Reviews of Kirby’s Pinball Land, Doraemon & Ray Thunder.
My name is Ray Larabie. I'm talking to you from Nagoya, Japan. Welcome to episode 16 of Game Boy Crammer. Today I'll be reviewing Kirby's Pinball Land, Doraemon, and Ray Thunder. If you ever drop by Nagoya, you're probably going to want to hit all the retro game stores.
Ask around for an area called Osu. There's one street called Akamon, Red Gate, and it actually has a red gate. If you go down that street, you're going to find a place called K-House. It's kind of an easy-to-miss sort of hole in the wall. It's a little disorganized. Everything's really piled up high, and there's very little room to move in there, but it's always really interesting stuff.
A lot of stuff not in the box. If you like loose cartridges, that's a place to go. And just a little bit further down the street is Meikoya. It's just a little bit to the left of K-House, and you can see they actually have usually Super Smash Brothers or Mario Kart playing right outside the store, so you can be on the street and people are playing these games.
And it's a little bit nicer. There's a lot more stuff in boxes. It's a little bit more expensive, and then it's a little bit hard to find. You have to ask directions for it. There's a place called Mandarake. They don't have any loose Game Boy carts. It's all stuff in boxes, a little bit higher priced, and some really hard to find stuff.
And they have floors and floors of crazy stuff. Cosplay stuff and manga and models. All kinds of collectibles. And another place you should check, and this is all over Japan. There's a store called Hard Off. It's related to Book Off. Not really a pawn shop, more of a recycling shop. They consider Game Boy cartridges to be junk. They basically put it in their junk section, and it goes for a buck.
But if you check often, they have an area right next to the cash at all of these stores. It's stuff that's headed for the junk department that hasn't been sent there yet, and that's where you can find the really good deals on Game Boy games. So if you're ever in Nagoya, you want to check that stuff out.
Anyway, let's get on with the show. And some play games that go Well, now there's Nintendo's new Pinball video game called Kirby's Pinball Land. And Kirby's All over the place. All you do is keep Kirby As long as you can. Get Nintendo's new Kirby's Pinball Land for Game Boy. And we'll bet you won't go.
Kirby's Pinball Land was released in November 1993 everywhere. In Japan, it was called Kirby No Pinball, which means Kirby's Pinball. This was made by HAL Laboratory, so you know it's good. This is the third pinball game they ever made. Before this, they made Revenge of the Gator, which I've already reviewed.
Wonderful pinball game. And then before that, they made something for the MSX and the NES called Rollerball. And after this, they'd go on to make Pokémon Pinball for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance. This was only the second Kirby game ever made. Before that, there was a lot of Kirby's Pinball Land. Before that, there was just the original Kirby game on the Game Boy.
So this predates even the NES Kirby. It's a little bit like Revenge of the Gator in a way in that you've got these big vertical tables. You're playing pinball like normal pinball. You've got two flippers. But then you go through the top of the table and there's another table up there. And you go up higher and there's another table above that.
It's very similar to the way Revenge of the Gator works. Except this time, you have three pinball tables. They don't connect with each other. When you start on one table, you keep playing until you get to the boss. And the boss of each of these tables is one of the bosses from the original game. So you've got Wispy Woods, you've got Cracko, and Poppy Brothers Senior.
The controls for this game are similar to Revenge of the Gator, except you've got a nudge in this game, which you didn't have in Revenge of the Gator. If you press left on the control pad, it moves the left flipper. If you hit A, it moves the right flipper. If you press the control pad in any other direction or hit the B button, you'll nudge the table.
Unlike a real pinball game, there's no limit to how much you can nudge it. There's no tilt. And unlike some other games, this nudge does have a real effect. You can actually really get a lot of control over the ball with the nudge. This game does have a battery. You'll have to replace the battery if it hasn't been replaced already.
You can save a game in progress. It doesn't have, like, multiple game saves. But if you pause the game, you can save at any point. And you can save your high scores as well and put your name on there. Now the three tables, Wispy Woods, Cracko, and Poppy Brothers. You get to choose those at the beginning.
So at the start, you've got, like, a table select. But instead of just choosing which table, you actually have to hit the ball into the Warp Star. And that will take you to the table. There's supposed to be different difficulty levels, but I don't agree. And a lot of, you know, I've read online, I've read in Nintendo Power, and they list different levels as being the most difficult and least difficult.
