Reviews of Wario Land – Super Mario Land 3, Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula, Cadillac II & Soreyuke!! Kid.

My name is Ray Larabie, and I’m talking to you from Nagoya, Japan. Welcome to episode 25 of Game Boy Crammer. Today I’ll be reviewing Wario Land, Super Mario Land 3, Shinseki, GPX Cyber Formula, Cadillac II, and Soreyuke Kid.

Thanks to everyone who’s tweeted about this podcast, liked on Facebook, commented on iTunes, or just mentioned me on a blog or anywhere else. I really appreciate it. However, this podcast still ranks really low when you’re searching for retro podcasts. In fact, a lot of Game Boy podcasts that aren’t even being made anymore show up higher on the list than this one.

It’s pretty far down. I think a lot of people aren’t finding it. If you haven’t done a review on iTunes, it really, really would help me out, and get more people to listen to this podcast. Let’s start the show! Come and get it on Game Boy, baby. Super Mario Land 3, Wario Land, was released in Japan in January 94, February 94 in the US, and May 94 in Europe.

As you can tell from the title, this is the third Super Mario Land game on the Game Boy, although it doesn’t start Mario. The first game came out in 1989. It was a launch title. Then you had to wait three more years to get Super Mario Land 2, the six golden coins. In that game, you met Wario. His castle was taken away, and the story continues from there.

It was a big change. It wasn’t the typical Mario game everyone was used to. I think Nintendo took a big chance with this one. They could have gone the Mega Man route and kept cranking up more and more Mario games, kind of one after another. But around that time, this is the time that, on the Super Nintendo, where they were going in a different direction with Mario, where, you know, they did Yoshi’s Island, you know, they weren’t just making the same Super Mario Bros. game over and over.

In the first Super Mario Land, Mario was pretty small. In the six golden coins, he was bigger. In this one, Wario is huge. You’ve got this big character on the screen, big enemies. Everything’s big and really easy to see. It’s really suited to the Game Boy. Now, Wario, on his own, with no special helmet, is actually kind of small.

But you’re not going to stay that way very long. When you are just regular Wario running around the world, you don’t have any special abilities. You can jump on heads, you can pick up and throw enemies, but that’s about it. You want to get your garlic. There are four different garlic types to give you different kinds of hats.

The first one is a regular hard hat. When you have this, you turn into the larger version of Wario. And if you take one hit, you’re going to go back to the small version. This is the same with any hat. They all give you one damage level. If you hold the B button, you’ll charge up, and then you can ram.

You can ram into bricks, you can ram into enemies, you can open chests. There’s another piece of garlic you can pick up that’ll give you bullhorns. Essentially the same as the hard hat, but stronger. You have a better charge. You can actually stick to the ceiling. When you’re jumping, hold down and Wario will smash into the ground, and it actually shakes all the enemies on the screen.

You can knock some of them over sometimes. Or you can, you know, find power-ups and stuff if you smash through blocks down. This is the only helmet that’ll let you do that. Now the jet hat, you can do the same charge thing, but you can charge much further. So you can actually, you can cross distances that you couldn’t normally get over.

You’ll see right at the beginning of the game, you’ll have these situations where there’s these man-eating plants on the ground, and it seems like there’s no way to get over it. Well, you have to find this jet hat and then fly over that stuff. And there’s a dragon hat. You pick up this dragon garlic, you get a dragon hat, and you can shoot fire.

It’s not the same as Mario where you’re shooting fireballs. This is like a stream of fire, and it never runs out. If you don’t lose this thing, you can go through level after level, just wiping stuff out. And it doesn’t just kill enemies, you can actually knock out bricks with this thing. The only problem is you can’t charge with it.

I found through most of the game I really tried to hang onto the dragon hat, and you can pretty much do anything except there’s a few parts where you need the bullhorns so you can do the downward smash. Oh, the story. So at the end of Super Mario Land 2, he loses his castle, and Wario only really cares about money.

So the goal of this game is to get lots of money and get a new castle or a new place to live. The enemy in this game is Captain Syrup and the Brown Sugar Pirates, who have a statue of Princess Toadstool. And why does Wario need this? Because it’s made of pure gold. There are 40 levels in this game, and some of them are pretty big.

