Reviews of Pocket Bomberman, Columns GB Tezuka Osamu Characters, Popeye & Frisky Tom.
My name is Ray Larabie, and I’m talking to you from Nagoya, Japan. Welcome to episode number 29 of Game Boy Crammer. Today I’ve got a review of Pocket Bomberman (it’s like regular Bomberman, but sideways), Columns GB starring Tezuka Osamu characters…y’know, like Astro Boy. In episode 1, I reviewed Popeye 2; this is Popeye. And I’ve got a really obscure one called Frisky Tom. Listeners, you could really help me a lot by mentioning this podcast on blogs, on Twitter. Load up your old Friendster account and see if anyone’s still on it and mention it there.
If you’re still on CompuServe, maybe put in a good word for me there. If you’ve got a Genie account, maybe put in a word for me there, too. If you can post an article about this podcast on GeoCi- Well, you get the idea. Anyway, let’s start the show! Old people. Swackers. Get a clue. Get a job. Get a haircut.
Get some hair. Have some respect. Have some prunes. Why you- I don’t want to take this and just give it to- Game Boy Bobby! With new games like Ken Griffey Jr.’s Major League Baseball, Tetris Plus, and Donkey Kong Land 3, the world is a better place. Nice earrings. Nice hearing aid. What? Let’s do a big review!
Pocket Bomberman from Hudson was released in December of 97 in Japan and late 98 in the U.S. and Europe. Bomberman, also known as Dynablaster in Europe, is a maze game, originally from Hudson, although there’s some Konami versions around. This thing came out in 1983 originally, and there are lots of different Bomberman games.
It started off as a computer game in Japan, but it got really popular on the original Famicom. Your character, the Bomberman, moves through a maze, dropping bombs. The bombs can kill you, so you have to get out of the way of the bombs. The bombs explode in a cross shape, like a plus sign. So it’s pretty easy to get out of the way, but you can get power-ups that make your bombs have longer range, you can drop more bombs at a time, you can leave more bombs simultaneously, causing chain reactions of bombs, there are power-ups to make you move faster, etc. etc.
This version of Bomberman is a little different because it is a platform game. You’re dealing with gravity. When I first saw this, I thought, oh no, they’ve ruined Bomberman. But then I played it, and it’s great. They tried to keep as much of Bomberman the same. You’ve got almost the same kind of power-ups, very similar kind of enemies.
You’re still breaking open blocks to reveal power-ups, and the power-ups can be destroyed. You have to defeat all the enemies before the timer runs out and run for the exit. But with gravity, now you have the option of jumping on your own bombs. That makes a real nerve-wracking, risk-reward kind of scenario.
Apart from the speed power-up and the ability to drop more bombs and increase their range, you’re going to find power-ups that’ll let you remotely detonate those bombs. After you drop your bombs, press Start, the first bomb will detonate. Now, sometimes that’ll trigger a chain reaction of bombs if they’re close to each other, but if not, you can just keep hitting it and you’ll detonate each bomb in the order it was dropped.
Very handy. In later levels, you’re going to have to do a lot of jumping on your own bombs, and if you can get this power-up, it makes it a lot easier and a lot less scary. So what you’re going to want to do in those levels is play them over and over and figure out where the power-ups are. The power-ups are in the same location each time.
You’re going to want to figure out how to get that particular power-up so you can do these jumps. This whole game is divided into multiple stages. You have the forest stage, the ocean stage, wind, cloud, and evil. They’re all kind of the same, just harder as you go along in different enemies. In each stage, there are several levels.
There’s a time limit. You have to destroy all the enemies within the time limit. An exit door will open up and you have to get out of there before the time runs out. At the end of each stage is a boss. With the bosses, you don’t have to worry about the exit, just destroy the boss. There’s no real trick to the bosses, you just have to hit them with a lot of bombs.
And not hit yourself with those bombs. That’s the hard part. Some other elements you’re going to find. There are some electro-zapper gates that you have to time your way through. There’s some, I think they’re chain gates? If you blow up the thing on the top of it, the gate will open up and it stays open.
Apart from the normal game, you also have a jump game. The jump game is just kind of a little fun thing where you start off on a level, the floor will bounce you. So you just keep bouncing and bouncing and getting higher and higher in the level. You have to see how high you can get in the level without dying.