Personally, I find them to be all about the same difficulty. Each floor in these tables has a different kind of trick to get you up to the next floor. So sometimes a character will grab you and chuck you upwards. Sometimes there's a Warp Star. Sometimes you just have to get lucky and hit the ball through the top.
Now when you get a Warp Star, this is like the ones at the end of Kirby levels, where you warp to the next level. But if you get a Warp Star on the bottom floor, it takes you back to the table selection screen. So then you can choose one of the other tables if you want. On the middle floor, if you get one of those Warp Stars, it takes you to a mini game.
It's like a little bonus game. And if you get the Warp Star on the top floor, then you get to fight the boss. It doesn't have to take you a long time to get to the boss. You can actually get up to the top level pretty easily sometimes, and then get the Warp Star, and all of a sudden you're facing the boss.
It's not necessarily a long fight. And all the bosses work the same way. You have to hit him a certain number of times to defeat him. But at the bottom, where the ball drain is, there is a Warp Star. And if the ball goes down there, it'll warp you back out of the level, and you have to get back in again.
After you defeat all the bosses, then you fight against King Dedede. And then you've beaten the game. You can keep playing to get your score higher. When you fall through the drain in the bottom level, through the sides or through the middle, you know, in Revenge of the Gator, you'd end up in an alligator's mouth.
In this one, you have a chance to survive. There's a springboard. And if you time your A button right, you will bounce back right up into the level. It's really forgiving. But each time you do it, it gets a little bit harder to do. When you're on the level select stage, you'll see like a little extra thing, EXTRA.
If you can spell the word extra, you will get an extra life. I mentioned the Warp Stars, but there's also other items you can get. There are 1-ups. You know what they do. There's something called Pep Brew, and it will activate the side drain guards. And there's a tomato with an M on it. If you get that, it's going to block the center drain temporarily.
And there's cakes and candies. You get the points that are bombs. They don't damage Kirby, but sometimes they can change the trajectory. I'll go over the different boards, because they're really like separate pinball games in themselves. Okay, in Wispy Woods, on the second level, there's a slot machine.
There's a giant Kirby. If you hit a giant Kirby, or if you roll over the slots, it will start the slot machine. If you get 3 stars in a row, you get a Warp Star to go to the bonus round. If you get 3 tomatoes in a row, you get the M tomato that's going to block your center drain. If you get 3 Kirbys, that big Kirby is going to boost you up to the next level.
In Wispy Woods, the bonus game is kind of like a breakout kind of game. It's really interesting. You've got 2 balls that you're trying to control. And there are 3 levels. It's a really involved bonus game. If you can get the third one, you get a 1-up. On the Krakow table, everything's pretty self-explanatory, but the bonus game…
On the second level, you have to hit all the Kirbys until one of them comes out with a Warp Star. It's actually pretty hard to get. You're basically trying to hit these items, and then Kirby's going to eat them. There's a time limit, 60 seconds, but you just try to get as many points as you can. And the ball actually warps through the side of the screen, which is brilliant.
I don't know why other pinball machines don't do that. Okay, now the Poppy Brothers table. Level 2, there's an interesting little play mechanic. You're going to see 2 Kirbys. There's one on the left that's thinking about something, and there's one on the right that's going to eat something that gets spit out.
So if Kirby's thinking about a Warp Star, and you hit him, he's going to spit out that Warp Star. The Kirby on the right, if you hit him, he's going to inhale whatever's there, and then you can't get it. So what you want to do is hit the Kirby on the left, get whatever he's thinking about, then try to get that item.
You can get a squid. He's going to send you up to the next level. You can get the tomato, the M, that's going to block the center drain. There's an apple that gives you points. There's like a sparkly thing that gives you points. And then there's like a spiky ball that just gets in the way. Okay, so the bonus game.
You get 60 seconds, you get two pinballs, and you have to get past a squid-y thing to get a goal. It's like a soccer game. On the third level, you got this thing where these chicks are bringing eggs out, and then you have to keep hitting the eggs to make them hatch, and then you have to keep them from getting repaired.