You just have to start at the beginning of the level, get to the end of the level, but there’s a lot of other stuff you can do along the way. It’s similar to a Kirby game in a way, because you can kind of blast through the game quickly if you want to. If you really don’t care about the money and you just want to get to the end of the game, it’s actually not that hard a game.

The point is money. When you collect coins in this game, it’s not like the regular Mario kind of thing where you get a hundred coins and you get a life. Coins are coins. You just want money. And you’re gonna see they’re in ones and tens, and once in a while you see a hundred dollar coin. Sometimes they’re just sitting out in the open, they’re in blocks, or you can ran into enemies to get one.

At the end of each level, there’s a bonus game where you can gamble to try to get more coins. All around this game, there are hidden treasures. Now, these treasures are worth a lot of coins. Three thousand, four thousand, some of them are nine thousand coins worth. I don’t know where they all are. You’ve got to find them.

There are fifteen of them all together. At the end of the game, you’re gonna cash them in and see how many coins you get. And with those coins, you’re gonna be able to buy a place to live. If you don’t have very many coins, you’re gonna get a bird house. You might live in a tree, a log cabin, a pagoda, a castle, or even a planet.

I think you have to have a hundred thousand coins to get to the planet. I didn’t even come close. If you run out of lives, you lose a lot of money, so you don’t want to be dying too much. This game saves automatically. And there are three save slots, so three different players can have a game going. There are hearts in this game, all over the place.

If you get a hundred of these, you get one up. And you find these inside blocks. There’s also a bonus game at the end of the level. There’s one bonus game where you’re just getting coins, but there’s another one where you can earn hearts and earn lives. There are keys in this game. You don’t need keys to get through the game.

The keys are to open up parts of the level you can’t normally get to. If you find a key, somewhere in the level, there’s a lock. So just keep looking around. It’s sometimes a hard-to-find location. And they look different from the regular doors. Speaking of regular doors, there are some doors that you have to pay ten coins to to get through.

Usually at the end of the level. And there are also some things that look kind of like doors, but they’re actually checkpoints. You know, in a lot of these games, you find a level checkpoint, and then if you die, you don’t have to go all the way back to the beginning of the level. Well, these ones you actually pay to use.

So if you want to save money, you can just skip past it and keep going. There are bosses in this game. I don’t want to tell you too much about the bosses because they’re… I didn’t find any that were super hard to figure out, but they’re all really creative and interesting. There’s a time limit on these levels, but the time limit is so high that I’ve never run out.

But it does limit the amount of time you can just go around looking for these treasures. This is around the time where game designers got really clever with this stuff. Like, they’d introduce a new gameplay element, but they’d introduce it in a way that was really friendly, where you could kind of tell, without reading the manual, what you’re supposed to do.

Which is great, because in this game, there’s no reading to do. That’s why it doesn’t matter if you get the Japanese version or any version, because everything is just explained visually and through the game. When new enemies are introduced, they’re kind of introduced gradually or in a situation where you have a chance to fight them.

Once in a while, you’ll find an exclamation point block, usually in a room on its own. If you hit that and then go back to the level, you’ll find something has changed, especially like water levels and stuff like that. You’ll have water that disappears and you can access something you can’t normally access, or just sometimes it makes a bunch of blocks disappear so you can get to something you couldn’t normally get to before.

The sound in this game is incredible. You know, the music changes to suit the mood, and it’s all really catchy, really great stuff. The controls are just flawless. Everything is intuitive. You don’t have to read the manual or remember anything. You just kind of hit A or B and everything does what it’s supposed to do.

It’s just really, really clean. And the collisions are spot-on, like you never find yourself falling off platforms. Just really crisp. Even if you’re blasting through this game, it’s still pretty long. I think it has a lot of replay value because it’s hard to get all those treasures unless you read some kind of guide or something like that that tells you where all the treasures are.

You’re gonna have fun going through these and finding treasures you couldn’t find before. I think you’ll have more fun with this game if you don’t look things up online and just kind of go through it naturally. If you buy the cartridge, you will have to replace the battery. That thing is dead by now, and it’s really no fun without the save game.