While bombing things and accumulating points on the way. It’s an interesting little thing, it’s not connected to the main game. There’s more than one version of the Japanese cart. The original version came in a metal can, and it was made for a regular Game Boy. In a grey cartridge, black and white. And then they came out with a colour version.
I believe, I can’t confirm, but I believe the US and European versions are the same colour cartridge. But there’s something different about the Japanese version. Now, there’s not a lot of reading to do in this game, just the intro. So there’s no reason not to get the Japanese version. The Japanese version had something called GB Kiss.
GB Kiss is an IR data link that’s included in the actual cartridge itself. Built into the plastic of the cartridge, they use a different type of material that’s semi-transparent. And that lets the light go through. Now, I took this cartridge apart and held it up to the light, and I couldn’t see any light through it, like even sunlight.
So it’s a special material that lets, I don’t know if it’s UV or infrared go through. You still use passwords in the Japanese version of the game, that’s the weird thing. But it’s got a save battery. I couldn’t find anyone else that has a GB Kiss, so I couldn’t really test what this thing is all about.
But what it lets you do, the whole idea of it is, you can transfer game data to other players, but you can also transfer messages. You can write a secret message, send it to your classmate using this GB Kiss cartridge thing. And don’t forget, you know, if you have Game Boy Color, you’ve got the little infrared receiver transmitter on there.
The Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Lite and original Game Boy didn’t have that. You had to plug in a wire if you wanted to play a multiplayer game. This doesn’t seem to be for playing multiplayer games, this is for transferring data. Like, you’re not going to sit with your cartridges pointing at each other playing.
And not only could you transfer between Game Boys, you could actually plug something into your PC that plugged into the Parallel port, I think, in Windows 95, and you could transfer your data onto your computer. And you could compose messages and store them in your mailbox and then send them to your friends, so.
It was really strange, it was like, if you bought this game, it was kind of like upgrading your Game Boy to do other stuff. There were actually some really simple games that you could transfer through this GB Kiss link. So, even though this is a Bomberman cartridge, you could actually transfer games through the GB link into it and play that game on that cartridge.
So, if you went through the GB Kiss menu, you could play, oh, there’s a game kind of like Pang, or Buster Brothers. There’s like a sliding tile puzzle, a really simple space shooter, there’s a snake game like on the Nokia phones. So, you could actually transfer these games from the computer with this GB link and then send these games to your friends through their cartridge.
And apparently, it didn’t matter which GB Kiss game you had, you could transfer, you know, it was all the same kind of thing. This was not included in the US and European versions of this game. And I don’t believe the US or Europe got the black and white version of the game. I highly recommend getting this game, it’s a really fun variation of Bomberman.
Look for DMG-APOJ for the Japanese version, DMG-AKOP for the American and European version. Let’s do a big review! Columns GB, Tezuka Osamu Characters, was released in Japan only in November of 99. Columns is a block puzzle game, and it’s one of the first block puzzle games. It came out just after Tetris.
Now, the Game Boy had come out with Tetris as a pack-in game, and very soon after that, Sega Game Gear came out. Columns is similar to Tetris, except you’re dealing with little jewels coming down, and you can’t rotate the pieces, but you can cycle them. If you have any kind of smartphone, you’re already familiar with this type of game.
It wasn’t nearly as popular as Tetris, but it was still pretty popular, and there was a lot of knock-off versions. I remember playing something, I forgot what it was called, but it was almost the same thing on the Amiga. It also came out in the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and the TurboGrafx, and lots of other systems.
There was even an arcade version, and it was also on the Sega Saturn. So ten years later, this thing came out in the Game Boy Color. Now, this is a Game Boy Color black cart, so you can actually play this in a regular Game Boy. As it is a matching blocks game, it is definitely much better to play it in color.
So the goal of the game is to make blocks disappear that are falling down from the top of the screen. The blocks have to be of the same type, same color, and you have to have a line of at least three blocks. These lines can be made horizontally, diagonally, vertically, and then if they pile up over the top of the screen, it’s the end of the game.
And like most of these games, you can cause chain reaction effects. Clear a line underneath a bunch of stuff, they’ll all fall, and you can get a whole bunch of points that way. Once in a while, you get these sort of clear crystals that come down, and whatever you land on, that particular block will disappear.