You have to kind of knock the chicks back so they don't come and repair it. And then they will hatch. The eggs go up into the tunnel and come back with different stuff following them, and one of those things will be the Warp Star and get to the boss. The boss on this Poppy Brothers table is kind of tough because there are bombs that will freeze one of your flippers temporarily, so it really messes you up.
Once you beat all the levels, you go back to the level select screen, there's going to be a Warp Star in the middle. If you can get that, you're going to fight King Dedede. Beat that, and you've finished the game. If you want to go straight to the bonus stages, here's a little trick. On the title screen, press left, B, and select.
At the same time, a little, like a white little cat will walk across the bottom of the high score screen. That'll let you know you've done it right. You go back to the title screen, start a new game. Whatever table you start on, you're going to start at the bonus game. Now, at the title screen, if you press right, A, B, and select at the same time, a black cat will walk across the high score screen.
Then you go back to the title screen, start a new game. Whatever table you start at, you're going to start at the boss. Kirby Pinball Land is another one of those essential Game Boy games you just have to have. Even if you don't like pinball, even if you don't like Kirby. It's hard for me to say if it's the best pinball game, because I love Revenge of the Gator so much, but I like to think of it as Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back.
I mean, I just love the first Star Wars movie, but Empire Strikes Back, I have to admit, is a better movie. That's kind of like this. You know, you have three separate boards. It's a lot more forgiving. You have a save game. You have Nudge. There's a lot about this game to love. It looks really good on Super Game Boy, and really nice on the Game Boy Color.
It actually starts in kind of a blue and pink palette, and Kirby is actually pink. It was designed before Game Boy Color came out, so there's this kind of weird stuff where some things are in the back layer, some things are in the front layer, so half of Kirby will be pink and the bottom half blue. But for the most part, it looks really nice.
If you have a 3DS, you can get this on the 3DS, then you don't have to worry about replacing the save battery. There's no reason not to get the Japanese version. There's a little bit of reading, but mostly start game, save game, that kind of stuff. It was a very popular game and very inexpensive. I see it all the time for a buck.
I just wish Howl Laboratory would have kept going along this line. It's like, this is where Pinball was headed, and it wasn't quite as good when they went to Pokémon Pinball, then after that we never really got any great Howl Pinball games. So we'll just have to keep playing this one. It's easy to find.
Search for DMG-K9, or DMG-K9J for the Japanese version. Doraemon is a game that was made by Epic in 1991.
Now this is not that there are a lot of Doraemon games and there are a lot of Doraemon games made by Epic. They make a lot of games. They made the… I think every Doraemon game on Game Boy was Epic. Now this game only came out in Japan. I think even if you don't read Japanese you can still enjoy it because the storyline is not necessary to play the game.
If you've never heard of Doraemon, well, he is a cat born a hundred years in the future who comes… He's a very funny, kind of sarcastic cat. And he's sent back in time to help Nobita, a kind of lazy kid who needs help. And then this robot cat gives him devices and stuff to help him get through his problems, usually causing worse problems.
It's one of my favorite comics, you know, I read that one. Since moving to Japan I've been trying to find reading material that's kind of at my kanji level, which is, you know, I don't need the basic, basic stuff. And if I read stuff for really little kids it's either too boring or kind of harder because sometimes you need the kanji to help figure out the meaning of stuff.
At least I do. And this thing has furigana, which is little hiragana symbols, so phonetic symbols above the kanji. So you can kind of sound out what the word is and kind of… it helps you remember words that you didn't know. It's a really educational comic, and I've watched the TV show, it started in 1979, and they're still doing the shows.
It's on every Friday. You can see Doraemon, although the guy doing the voice is not very good. The original was so much better. Everybody knows that. Come on. Anyway, this Doraemon game. Storyline, something, something, kidnapped, blah blah blah. You start off in an overworld where you're looking down on Doraemon, it's kind of a 2D little world.
You walk around punching monsters with your giant fist, and then you go into these doors. Doko demo doors. Doko demo doors isn't an anywhere door, it's a teleportation device. So you go into these doors, sometimes you have to wiggle around to get in them because the collisions aren't set very well. So you go inside these doors, and what do you find in there?