However, you can get this thing on 3DS Virtual Console, so that might be a better way to play it. One thing that really strikes me about this game and what really makes it so special is, I imagine in 1994, it was the least frustrating Mario game that ever came out. Super Mario Land 2 is pretty tough.

It’s probably not the hardest Mario game, for sure, but it’s a challenge. This one is challenging, but it’s more challenging finding all the secrets than just going from the start to the end of the game. And there were two more sequels to this on Game Boy, which I’ll be reviewing at some other time. I highly recommend getting this game.

This is one of those essential Game Boy games, I think. In fact, I’d probably get this before Six Golden Coins. I like Six Golden Coins, but I like this one better. It’s a pretty common game. You can get it for not too much. So get any version you want. They’re all the same. DMG-WJ. Shinseki GPX Cyber Formula was released in Japan only in early 1992.

It looks like a racing game. When I bought it at the retro game store, it was in the racing game section. It’s got a little picture of a race car on it. But when I brought it home and put it in my Game Boy, it turned out to be a board game. A board game with a theme of futuristic race cars. In this game, you play a generic boy with spiky hair, like almost every game, and for some reason, you need to win race cars.

It looks a little bit like the Speed Racer car with a big ugly park bench spoiler on the back. Makes it go faster, I guess. You start the game with a little set-up. You can go to a garage and add some parts and stuff like that. But since it’s your first race, you have no items and no ability to upgrade your car yet.

So, the first race. You start off on a track, and the camera pans around the track so you can see the whole thing. Now, this thing doesn’t have curves. It’s all based on how fast you can go. It’s all built in. And you’re just going to be going straight ahead. There’s no lane changes or anything like that.

That all happens automatically. So you start off, you have a choice. You roll the dice to get your pole position, I think. And then the race starts. Every turn, you’re presented with an option. Edo, or item. So Edo just means movement. Roll the dice. So you roll the dice. You want to roll low. So use your magical luck powers to get a one.

Because that’s the only way you can get a one. So you roll the dice. And you roll the dice. Magical luck powers to get a one, because that’s the best one. You can go further ahead with a one. A six is the worst. You get to go one space. It seems to vary. I think it depends on your car. Because in later levels, you go a lot further ahead with each roll.

Okay, so let’s say you roll a one at the beginning. You’re going to try to pass the whole pack. But it’s not as easy as that. When you try to pass someone, you go into this passing mode. In this mode, you’re going to see you. When you first start this game, it’s hard to tell which one is you. You’re kind of the little white speed racer car.

And you’re presented with some choices. You can ram attack, you can compete with, you can dodge, or you can use an item. If you choose ram attack or compete with, you’ll have a cursor. And then you can choose which car you want to compete with or ram attack. Now compete with means you’re going to try to pass that car.

There’s nothing I can see that really indicates your strength at this time. Like you can’t really see the strength of the other cars. So you kind of get used to which ones are tougher than others. Some of them you can kind of do the ram attack. And they’ll just spin out and you can go ahead. Sometimes you try to do a ram attack and you end up spinning out.

If you spin out, you damage your car a little bit and then it sends you back. So then you have to roll the dice again and try to get ahead. If you use the dodge command and you time it with when someone’s going to attack you, a lot of times their attack will backfire and they’ll end up spinning out. Not just for attacks, also if someone tries to compete with you.

It seems there are three turns in this stage. So you can compete all three times and hope to get it or try different stuff. Now items. At this point in the game you don’t have any items. As you move around the board, items will automatically get picked up. Items such as jump parts, DF effect, transform system, super grip, repair kit, burning spirit, and hyper boost.

I didn’t get the manual with this game so I don’t know what all those things do, but I just try them out. You can actually use some of these items before your die roll on the main board, or you can use them in these passing battles. And they really work. I tried the hyper boost and then did a compete right after that and I passed the guy.

I tried super grip with a ram attack and that worked really well. It’s hard to tell if I’m just lucky or the item worked. Now repair kit will repair your car. You will have to pit in at some point if you take too much damage. Okay, so back to the board segment. You’re going to roll the dice again and keep going around the track.

If you do win the race, you’ll go on to the next race. And just before that you’ll have some options for your car that you can choose. It starts all over again. Now the second level is a little bit tougher. At the beginning you can’t really do much passing. You have to kind of let them space out a bit and then just pass one at a time.

