Reviews of Kitchen Panic, Ultraman Club Teki Kaijuu o Hakken Seyo!, Batman Forever, 2048 & Magical Chase.
My name is Ray Larabie, and I’m talking to you from Nagoya, Japan. Welcome to episode number 40 of Game Boy Crammer. Happy 25th birthday, Game Boy. I’m so old. Today I’ve got reviews of an amazing platform game called Kitchen Panic.
Only came out in Japan. Another Only Japan game, the strategy game Ultraman Club. Batman Forever. Indie games, I’ve got a new one, two versions of 2048. And the expensive shooter, Magical Chase. And thanks to everyone on Facebook and Twitter and even Pinterest that have been, you know, all your comments and stuff.
Gets me more and more listeners. It’s great. When I started this thing, I had those maybe like 20 people listening to it, including myself. It’s really nice to be doing this to so many people now. Kresna Susila contacted me and asked me, hey, can you send me the Game Boy Crammer logo, the original? And I thought, oh, I hope I kept it.
The logo that you see on the podcast, like if you have a podcatcher or something like that and you can see the logo. I made that in Photoshop and I stuck it on the screen and took a picture of my screen, just a regular LCD monitor. Hoping it would look like a Game Boy Color, which it really doesn’t if you look at the pixels.
It’s not the same. Kresna actually got this thing working on an actual Game Boy. If you go to GameBoyCrammer.com and go to the page for this episode, number 40, you can download the GB file. Load that into your emulator or even better, put it on a Game Boy. So if you’ve got a multi-cart and you’ve got room for another game, throw that on there.
You can show off your Game Boy Crammer actual logo on a real Game Boy. And if you run it on a Game Boy Color, it actually shows on a separate sprite layer. So you get the actual green and pink thing going on. Thanks very much, Kresna. That’s amazing. One thing I forgot to mention when I did the Ultraman Club review.
Make sure you’ve got a monochrome palette if you’re going to run it on a Game Boy Color, because the sprite layer and stuff, it makes it really confusing to look at. So if you want kind of a sepia tone, when you turn on your Game Boy, hold up and B. You get the kind of sepia tone if you want pure black and white, B and left.
Let’s start the show. Kitchen Panic, developed by Bits Laboratory, published by Coconuts Japan, was released in Japan only in May of 1991. Kitchen Panic is a platform game. It’s not a side-scrolling platformer, but it is on a level that’s bigger than the screen that pans around, a little bit like Bubble Bobble.
In this game, you will jump on platforms and kill insects. And Bits Laboratory, if you’ve heard of them, maybe it’s from the NES Ghostbusters, the notoriously bad NES Ghostbusters. They also made Fantasy Zone for the TurboGrafx-16. This is actually the only Game Boy game they ever made. There’s another game called Kitchen Panic for PlayStation and Xbox.
This is not the same thing. Totally different game. In this game, you play Chi-Kun. He’s a little boy and he wants to destroy all the insects in the kitchen. And what’s the best way to kill bugs? With a can of bug spray. Also starting this game, big Mickey Mouse looking thing that looks like Mickey Mouse on steroids.
It really has the Mickey Mouse ears. There’s also a big praying mantis and some sort of ant boss. And also, God is in this game. You know, the one with the beard. Yeah, I’m not kidding. He’s in this game. So the idea of this game is you have to kill a certain number of bugs. Now at the top of the screen, you’re going to see an indicator showing how many bugs you have left to kill.
Once you kill them all, a door is going to appear. Go to the door, push up, and you’re finished the level. After you finish a bunch of levels, there’s going to be a boss, then you go to the next stage. There are five stages and there’s a final boss. Most of the insects take one hit, but later on they’re going to take a few more hits.
You don’t really get different weapons in this game except when you’re fighting the bosses, but I’ll get to that later. But you have just a basic spray that you’re shooting. There’s no power-ups like you’d find in maybe something like Bubble Bobble. When you kill these bugs once in a while, a block is left behind.
Now this block can be pushed. If it gets pushed into a corner, sometimes you can’t move it. But if you can push it and you can get three together, good things will happen. There are suns, stars, and moons. If you get kind of a mix of three, you still get a thousand points. If you get three moons together, you get three thousand points.
If you get three stars together, five thousand points. If you get three suns, you become invincible for a little while. You can actually destroy these blocks if they get in your way, because especially in later levels you can actually get trapped by these blocks and not be able to kill any of the insects you want to kill.