Well, sometimes you don't find anything. They just tell you go in another door, or it just warps to another part. And sometimes you need to get an object, but they don't really tell you where to get it, so basically all you're doing is bumping into random doors until you find the right one. That's all I did, and I got through the game no problem.
You go in the door, and once in a while you'll get a level to do, and these levels are top-down shooters or side-shooters, or puzzle, little one-screen puzzle things that are not really much of a puzzle. Pretty much the same puzzle over and over. Through the whole game, it's basically the same side-scroller level with slight variation, and the same top-down shooter level with slight variation.
With the side-scrolling level, you start off the game not able to fly, so you're running around the ground, jumping, and later on you can fly around, so walking around the ground is optional. While you're on these levels, you get different shooting power-ups. So you start off with a fist, which is kind of like a boxing glove on an extender like a clown might have, and then you get sort of a pea-shooter gun that shoots very fast, single shot, then you get a double bullet that's a wider shot that shoots very fast, and then you get a boomerang, which is totally useless, and then there's also this other ball shooter thing, which is also equally useless because it's so slow, and then you get a triple shot, which is slow, but it's a triple shot, and if you move kind of close to the edge of the screen, it'll shoot a lot faster.
Three bullets on the screen at a time. I found most of the game, I was just trying to hold on to that three-shooter because I could just stay in one part of the screen and blow away all the enemies. Yeah, it's not challenging, it's definitely made for kids, which is not surprising for a lot of the early 90s games were definitely aimed at kids.
And then, you know, after a while you run out of doors in that level and you get a boss to fight, and the bosses are sometimes a little bit, a couple of them are a little bit challenging. It depends what power-up he has. You want to have that three-shooter most of the time, he can pretty much finish all the bosses off with that.
And that's it, you just blast through the levels. Oh, there's one level where they reverse the controls, so everything is backwards, left is right, up is down, and you can't just turn your controller around like you do with other games. It's a Game Boy. Even for 1991, it was just full of video game cliches.
You always know exactly where the next enemy is going to come out in these shooters because the placement is very predictable. If you see an enemy on the left, you know there's going to be one coming on the right pretty soon. That kind of thing. I kind of half-asleep played through the whole game in about an hour and a half, hour and three quarters.
There's just not that much to it. I don't recommend getting this game unless it's really cheap. I paid about 15 bucks for the game in the box with the manual. It's not rare either, I've seen it around. There are a lot of other good Drimon games for Game Boy, there's definitely some good educational ones, but as far as this one goes, I would skip it.
With Epoch, you never know what you're going to get. I mean, they made some good Game Boy games, but they also made some, eh, okay ones. And they've definitely done better ones than this. Oh, here's one weird thing about Epoch, though, that I just learned. They had their own console, they had their own video game console called the Cassette Vision in 1981.
And then I realized, I bought a whole bunch of Epoch games. They came out about 10 years ago, they came out with this TV, it was one of these plug and play things, you plug in your, you know, you put the batteries in, you plug the composite cables into your TV. It came out before the Wii, so you had stuff like boxing, where you put on these boxing gloves and they had little motion sensors or something, you could box on the screen.
And the graphics looked like sort of Super Nintendo, Neo Geo style graphics. And there was bowling, where you had this bowling ball, and there was an IR detector that sat on your TV or below your TV. And then the ball had weird kind of, like, reflectors, like a road sign, reflectors. So you'd kind of bowl at it, and it would figure out the speed of the ball on the curve.
And the other game we had was, uh, Ping Pong. And it was, that one was fun, I mean, before Wii came out, this was like the most exercise you could get with a game. The paddles had little IR transmitters all over them, like in the front, on the side, so it could tell the angle of the paddle where you're hitting the ball.
And it was pretty intense, you could actually put some, there was some subtlety to how you hit the ball and how you get it to curve and stuff like that, and you could play two players against each other. Epic have made a lot of interesting stuff, but, um, this game is not one of them. Skip it! Ray Thunder is a first-person shooter that came out in 1991, Japan only, by Nichibutsu.
It wasn't the only first-person shooter, there's another one called X, and that's the only one that comes to mind right now, but there's probably some others. When I say first-person shooter, you might be picturing something like Doom or Castle Wolfenstein. This is a lot simpler than that. You're basically going down hallways, but you're locked in the middle of the hallway, and you can turn 90 degrees and move forward.