So if you land on a heart, let’s say, all the hearts will disappear. Instead of rotating like Tetris, you just kind of cycle through them. They’re always in groups of three, and you can cycle with the A button. And you have a little bit of time after the block lands to kind of cycle through, but not much.
There are two modes. There’s the classic mode, and there’s puzzle mode. Now, puzzle mode is just a few simple little puzzles. Usually it takes one or two moves to finish them. I didn’t find it that fascinating, it’s okay. There’s an options area where you can turn off the background music, which you will want to do.
It sounds like a little kid practicing piano. That’s the nicest thing I can say about the music. And also, it doesn’t play smoothly as you’re clearing things. It’s kind of skipping and pausing. You know, you think about Tetris music, it’s just non-stop. You know, it’s just perfect. That was made ten years before this game.
So what’s with the Osamu Tezuka characters? If you’re familiar with Astro Boy, also known as Atomu, that’s the guy who drew the manga. Also came by the White Lion. You got Hosuke Sharaku with the third eye. You got Metomo-chan, who uses drugs to turn into an adult. Candy, really. And a bunch of other characters.
They’re really just a little bit of decoration. When you start the game, you get a choice of character, and when you choose that character, you just see the little image beside you when you’re playing. And when you fail a level, you see them looking sad, and if you pass, you see them looking happy. It’s really nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
The game is in no way related to these characters. Even the music doesn’t seem to relate. At least, not that I could tell. While at least having it in color makes it a little easier to play, I thought it was a bit lazy to not take full advantage of the screen. A lot of these block tile puzzles on the Game Boy really take advantage of the full screen.
I mean, you already have a small screen. You don’t want to section a little piece of it off to be your main gameplay area. You think about Tetris. You know, most of the screen is Tetris. Why so tiny? Since it’s on the Game Boy, they should have made a version that was more appropriate to the Game Boy, not just try to port a version that was made for television or the arcade over to the Game Boy without modifying it.
While I don’t think Columns is a bad game, I think if you have a smartphone, you’re already tired of this type of game. And there are so many other games in this category that offer something kind of special, like Yoshi’s Egg. Sanrio Carnival, at least, is interesting. I guess you’d have to be really into collecting Osamu Tezuka stuff.
And if you are, search for DMG-AOYJ. Let’s do an egg review! Spargears! My toys! This new Popeye video game has the boys fighting worse than ever! Popeye, from Sigma Entertainment Inc., was released in April 1990 in Japan only. In episode 1 of Game Boy Kramer, I reviewed Popeye 2, which was a side-scrolling platform game, and it was really good.
So I sought out the original Popeye. Now, this Popeye is not related to the Popeye that you might know from arcades or from Colecovision, which wasn’t a scrolling platform game, but it was a platform game, and it was really good. This Popeye is a maze game, kind of like a Pac-Man, Ladybug, lock-and-chase kind of deal.
The game takes place in a maze, a scrolling maze, so you can’t see the whole thing on the screen at the same time. The size of the maze is approximately I’d say about three screens by three screens. You control Popeye. You move him around the maze with your D-pad. Except for one exception with the B button, you’re really not pressing any buttons.
You’re just moving around. You’re gonna find some other characters in the maze. You’re gonna find Olive Oil. To finish the level, you’re gonna have to pick her up, and when you’ve picked her up, she’ll have a little heart. So this is a rescue the damsel type of game, but this is based on Popeye, so that’s kind of the deal with Popeye.
So you’re basically carrying her to the end of the level. Now, the end of the level is Sweet Pea, the baby. But Sweet Pea’s not gonna appear until you collect all the hearts on the level. But someone’s trying to stop you, and that is Bluto, also known as Brutus. Fight like a man! Both Bluto and Brutus are correct for Brutus’ or Bluto’s name.
Same guy. There was some confusion about copyrights or something in the 60s, but I call him Bluto. Bluto presents no danger to Olive Oil, but he does present a danger to you. If you even go near Bluto, I mean, you don’t have to touch him. You just have to get a little bit close. You get into a fight.
When you’re in fight mode, you just want to hit the B button as fast as you can. If you’ve already picked up Olive Oil, she’s gonna take off. You’re gonna have to go get her again. If you do beat up Bluto, he just stays knocked out for a couple of seconds. Just enough time for you to get away from him.