You can just go up to them and hit your butt a whole bunch of times. Just spray them point blank. Now I’m not going to go and list all the bugs in this game. There’s just all kinds of crazy bugs, and it’s really disgusting. They look pretty realistic. These are not cute, cartoony bugs. Well, some of them are.
Some of them shoot projectiles. There’s bees. Some of the bees shoot down. Some of them shoot across. The collisions are very forgiving. The bee stings, if they’re shooting horizontally, they pretty much have to hit you in the eyeball to do any damage. They can kind of graze the bottom of you, the top, and they don’t do much damage.
It’s very forgiving in that way. In fact, a lot of enemies will just kind of graze you, and in some games you know how it is. If a pixel even comes close to you, you die. Not in this one. And you’ve got two life hearts, which means three chances to get hit before you die. When you run out of lives, game over, but you can continue.
There doesn’t seem to be any level passwords or any way to skip levels, so you have to play this whole thing in one shot. I played through all five stages, but I don’t remember exactly how many levels there were. But there were a lot. The collisions are really nice, and the jumping is really nice, too.
You can jump really high. You can jump through the bottom of platforms. The whole thing has a really good feel to it. And you know, if it feels too cartoony for you, you can just pretend you’re William S. Burroughs or something. Just once in a while, if you spray a random location, I don’t know where it is, it’s hidden.
You spray this place three times, you will trigger a bonus game. I don’t know how it happens, it just happened to me a couple of times. And what you get is one of those matching tile concentration type of games, except you don’t have long to play. Play it really quick, and whatever you match is what you get.
You can get 1-ups, you can get cake, I don’t know what cake does. You can get a frog, which I guess makes you jump higher. Boots make you go twice as fast. Balloon lets you jump longer. There’s a 5,000 point bonus. There’s one that I don’t know, it’s the Katakana for Skye. Maybe it’s related to Dance Hall?
I don’t know what it is, in the manual it just says puzzle. And there’s a skull, which I didn’t get, but I imagine it’s something bad. Okay, when you get to the bosses, you’re going to have a choice of four different outfits and equipment that you can wear. So before you go to battle, you get to choose.
You can choose the first set, which is a different kind of spray, kind of a bubbly spray. It says moose. You get some bouncy shoes that make you jump higher. You get a shirt and a hat, I don’t know what they do. The second set, you get a regular spray. It’s supposed to be lemon spray, I don’t know what difference it makes.
You get slippers, doesn’t sound helpful. But you get pants. Pants are helpful because they’ll prevent you from getting damage. Third choice, you get a spray. Now this spray is amazing, it shoots super far. It’s weak though. So, but you can stay on the other side of the screen when the boss is attacking you, you can shoot really far and keep your distance.
And you get roller skates with that one too, which makes you run fast and there’s a batting helmet and a vest. I believe that has the same effect as the pants and the hat. The fourth set seemed to be tuned to fighting the final boss. So, in fact, when you do fight the final boss you’re forced to use that one.
So I never actually chose it for any of the other bosses. You get Mickey Mouse ears and I’m not sure what the other stuff is. So just pick one at random. I like the third one where you can kind of hang back and shoot at the boss, although it does take longer to defeat. It’s a little safer. I was surprised how much I liked this game.
At first I thought it was pretty lame, but the more I played it, the more I liked it. I think because the difficulty ramps up rather gradually. It does get very, very hard. The last couple of levels are pretty tough. There’s a lot going on. And there is a time limit for these levels. It’s kind of like in Bubble Bobble where the little skull thing comes out. If you take too long, a little fire is going to come out and chase you.
And you don’t have time. There’s not much you can do to avoid it. You can jump over it and avoid it a little bit, but it’ll catch up to you. So you want to go out the door as soon as you see that thing. See, after you finish the required number of bugs, you can still hang around and get points. You don’t have to go through the door right away.
But when you hear it, you’ll hear a musical cue, which means you better find the door quickly. In the early levels, you know, as long as you’re consistently killing bugs, you’re probably not going to run into the time limit, but in later levels it is a problem. In which case you’re going to need to use those blocks to wipe out as many bugs as you can at once. Usually that involves dropping the block down to the bottom level and then kind of waiting for the bugs to fill in and just wiping out a whole bunch in one shot. I’m not sure why this game didn’t come out in English, because there’s not really much reading that you need to do.
