle. And Koku, which is Country. Unlike the first two games, this is not a straight-up platform game.

And while on the PC Engine, TurboGrafx-16, there was a third installment of PC Genjin, the platform game, that didn’t happen on the Game Boy. This is the third and final Game Boy game starring GB Genjin. Which is surprising, because in 1994, there’s still a lot of Game Boy years ahead. I don’t know why they bailed out on it.

In this game, you’re going to be going to a theme park. It’s all minigames. When you start the game, you’ll see a map of the theme park. The first building is the ticket booth. You gotta go there first. You can go to the other buildings, but all you can do is look at the rules of the game. So let’s say we’re gonna play the Breakout game first.

The icon for this is a bone. It’s the building on the left. So we’re in the ticket booth. Navigate the menu. Navigate the menu. It’s not the usual height and EA that you see. It’s mm and EA. Yes is on the left. No is on the right. Whenever you see a symbol in this game of two feet, that means exit. If you see two Atari logos together, that’s rule.

So the rules of the game. Buy a ticket. You got 100 credits at the beginning. Buy the cheapest ticket you can, because that denotes the skill level. So you always want to try the 100 tickets first, so you can work your way up to the more expensive ones. So once you have your ticket, exit the building.

Watch out for that pig creature roaming around the map. Just avoid it, because it eats up a lot of your money. So enter the building. You’re going to see there’s a rule thing that I described. Feet for exit. And if you go down, you’ll see your ticket. Go to the ticket. Hit A. Now you’re playing a game of Breakout, where you have to bonk the ball with your head.

So a cannon will shoot the ball out. You hit the ball with your head, and it’s just like regular Breakout or Alleyway. Once in a while, it gets some meat, which causes the ball to go through the targets, which are not blocks in this game. They’re bones. There’s a 1-up once in a while, which will allow you to drop the ball.

You can drop the ball three times otherwise. There’s some sun icons that are worth some points, some happy faces. They’re worth money. You can get those in any level. Once you’re done, it’ll tally up your score, and you get some more money, which you can use to go buy more tickets. Sometimes when you’re walking around the game board, you’ll just get money for no reason.

And it’ll ask you something and just say yes, and you’ve got some money. Usually it’s not very much. It’s kind of random. Some of the other games you’ll encounter. There’s a Whack-a-Mole game, which is pretty self-explanatory. There’s a game where fruit and vegetables and hot burning rocks are falling from the sky, and those happy faces, which are worth money.

What you want to do is try to only hit the fruit and knock it into the dinosaur’s mouth. This is the one game I can’t really figure out how to clear, but it makes a boo-boo bad sound when I knock vegetables in their mouths, so I think it has something to do with getting the fruit in their mouths. And you have to hit it on a certain angle to get it to go into their mouths, otherwise they just kind of fly off the screen.

There’s a roller coaster. Now this roller coaster moves very slowly. You’re going to have to use a lot of your techniques you learned in the other games, so you probably don’t want to play this game if you haven’t played any of the other games in the series. Your roller coaster will be moving very slowly, and you have to jump out of the car to grab happy faces for points.

Sometimes there are safe platforms to land on. Sometimes the platforms will disappear from under your feet. You’ll see some of them look like stone, and some of them don’t. The ones that don’t will disappear when you jump on them. You have to use your flipping ability. Hit the B button rapidly to float through the air.

You have to avoid spikes, spiky balls, enemies. It’s hard. It might take you a couple of tries to get it. Later, when you get more money and you want to buy higher level tickets, it gets really, really hard. Another game, climb the building. If you’ve played any of the other GB Genjin games, you know that you can jump onto a wall and bite it, and you can keep chomping on the wall to climb.

And you can jump off the wall and flip and jump to another side. Use whatever techniques you want to climb this building. But watch the brick. You’ll see there’s a different texture on some brick. That brick you can’t sink your teeth into, so you can’t climb it. But it’s not just about getting points.

You’ll see the smiley face power-ups everywhere. The goal is to get to the top. In higher levels, this is really difficult. And there are obstacles getting you. There’s flower pots falling and enemies. It’s hard. And finally, the haunted house. You can take three hits. You just have to get from one end to the other.

It’s actually the closest thing to a platform game in this whole game. All kinds of spooky stuff will happen. You never know. Every level is different. So it’s not just the same house you’re going through with greater difficulty. It’s completely different levels. So use all the techniques you can. You can bonk things with your head or just run away from them or fly over things.

But it’s a very short level. If you fail at a game, just keep trying at it. You can use that ticket over and over. But you need more money if you want to buy the more advanced tickets. What happens if you play all the high-level tickets and you finish everything? Well, you get a game ending. Big deal.

But it’s really hard because just the amount of time it takes to play these things and the fact that there is no save game in this. There’s no battery. There’s no password. You have to do this whole thing in one sitting. You have to be pretty bored to really want to get to the end of this thing because it really is just a bunch of mini games.