Nothing in this level can kill you except the time limit. There’s a constant time limit running out. So the problem with meeting Bluto is he eats up your time. Whether you lose or win the fight, you’ve still wasted a lot of time. So you don’t want to go anywhere near that guy. You’ll see Popeye’s friend Wimpy walking around.
That’s the guy whose main motivation is hamburgers. Wimpy is constantly dropping hamburgers in your path. Hamburgers will block Popeye’s movement. But once in a while, Wimpy will also eat the hamburgers. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the play mechanic we’ve got to deal with. These burgers also block Olive Oil.
It can be really difficult to finish the level because these burgers are blocking off things you need to get, either hearts or Olive Oil or all kinds of stuff. The burgers also block Bluto, so that can be handy. Now I mentioned you had to get the hearts and Olive Oil to finish the level to make the baby generator.
You also have to give this guy a burger. But if you just walk into a burger, you can’t pick it up. You need spinach. Spinach just happens to fly from off screen once in a while. And if you play the course a few times, you can kind of predict where these are going to come out. Once you get the spinach, you can walk much faster and you can blast right through burgers.
So all you need to do is get one burger and then go up to Wimpy and it just kind of automatically gives them the burger. Actually, I finished all the levels in this game without even knowing I had to give Wimpy a burger. It just kind of accidentally happened. I’d always clear out some burgers with the spinach and then walk into Wimpy.
Now you might think getting the spinach is going to help you beat Bluto, but you would be incorrect. Spinach is the key to this game because it’s going to let you clear out the burgers and the burgers are really what prevents you from finishing the level. Because if you know the maze layout and you kind of have a rough idea where Bluto is, it’s really no problem to complete everything.
It’s the burgers that get in your way. So if you can get spinach after spinach and just keep clearing out burgers, you can just play the course and you can just plow right through these levels. No problem. Sometimes olive oil will be locked behind a couple of burgers and there’ll be a heart behind those burgers and your time’s running out and you’re just waiting for Wimpy to maybe come along and eat one of those burgers.
If you don’t know where the spinach pops out, you’re pretty much just waiting for the timer to run out. Completing these levels isn’t very hard, so I guess it’s kind of a point scheme, right? When you collect olive oil, you get 2,000 points. If you beat up Bluto, you get no points. Hearts? 1,000 points.
Burgers? Nothing. Spinach? 500 points. What’s your favorite game? A, B, or C? When you start the game, you can choose either one of those. It doesn’t matter which one you do. There’s no advantage to doing all three of them. Each one has, I think, five levels and once you’ve played all five levels, that’s just game over.
The strange thing is this is kind of a points-based game. When you finish the final level, you better look at your score really quick because it doesn’t save your score anywhere. It doesn’t keep a high score. Many times I just kind of finish it and then it just bang, right to the title screen and I’m like, where’s my score?
Okay. So you got to pay attention There are infinite continues so if you do run out of time on a level, you get to continue so there’s no lives or anything like that. You just keep continuing. The controls are so-so. I don’t like the way Popeye’s kind of loose in the maze. Like when you’re Pac-Man, you know how you’re kind of on rails?
Like there’s no kind of wiggling around inside the maze. You can’t really get stuck on corners. With Popeye, you’re kind of a little bit loose inside the maze. It’s hard to explain but I don’t know why they did this. It doesn’t give you any advantage for gameplay. It doesn’t play better. It just makes it a little harder to get away sometimes.
Although there are these intersections sometimes you can kind of get a little bit more space between you and Bluto to avoid a fight. This whole game seems to be really quickly slapped together. The title screen has this one bit graphic but they didn’t even use any greyscale or anything. Just a solid black and white image.
While you’re playing sometimes a picture of Popeye being victorious or Bluto being victorious will pop up from the corner of the screen. Just kind of slide up with no animation and it’s, again, it’s a one bit graphic like they couldn’t put any greyscale in there. It looks really cheap. The music is kind of an annoying loop.
It’s different for each course. At the beginning of the game there’s kind of an opening cinematic I guess you’d say but it’s this kind of glitchy really fast frame thing. You can’t really tell what’s going on. And the gameplay balance seems really rough. Like there’s so many situations where you’re just hopelessly waiting for Wimpy to show up and eat a hamburger or a spinach can to show up just so you can clear out burgers.