Maybe it was the overt Mickey Mouse references. The final boss is a parody of Mickey Mouse, obviously. So that might have had something to do with it. This game is kind of rare and therefore expensive. I rarely see it around. I usually see it around the 40-50 dollar mark. And that’s just a loose cartridge.
It is a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t break the bank over it. If you’re looking for this thing, look for DMG-KPJ. Ultraman Club Tekki Kaiyuu Ohakenseyo was released in Japan only in May of 1990. So a pretty early game. It was published by Bandai, developed by Tosei. Tosei made a lot of games for the Game Boy.
Malibu Beach Volleyball, Roadster, which was one of my first reviews, Yoshi’s Cookie, some of those Crayon Shin-Chan games, Tetris 2, Namco Gallery, Konami GB Collections, Harvest Moon. It just goes on and on. They made a lot of games for Game Boy. This Ultraman Club game is one of a series of Ultraman Club games, but it’s the only one of its type. Most of the Ultraman Club games came out on the Famicom, and they were more of a standard RPG.
This one is a strategy RPG. It’s more like a board game with RPG elements. I won’t go into every detail about Ultraman, because there’s so much to it. Ultraman started in the 60s. Plot is just too detailed for me to get into. There’s just countless TV series based on Ultraman. If you don’t know about Ultraman, just check it out on YouTube and watch a few episodes here and there.
There’s just so much of it. But the Ultraman Club games are based on this whole SD idea, the super deformed characters. Do you remember that crazy Super Robot Pinball game in Episode 24? Big bobblehead characters, and a less serious storyline. So this is like a silly version of Ultraman. When you start this game, you have a choice.
You can play it two player if you want, with a link cable, and that’s the only way you can actually play the bad guys in this game. It’s you, the Ultraman force against monsters. You may find the characters a little hard to tell apart, but basically if it has kind of an Ultraman like face, then it’s probably an Ultraman character. If it’s an ugly, weird monster, it’s a bad guy.
When you start off, you have a choice. Space, city, or forest. I don’t think it changes the difficulty, it just looks different. And then you’re going to have a grid of characters at the bottom. The first character you choose is going to be your boss. I guess you should pick a really tough one. I just picked the fanciest looking one there, because I don’t really know the characters.
And you’ll see it’s marked with a star. Then you can start putting characters down on the map. You can kind of scatter them wherever you want. You can put characters on the water. You’ll see there’s a few blocks with a little horizontal line. You can’t put stuff down, you’ll see it won’t let you put stuff down on those blocks. You can put characters in the middle of the water if you’re in the city level, or on a building.
There’s no terrain that’ll slow you down or anything like that, but some of these buildings will restore your health if you’re hanging out in them, so you need to think about that. Especially when you have a boss that you need to protect. You gotta protect this boss. If that boss dies, it’s the end of the game.
So put all your characters down and the game starts. If you hit select, you can see a different map. It starts off pretty much blank. Maybe you’ll see a vehicle or something. That is the enemy map. And because of the fog of war, you can’t see anything. You can’t just be defensive and wait for everything to come to attack you.
You have to go down to that other dimension and attack things on that map. So movement. You have your first move. Select a character and then you have a choice of things you can do. The first choice is move. You can only move one space at a time and no diagonals. And it’s not like Famicom Wars or Advance Wars, Game Boy Wars where you move a whole bunch of characters and then the other player moves a bunch of characters.
It’s all one at a time. You move one, the enemy moves one. It’s very slow. So you move your character and then there’s another turn and the enemy moves their character. Maybe you don’t see anything, maybe you do. It depends. They might be moving stuff on their enemy map that you can’t see. The second choice on the menu, after move, will let you warp to the other dimension.
Now there’s no coming back. So when you send guys over there, they’re in that dimension for the rest of the game. So you need to do this. If you want to capture the enemy boss, you have to run a bunch of guys around the map. Now the enemy can’t see you and you can’t see them. So it’s fair. But it’s not like you can see a whole bunch of blocks. You basically can only see the block you’re on. So really to make any kind of dent on the enemy map, to find out anything about what’s there, you have to send a lot of people over. You’ll have to decide who’s going to be your defense and who’s going to go over there and scout and try to attack enemies. I guess think of it a little bit like chess. You don’t want that boss to be totally exposed.