It looks okay. The music is fine. But I’m disappointed. Compared to the first two games, this is pretty lousy. This game was released as a standalone cartridge, but also part of the Genjin Collection from 1996 and re-released in 1989. The Genjin Collection is actually a pretty good deal because you get the first two GB Genjin games, also known as Bonk’s Adventure, Bonk’s Revenge, B.C. Kid 1, B.C. Kid 2, and you get this throwaway GB Genjin Land Viva Chikkun Okoku game.

But it’s worth it because the GB Collection is not uncommon. It goes for pretty cheap. You save yourself having to buy three games separately. There’s a version of the Genjin Collection. For some reason, they don’t call it GB Genjin Collection, just Genjin Collection. There’s a version of it that comes in a tin can.

There was a series of games that came out in 1996 that came in actual metal cans, and this is one of them. So you get this cool little collector’s can and three games, and not too expensive. To find that one, look for DMG-AG3J. P-tan was released in Japan only in December of 1991. It was published by Kaneko, developed by Interstate.

I don’t know if Interstate developed any other games for Game Boy, but Kaneko certainly published a few games. You may know Kaneko from the Gals Panic series and the very controversial DJ Boy, which was an arcade beat-em-up also on the Genesis. The name P-tan doesn’t really mean anything, but when you put tan at the end of a name, in Japanese you can make a name kind of cute by putting chan at the end of it, especially for girls.

But little kids, supposedly, can’t say the ch, so they say t, hence P-tan. The romanization of P-tan is sometimes P-I-T-A-N, sometimes P-E-E-T-A-N. This is a port of a game that came out in 1994 by Nippon Colombia. Nippon Colombia used to be related to the American Columbia Records, but currently Columbia Music Entertainment in Japan has no direct relation with Columbia Records.

This game came out in the MSX in 1984, also in Europe, so this was the only time P-tan was outside of Japan. P-tan is an action game. It looks like a puzzle game, but it’s an action game. You play a chicken. You can move left and right and use B to drop eggs. There are four platforms below you. On each platform, a bunch of teeter-totters, seesaws, letters, and fulcrums.

When you drop an egg on those, they’ll either roll down, or if they hit the top, they’ll flip the other way. So when you drop an egg, it’s going to go back and forth, kind of like a pachinko machine. Now, there are chicks at the bottom of the screen. You want to save these chicks. You want to get them up on the top where you are.

The chicks will walk in whatever direction they’re walking in, until they hit the left or right side of the screen, and they’ll turn around and come the other way. If they come up to a seesaw that is up, they’ll just stop and wait. If they come to a seesaw that’s down, they’ll walk up it like a ramp.

Once they’re up on the seesaw and an egg hits the top of it, they’ll flip up to the next level. This is how you get them to the top. You have to keep flipping those seesaws back and forth. You have unlimited eggs, but there’s a par. I think it’s 30. If you go over that, then you don’t get as many bonus points at the end of the level.

Once in a while, you’ll get this egg bonus. I don’t know where the whole screen says egg bonus. Then you can fire two eggs at a time. I don’t know why that happens. It’s nice when it happens. But for the most part, you have to fire one egg at a time, so the egg has to reach its destination before you can fire the next egg.

But there’s a wolf. The wolf will come up the sides and move across the platforms and try to eat the chicks. It’ll actually get the chick in its mouth. At that point, you can hit the wolf with an egg and save the chick, but you’ve got to be quick. When you hit the wolf with an egg, you get a few points, not many, but it’s incapacitated for a few seconds.

Once you get all the chicks up to the top, the round is over. It counts how much time you have left, goes to the bonus, how many chicks, and how many under par you were with the eggs, if at all. If no chicks died, it’ll say non-death on the screen. Cool. But I don’t know if that adds to your bonus. Then on to the next stage. Once in a while, you’ll get a bonus stage.

These bonus stages are really cute mini games. They’re all self-explanatory. Most of them involve hitting the B button really quickly. If you run out of chicks, if they all get eaten, that’s game over, and there’s a high scoreboard. You can’t save your game, but you can continue. And there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the number of continues.

I believe there are 28 levels. So many times I get to the end of the game, I forget what level I was on, and you can’t go back. But the ending of this game, there’s a scene that’s very funny and very dark. You’ve got to see it. Oh, and when you start the game, there are three skill levels you can choose from.

The graphics are very cute, the music is really cute. It’s a shame this game was never properly released outside of Japan. It’s a game that doesn’t really fit into a standard game category. I mean, it looks like a puzzle game, doesn’t play like a puzzle game. It’s kind of a shooter because you’re shooting eggs, I guess.

You’re dropping them, maybe it’s a dropper. That’s what we’ll call it. This game is adorable. Even though I’ve only played it a couple of times, it’s already one of my favorite Game Boy games. You have to get this game. It’s kind of pricey. If you want to get this game in the box, you’re going to be broke.

I rarely see it in Japan. Ptan, look for DMG-PFJ.