I was initially really turned off by this game. I thought there’s no way I’m going to play this. But I kind of got into it. Once you get into that kind of board game mode, your expectations drop and I’m not going to say it’s a blast, but it’s okay. There’s no save game on this, but there is a password system.

Everything’s in Japanese. The only part, like I told you what all the different moves are that ram attack, compete with and dodge and some of the items. So you will want to have a Japanese dictionary with you handy for some of this stuff. But there’s not a lot of reading to do and it’s all in hiragana so it’s really easy to type in.

You don’t have to look up any kanji. The music’s actually pretty catchy for such an early Game Boy game. A little disappointing. There’s not a lot of car sound effects. There’s not a lot of car special effects at all. When you move around the track it just makes little bloop bloop bloop sounds. Doesn’t really sound like a race.

Well anyway, if you’re looking for this game, look for DMG-CFJ. Katalac 2 was released in Japan in November of 1990 and in the U.S. in April 1992. Except they couldn’t call it Katalac there, so they called it the Square Deal. Also, there was no Katalac 1 in the U.S., but there was one in Japan released on the Famicom.

Basically the same game. This game was made by a company called Hecht. H-E-C-T. Hecht. They made a lot of Mag-O-M-A-G-E-T. They made a lot of Mag-O-M-A-G-E-T. They made a lot of Mag-O-M-A-G-E-T. They made a lot of Mag-O-M-A-G-E-T. They made a lot of Mag-O-M-A-G-E-T. But there was one in Japan released on the Famicom.

Basically the same game. This game was made by a company called Hecht. H-E-C-T. Hecht. They made a lot of Mag-On games and board games, quiz games, card games. But they also made a game that I really like called Formation Z. This is one I remember when I was a kid in the arcades called Aeroboto. This is a falling block puzzle slash card game.

It’s in a 5×5 grid. Cards fall from the top to the bottom. You can move them side to side and drop them to try to create poker hands. Then those cards disappear and everything drops down. drops down, like Tetris with cards. And the game’s over when you run out of space, like the cards pile up over the top, or if you get rid of every card. But when you finish, you want to end up with as few cards as possible on screen, because you’re going to lose money based on how many cards are left on the screen. It doesn’t matter the value of the card, it’s just how many are left. So the poker hands you can do, you can do a straight flush, for those of you who are like me and don’t know anything about poker, that’s when you get three cards in a row that are of the same suit. So like a three of diamonds, a four of diamonds, and a five of diamonds would be a straight flush. Three of a kind is when you get a three, three, and a three, or a five, five, and a five. You know, anything the same card, three in a row. A straight is when you get all five cards in a sequence.

Then a flush is just three cards in the same suit. So you get a lot of points for a straight flush. Still a lot for a three of a kind, but not as much. A straight is okay, and a flush is pretty worthless. You have to do it sometimes just to bring the stack down, but you really want to try to go for the other stuff. You want to get more points. Now to get a royal flush or four of a kind doesn’t seem like it’s possible, but I think it is if you can, you know, let’s say you have kind of a royal flush on a split, and then you kind of undermine it. Maybe they’re going to drop down and make a royal flush. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but if you do one, let me know. I haven’t been able to get it to work. If you’re still kind of shaky on the rules, just watch the demo at the beginning of the game. Just instead of starting the game, let the game show you how it works. But there’s more to it than that. When your card is coming down, you have a chance to change what card that is. Now normally, you know, if you’re playing Tetris in the top right, you’re going to see what the next piece is. This will actually show you your hand, which is three other cards.