And there’s no reason for you to be running around far areas of your own map. Because if a monster lands there, they can’t really do anything. It takes a long time for them to walk over to your boss. So I found, in the first couple of times I played, I was kind of wasting my time attacking these guys in a far corner. But then I thought, well, it’s going to take forever for them to get down to my boss anyway. I should concentrate on other stuff.
Apart from moving and warping, you have the last choice is to pass, which I don’t understand. Why don’t you just hit the B button and choose someone else to move? I’m not sure why it’s even a choice. You can use an item. Now, I have to admit, I played this game a few times. I did not figure out what the item thing is all about. Once in a while, a woman will appear and if she seems to give you items, I can’t figure out how you even look at the items or anything. I just don’t get that part of the game.
So you’ll have to do some figuring out. There doesn’t seem to be any information in English or even in Japanese about that aspect of the game. So, let’s say you attack an enemy. There’s an enemy beside you. You move on to the enemy or the enemy moves on to you. Now you’re in attack mode. You can see you and the enemy.
Those are your maximum health and your current health and the enemy’s maximum health and current health. And there’s a star. Now, the star will determine who goes first. Whoever has the highest number gets to go first. And you’ll have four cards. Now, this is very different. There’s some Dragon Ball games that have this kind of thing.
You’ll have to know a little bit of hiragana to be able to look up some of the words here or just kind of try things and figure it out. But one of these is attack. Unless you want to run away, you want to pick the attack ones first. The order you select the cards is the order that they’ll be played. So you can move your cursor and then choose the order that you want. One of these is defense. And another one is item, which I don’t get. So I usually put it last. And then there’s a mystery card with three question marks. That could be anything. If you do choose the defense card, you’ll have two choices. The first choice is dodge.
The second one is nigeru, run away. Which doesn’t always work. But if your health is almost at zero, you want to run away. Now I’ll get back to combat in a minute. If your health is really low and you do get away, you want to move that character to a building or something. And if you’re lucky and nothing attacks you, your health will go back up. When the attack card is played, you’re presented with some choices. The first is punch.
The second is chop. Third is kick. Sometimes there’s a choice after that, which is some kind of special move. Of course pick that because it’s something cool. Depends on the character. They all do different things. But basically anything that’s not punch, chop, or kick is some kind of special move. So try it out.
As far as the effectiveness of punch, chop, and kick, you just have to try it out. Some characters don’t seem to respond much to a punch. Other ones are really susceptible to chop. You just have to try it. When you select a character to move on the map, one of the other choices is status. So you can check the health and you can check that star thing to see if this character has a likelihood of attacking first. It makes a difference because you can only move one at a time. So if an enemy is diagonal to you, if you move first, he’s going to attack first. But if his star is lower, then you still get in the first shot. Whoever does the attack move, that doesn’t matter. It’s the star that makes a difference. There’s no save game in this, so you really have to have about an hour to spare if you really want to beat this game. I don’t really understand what the failure condition is because I played it for a long time. Nothing attacked my boss all of a sudden. There was a picture of a bomb and my characters and I got the game over and a bunch of end credits.
So I don’t know if there’s just a limited number of moves. Nothing seemed to attack my boss. I don’t get it. This game is pretty common and so it shouldn’t cost you too much if you do want to get it. It tends to come, you know, if you buy a batch of games, this tends to be included because it’s just a common game. Search for DMG-ULJ.
Next to a big review. Let’s start this party with a bang! In an uncertain world, in a chaotic time, Justice wears a mask. Batman Forever by Probe Entertainment, published by Acclaim, released in the US in summer of 95, in Japan fall of 95, Europe sometime in 95. Now when you see Acclaim on the label, you know you have to watch out. Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be a bad game, but you should beware. So this is based on the third Batman movie, the one with the Riddler and Two-Face, Catwoman, Robin.
Actually my favorite Batman movie, but I have weird taste in superhero movies. My favorite superhero movie is still Mystery Man. This game came out on Super Nintendo, Genesis, Game Gear, PC, and Game Boy. It’s a beat-em-up game. All the versions are basically the same, but they took away some stuff for the Game Boy version. Some of the puzzle elements. This game series is very well known for having terrible controls.
But luckily, the Game Boy has less buttons so they had less of a chance to mess it up. The Super Nintendo version had a ridiculous control scheme. In this game, you play Batman who is a creep who has to go around beating up people. In the movie, he puts a miner in mortal danger, which is also a crime, I think. But in this one, I don’t think you see Robin. At least I didn’t see Robin. So you can feel a little better about yourself.