So it's not, you're not doing any kind of movement within that hallway. The levels are mazes, you're never in a room where it's more than one unit wide. So there are no big rooms that you go into, you're just going down hallways. You can turn left, right, go ahead. You can't actually move backwards, which is kind of strange.
I don't know why they didn't let you do that, but it makes it a little bit hard. You have to kind of turn around and move wherever you go. You pilot a spaceship, which doesn't really make sense, because you're fighting sort of humanoid robots, but I guess maybe they're like big Gundam-style apartment building-sized robots.
Who knows? You can't really tell the scale. There doesn't seem to be a story. You don't have to worry about reading Japanese in this game, because there's no reading to do. There's no save game, but there's a password for each level. So what this game is all about is shooting enemies and picking up power-ups.
You're in a maze. You can't really see very far, but you have a map, so you hit the select button and it comes up with a map. I find the map to be very sluggish to come up. It's like you really have to press that select button. When I was taking screenshots and recording the sound, it was really tough to get it working in the emulator.
On the actual Game Boy, it is pretty snappy. The enemies are just dumb walking along a path, like basically they'll do a little circuit or they'll just move back and forth, and there's a few that actually wander around. It's hard to describe them. One looks like a floor fan, and one looks like a robot, and then there's a sort of a probe droid, an Empire Strikes Back.
Pretty generic enemies. There's no sense that they're intelligent in any way. They're just kind of moving targets. They do shoot at you. You can cancel their bullets by shooting back, so if you fire fast enough, you can shoot. There's no weapon select, but there are power-ups that give you a different weapon, so you'll have like a weapon power-up that will shoot fireballs, and they are better somehow, although I find the regular weapon to be just fine.
You have a health meter, and you have a fuel meter, so you're actually using up fuel as you wander around, so you don't want to just blindly wander around the maze. You have to use the map to kind of figure out what you're going to do. The whole point of finishing these levels is to defeat all the enemies and pick up all the parts.
Now parts are power-ups marked with a P. We don't know why we have to pick them up. I'm sure that was in the manual, which I don't have, but you have to collect these key parts things. Other power-ups you're going to find in this maze are fuel and armor, and also once in a while you get a weapon power-up.
The other thing that's kind of strange is all these power-ups show up on the radar, but there's some that don't. These are key power-ups, and when you grab these things, they open up a door somewhere. I shouldn't say a door. A wall will disappear somewhere, and you can access an area you can't normally access.
Another power-up that shows up is something with a big W on it, which I assume means warp, and this will warp you to a different location. The first few levels are pretty straightforward. Like in the first one, you don't really need any keys to open doors. Then you start using keys to open doors. It gets a little more interesting, but then around about the sixth, seventh, eighth level, it starts to get a little bit ridiculous and mazy.
If you really like being lost in a maze, if that doesn't make any sense, then you might like this. I really don't like it in games, even in Zelda when they do this, where, you know, you'll be walking in a certain direction, and you're not really getting anywhere, it's just kind of looping you. There's a few levels like that where you can see on the map where you are, you can see where you have to go.
If you move in that direction, you can just keep moving and moving, and then you look at the map, and you're actually still in the same space. Oh, it's a puzzle. You're supposed to wander around and find a key and do something else. After that, you're not really confident that when you're moving forward, you're actually moving forward.
That really spoils the game. And also, they put mines here and there, and you can't see the mines until you're really close to them, and they're like a really pale gray. So you really have to keep an eye out for these things, so you can't blindly blast forward in the later levels. You have to kind of inch along, see if there's a mine, find another way around.
And the mines don't kill you completely, they just take a little square off your armor. I'm not surprised this wasn't released outside of Japan. It doesn't really have anything going for it, except for, I guess at the time, people had never seen a first-person shooter, maybe, on the Game Boy, and in general, first-person shooters are kind of very new still.
Maybe you've seen Faceball. You know, the whole virtual reality thing was just a big craze at the time with movies like Lawnmower Man. Maybe people at the time, primitive humans in 1991, thought this looked totally real. Totally realistic wireframe world. Well, anyway, if you're looking for this thing, search for DMG-RTJ.
I don't think you're going to have a great time with it, but it's kind of a fun little oddity to have in your collection.