If you hit the A button, you can cycle through these cards and switch which card is coming down, so you don’t have to stick with whatever card is falling. And below that, it’ll tell you how many cards are left in the deck, but also time limit. Now what’s this time limit all about? Well, if you hit the B button, you can just hold the card at any time. The card can be falling and you’re not sure which one. You’re panicking, and we’ll just hit that B button. That’s going to save you a little bit. Just don’t do it too long. You’ll run out of time. One thing I found on the Game Boy Color is that the colors are kind of distracting. You know, the way the Game Boy Color works is things on the background layer and the sprite layer have different palettes, which is kind of nice because the hearts and diamonds are red and the spades and clubs are black. However, when they fall into place, they become static. They become part of the background, so that heart becomes gray. So it ends up being very confusing because you’re mentally, you know, if you have a heart coming down, you’re kind of looking for red, but there’s no red down there. And I found a lot of times I got kind of a brain freeze on that one. So what you want to do before you turn on your Game Boy, hold down B and left, turn the power on, and you’ll get a monochrome screen. Or up and left will do the trick too. You’ll get kind of a sepia tone. I didn’t really love this game because I don’t like cards in general. I think if you like poker a little bit or you just want to get kind of a little bit more familiar with cards in general, it could be fun. To find this game, look for DMG-CAJ or just DMG-CA for the American version.

Sorayuke Kid from Kotobuki Systems was released in the summer of 97 in Japan only. The protagonist in this game is a clown. Still listening? Okay. This is a platform puzzler, very much in the style of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. You’re walking up and down stairs, climbing ladders, et cetera, warping through tubes, opening doors, collecting keys, and occasionally defeating enemies. There’s a lot of this type of game on the Game Boy.

In fact, I’d say there’s more of this type of game on the Game Boy than any other game console. And since this came out, I mean, so many years after the original Mickey Mouse slash Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, you’d think there’d be some kind of gameplay improvement, but not really. It’s pretty much the same thing. In each level, you have to open doors and collect keys. And sometimes behind these doors, there are other items you can collect.

There are warp tubes, so you kind of push up or push down to go through them, and you’ll pop out the other end of the tube. So a lot of times, these levels are just kind of a navigation puzzle. But there are enemies walking around. The enemies are not super fast, so you have time to think about what to do. And if you get really confused about the level, you can pause and then pan the camera around the level, and you can kind of see what you need to do. One door has a lock on it, and of course, like most locks, you require a big pile of keys to open it. Well, anyway, you’re collecting keys. When you have enough keys, the music changes, and that means you can open the lock. Now, that doesn’t mean all the doors have been opened. Sometimes there are doors that have their power ups, but you know, at least at that point, you have all the keys. The enemies are other clowns and other kind of generic things walking around. So what are these items? Well, out on the main level, there are weights that you can push, and you can crush enemies with them, or you can just push them onto enemies and it kills them. There are bombs. If you pick up these bombs, you can put them down, and they won’t blow up on you, but if another enemy bumps into it, it’ll blow up. So you can kind of set them as traps. And if you put them in the wrong place, you can just pick them up again. There are shields in some of the doors. Now, these shields don’t knock out the enemies, but you can just walk through them for a short amount of time.

And as everyone knows, nothing makes a clown happier than increasing his or her kill yield. So, of course, you can find guns. After picking up a gun, point it at the enemy, and the clown will gleefully blow them away. You can almost feel the joy that clown feels. Clowns love killing. You can also find hammers. Now, these hammers, unlike in real life, when a clown finds a hammer, he usually wants to bash someone’s skull in. In this game, you use them to smash rocks, which will let you access areas you couldn’t normally access. And as the game goes on, they keep introducing more and more items, and enemies get a little more nasty and more plentiful, and the levels get more confusing. It kind of reminds me of today’s casual type of games, where you’re not actually trying that hard, but you’re getting a lot of rewards. But one thing I really wish is, if they’ve made the key inside each door, when you open the door, you don’t just automatically get the key. You have to walk one, two, three steps, pick up the key, and then walk back out the door.

Why didn’t they just make the key slightly closer to the door, just to save me a couple of steps? Because you have to do it so many times. I mean, if you actually add it up, if you play this game for a few hours, you’ll probably spend about half an hour just walking to a key and back. I don’t know how many levels are in this game, because I didn’t get to the end. You know, I played about 30 or 40, and kind of got the idea. If you like clowns, and violence, and puzzle games, then this is the game for you. However, it’s not very common, actually.

I haven’t seen it around very much, and I bought it just because it was so rare. It’s like, wow, I haven’t seen this in all my travels. I found it on a Yahoo auction, and it looks like it was untouched. There wasn’t even a scratch on the contacts on the cartridge. In other words, you need this game, so search for it. DMG-ABJJ.