You’re just an adult beating up adults. In this game, you will walk through hallways and you’ll beat up bad guys. Now, when you’re fighting, it’s kind of like a fighting game. You’re going to see your health bar and the enemy’s health bar, and you fight one at a time. It’s not like a typical kind of beat-em-up where you’re beating up a whole bunch of people. There’s none of that kind of stuff. It’s very simple. Controls are just left and right. You don’t… It’s not one of those two-and-a-half-D games like a Double Dragon.
The fighting controls are pretty standard. You’re going to be punching and kicking, pressing up to jump. Certainly, they just process the graphics from the 16-bit versions. They’re almost untouched by human hands. The backgrounds are not even dithered properly. They just took the 16-bit graphics and converted it over.
The characters have a very, very slow frame rate. There are a lot of moves there, but they just… You know, the cycling animation is very stiff, and it just doesn’t look great. The enemies all look the same. Maybe they look a little bit different, but because of the resolution and the way they’ve converted the graphics, they might as well just be different characters with the different color shirt once in a while. Now, it tells you the name of the character you’re fighting, which, you know, makes it a little more personal. You know, when you’re beating up Jerry, it feels like, wow, I’m actually beating up a real human being. Poor Jerry.
Now, the first thing you’ll notice, you’re going to walk through this level, you’re going to beat up a couple of guys, and then there’s going to be a door at the end, and you’ll be left wondering, why can’t I go through this door? You can sit there and punch the door all you want. That door will not open up. What you have to do is press down and up quickly. You’re going to jump up to the next level. Now, it’s weird. These are not platforms.
These are floors in a building, and you have to use an elevator to get to different floors, so why can you just jump through the floor? It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no indication of which floors you can jump through. You just have to try to jump up and see if you can jump up. So that’s your first test, is to get to the second floor. Once you beat up everyone and rescued hostages, you’re also going to find some secret items, blueprints, and health power-ups by beating up statues and potted plants. Make sure you beat up every statue and potted plant, because that’s where you’re going to find health power-ups that you need. So, there’s no real indicator that you’ve finished the level, but you just kind of keep going in every direction. Eventually, you’re going to get to an elevator that will take you to another floor. I don’t know why you couldn’t just jump through the floor. And then you’re going to do the same thing.
Beat up some bad guys, rescue some hostages, go back in the elevator. It gets a little confusing, because there are some places where you get out of the elevator, you beat up some guys, and then you just go back in, and then you don’t go back in the elevator. You come out another door. Like, the first time I played it, I thought, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
But, it just defies logic. It’s just a world that doesn’t really make sense. Eventually, you’re going to get to a place where you’re going to see a big hole in the wall. You’ll see a cityscape back there. After you beat up all the guys in that room, you’re going to go out to the rooftop and beat up a hologram, which is slightly tougher than the other opponents. And then that’s the end of that level. Bank 1 is finished.
Before you start the level, you get to choose different gadgets. You can select from several gadgets and then hit start to start the level. And, actually, after you finish the first bank, you have a chance to pick some different gadgets. Now, actually, using these gadgets is very difficult. There are combinations that are only in the manual.
You can find them by just whacking different button combinations and trying to figure it out. If you’ve equipped the grappling hook, down, right, and B. To use the batarang, you go towards your opponent and down and B. There’s a force wall, down, towards the opponent and B. But they’re really hard to execute. Like, even if you know the combination, it’s really hard to get them to work. I found that up to the point where I got stuck in the game, I didn’t need to use any of that stuff.
I did fine with just the punches and the kicks and you can block with select. I just didn’t find they were necessary up to that point. So, then, in the next level, I got to kind of a junkyard. I jumped up on some platforms, this actual platform jumping, and then I went into a hole and there was a room underground and the doors leading out, the trap doors, were closed and then I just got stuck in there. I can’t figure out how to get out of this hole. I equipped the grappling hook, but I can’t really get it to work. I don’t know how you open up that door. If you figure out how to get out of this hole, let me know and I’ll tell everyone on this podcast. The music is not the music from the movie. It’s actually not that bad. At least it changes once in a while.
The fighting isn’t really that bad, but it’s just the same thing over and over. You’re going to fight an identical looking enemy. Sometimes they throw a weapon at you or something like that or a chainsaw will just come out, but other than that, you’re just, it’s just a really rudimentary fighting game and not a lot of fun to be had. It’s only for serious Batman collectors. Look for DMG-A3BE for the US and European versions, DMG-A3BJ for the Japanese version.