You’re just watching the counter run down. And there should be some advantage to beating up Bluto. It takes so long to beat him up your timer’s just running down and then after you knock him out he’s just back in a few seconds. So you’ve lost a whole bunch of time and all of oil has probably run away.
And I have nothing against maze games in general. This is just lousy. But if you do want this game search for DMG-PYA. Watch out! Yikes! Next to a patient review. Frisky Tom by Nichibutsu was released in July of 1995 in Japan only. Nichibutsu also known as Nihon Busan was an Osaka video game company.
They’re around from the mid 70s till about the end of the 80s. You might know them for Moon Cresta Crazy Climber Terra Cresta Seicross but eventually they switched to making strip Magon games. And one game they came out with in 1981 Frisky Tom. Frisky Tom isn’t really a maze game. You could compare it to Crazy Climber.
It’s a little bit like that game in Wreck-It Ralph. You are Frisky Tom. You are Frisky. The cartridge has the same artwork as the original arcade game. You’ve got a blonde woman with rosy cheeks nude in a bathtub. Frisky Tom he looks frisky he’s holding a pipe. Oh Frisky Tom what will you do? You’ve got a water supply the screen is full of pipes which are all leading to a bath.
This bath needs to be filled up because this blonde woman requires a bath. Maybe she’s just really dirty and she needs a bath. On the original flyer it says Tom the Plumber and five mischief filled mice have tank fulls of good clean fun with a lively blonde. A lively blonde. Those were different times folks.
It was actually a hand held electronic game of Frisky Tom by Bandai Electronics. It was this cool looking silver thing with a little joystick and action button. It had that cool gas filled tube glowing screen. These are like $140 on eBay. Alright so the pipes. The water is going through the pipes and filling up the bath.
Great. Except there are mice all over the place and they’re chewing on the pipes. Well there are two different kinds of mice. There are white mice and black mice. The black mice don’t chew on the pipes but they do knock you off the pipes. Now it doesn’t hurt you to fall off the pipes but it wastes your time because you have to climb back up.
And the reason you have to climb back up is these mice are knocking out the joints on the pipes. So you go along the bottom of the screen or you can catch them if you can. You can pick up several of these pieces and go up and repair. So you just have to move up to where the brake is and it will automatically put that piece on.
But it’s not just a grid it’s a system of pipes and you have to kind of move around from pipe to pipe to get up to that location. That’s where the black mice come in. They will knock you down and sometimes it’s just hopeless because you’ve got a whole bunch of pipes broken and not much hope of getting it done.
Now the white mice you can knock those off just by touching them. So if you can get up really high at the beginning before they start breaking the pipes you can just start knocking them off the pipes. Now these black mice don’t just knock you off the pipes. They are also experts in demolition. A black mouse will put a bomb right beside the pump and then a wick that goes all the way to the bottom of the screen.
Then another mouse comes and lights the wick. How do you put out a wick? With your body. You just kind of fall onto the wick fall over it and your body puts out the wick. So you’re safe until someone lights it again. This other stuff is going on you’re fixing pipes and stuff like that. And it’s not a long level after a while if you do well the bath will be filled or at least filled enough and you get this awkward looking but cute I guess intermission screen where the lively blonde will enjoy a bubbly bath.
In the arcade version this was actually a pretty cute graphic because well she actually was blonde and the bubbles were blue and this one this is kind of looks like she’s in a vat full of cottage cheese or something I don’t know. The mice had different personalities and stuff like there was a purple mouse that would set the bomb there was a pink mouse that would light the bomb and there was a blue mouse that’s kind of what the black mouse is in this one that would knock you off and then you had the other mice chewing I think yellow or green.
I actually played this in the arcade a couple of times way back it wasn’t a common game and I believe it was one of if not the first game with a custom CPU the coin up game not the not the Game Boy game. This game is largely unknown outside of Japan except for that coin up version there’s not a lot of home versions of Frisky Tom.
I have it on the Super Nintendo on something called Nichibutsu Arcade Classics but I don’t think that was released outside of Japan. Apparently it was on PlayStation at some point. If you played a computer game way back called Mousek Attack I think it was on the Apple II you basically played the same game.
If you like really old style video games you’ll probably like this. I didn’t like it at first but I really got into it after a while and the difficulty isn’t that crazy high like even the first few times you play it you can play for three or four levels even not really knowing what you’re doing. Frisky Tom look for DMG-AFTJ-JPN.