What began as a riddle will become video history. Riddle me this. What was 1995’s top-grossing movie? Riddle me that. Who had the biggest opening weekend in movie history? Who’s afraid of the big black bat? Who’s afraid of the big black bat? What do Val Kilmer, Jim Carey, Tommy Lee Jones, Nicole Kidman, Chris O’Donnell, and Drew Barrymore have in common? I will help you solve the greatest riddle of all.
Batman Forever. Exploding onto video for just 1996. 2048 was released right now on Game Boy. This game came from an old game that came out way back in February of 2014. Back in those days, no one had ever heard of this type of game. It’s a sliding tile game on a 4×4 grid. In the original version you had 1s and 2s that would show up.
If you moved a 1 and a 2 together, it would become a 3, and then you kept doubling. You got 6s and 12s and 24s and 48s, and you tried to combine those together to get higher and higher numbers. Eventually, you can’t move anything on the screen anymore and it’s game over. Then it tallies up your points. When this game came out, the clones happened just a few weeks later.
This just happened a few weeks ago. Just after that came out, there was an iPhone game called 1024, which was the same idea except it was all in 2s, 4s, 8s, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc. This thing spread around. There’s a browser version that came out, and it just spread like wildfire everywhere. You’ve probably heard of it. Now you can play it on the Game Boy. As of this recording, there are two versions. The first one I saw was Euronox, capital U, lowercase rA, capital K, lowercase N, 0x. If you follow that on Twitter, you’re going to find Euronox.
If you want to get the ROM, go to j.mp slash 2048GB1. That’ll take you to a mediafire page where you can download the ROM. Now if you’re listening to this in the future, then there might be a different way to find it. Just look for the guy’s Twitter or something. Or just search for 2048 Game Boy. You’ll probably find it. You can use this ROM in a Game Boy emulator, or you can actually put it on a real Game Boy if you have a flash cart, which I’ve done. Here it is on the flash cart, and I’m playing it on a real Game Boy.
So when you start this game, you have an option. You can choose to play 2048, 4096, 8192, 16,384, 32,768, 65,536, and 131,072. And then you hit up, down, left, right to move the tiles around, and that’s about it. There’s no music or sound effects. It will keep track of your high score. In the version I’m playing right now, the only flaw I can see is that when you do lose, the screen disappears right away, so you don’t get to see what you’ve done wrong. Other than that, it’s totally fine. The graphics are all straight lines and vector. It looks pretty retro. And you can actually you have some undo’s in this one, so you’ve got two undo’s. So that’s cool, and it’s free.
Let’s get to the other version. This one is by Sanki, S-A-N-Q-U-I. To get this ROM, go to J.MP slash 2048GB2. This one, of course, the gameplay is the same. In this one, they add tiles actually animate. They slide around. And the numbers are nice anti-aliased looking numbers. It looks really cool. And the display is actually bigger on the display. When you’re playing on a real Game Boy, it doesn’t feel as small. And it’s free as well, so try them both.
I think it’s really cool that people have put this on the Game Boy because, I mean, when do you actually get to play something that other people are playing right now, you know? So try that out. Magical Chase GB Mirai Mahotsukai Kenjin Otene was released in Japan in August of 2000. This is a side-scroller shoot-em-up game that originally came out on the TurboGrafx-16, which is the PC Engine in Japan.
So the TurboGrafx version came out in 1993, the PC Engine in 1991. By the time this came out in the Game Boy Color, it was already a nine-year-old game. It was developed by Quest. Quest is not known for doing a lot of other games. It just kind of came out of nowhere, it seems. This version was published by MicroCabin. It’s pretty much a port of the original Magical Chase. Now, the PC Engine is pretty powerful compared to a Game Boy Color, but it’s a pretty faithful port. The same levels are there, same enemies. It seems to be a very similar experience. Magical Chase isn’t just a regular shoot-em-up, it is a subcategory called the Q-t-em-up. If you remember, in an earlier episode, I talked about Parodius. Parodius, da!
This is the same kind of thing. It came out around the same time as Cotton. I’ve got a Super Famicom, I’ve got this Cotton 100% game. It’s very much the same idea. It’s different enough, I wouldn’t call it a knock-off of it, but it is a, you know, it came out around the same time. It’s the same kind of idea. It’s a shoot-em-up with Q-tsy elements. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy. Even though it looks like a toddler could play it, it’s a pretty challenging shooter. You play a witch called Ripple, you fly in a broom stick, and you’ve got these stars that fly around your ship, similar to what goes on in Gradius. It’s kind of a typical side shooter in that you are shooting enemies, collecting power-ups, and destroying bosses to get to the next level.
When you start the game, you have three choices of difficulty. I wish they’d do this in more shooters, where, you know, instead of just giving you a certain number of continues, you just make the game shorter. So if you pick easy, it’s a shorter game. You only get a few levels. If you pick hard, you get all six levels. So you get easy, medium, hard.
So the two stars around your ship. When you move backwards, the stars kind of move in front of you. If you move forward, the stars move in the back. So you can kind of use that to aim shots at enemies. Normally, with your regular weapon, you just shoot straight ahead. But with those stars, you can kind of hit different angles.
The stars act as a shield. They can’t be destroyed. This is not one of these instant death games. You’ve got a big health meter. But unlike most of these games, you’re not just picking up power-ups from the air, you’re picking up money. There are gems that appear. You can kind of tell which ones are worth more money, because they look bigger and flashier. But you don’t have to wait until the end of the level to spend it. Once in a while, you’ll see a hot air balloon. Ram your ship into that, and you’re going to go inside a cute anime. Moi Moi Girl will sell you some goods.
Now this is a bit tricky, because it’s very verbose. It’s not just pick something off a chart, yes or no. There’s a lot of talking going on. Since this game only came out in Japan, there’s an English-translated ROM available, but you don’t really need it, because you can see what everything does in the store. The one thing I found hard in the menu is, you know, it actually asks you, do you want to buy this? Yes or no? So you pick yes. And then it asks you, do you want to buy another one?
And then you can say no or yes. You can buy a bunch of power-ups. You’re going to see them near the top of the store. There’s three in a row. There’s a heart and a little cross and a little circle. You can store six of these things. You can buy six of them. While you’re playing, if you, normally you’re holding down your button to shoot, you’re not pressing your button really fast, wearing out your thumb in this game, so that’s nice. If you double tap, you will use up one of those power-ups.
Some of them refill two hearts on your life meter. Some of them destroy enemies on the screen. Some of them destroy a specific enemy on the screen. When you buy weapons, that is going to be your main weapon. You can’t buy weapons and then switch between weapons. It’s not one of those games. You go to the store, you buy a weapon, that’s the weapon you’re going to have when you get out of the store. You don’t sell your weapons, so, you know, if you don’t buy every weapon you see, you’re going to be broke.
But there’s a lot of money in this game. If you, you know, if you’re diligent, you can make enough money that you’re never really that short. You can refill your life meter. You can buy something that will, just like the fairy in Zelda, when you, when your life gets down to zero, it will refill all the way to the top, so it’s like having a whole extra life. That is definitely worth getting.
There are some power-ups that look, I don’t know what they are, they look like lollipops or something, I don’t know, but these dudes on surfboards drop them. Grab those, those will restore some of your health. You can also buy something that will increase your speed in the store, too. The enemies are creatively designed, but they’re not actually that interesting as far as, you know, if I compare it to Parodius, where you never know what to expect, and there’s just really strange things happening all the time.
This one is pretty predictable. It is cute. Visually, things look strange, but they’re mainly just flying around shooting at you. They’re not really usually doing anything that interesting. So I was a little disappointed, and the levels are kind of bland in that really, most of the time, it’s just a scrolling background.
The music is quite good. From a technical standpoint, it’s wonderful. I mean, it’s amazing to see such a smooth game on the Game Boy. Now, this is Game Boy Color only, so you’ve got the double speed CPU to help out, but there’s a parallax scrolling background. There’s some slowdown when the screen is full of stuff, but not that much. You couldn’t call this a bullet hell game because there really aren’t that many bullets on the screen. You’re never doing one of these things, you know, with some of these games where it’s just a mass of bullets and you’re trying to see your way, you know, you see the path through the bullets. None of that stuff.
Even near the end of the game, it doesn’t really get that saturated with bullets. When you’re on the sixth level, when you get to the last store, you’re going to know when you’re getting close. On this level, you’re going to have an option to buy a homing shot. So this will fire two shots that automatically track enemies. That’s great. I mean, I wish I had that early on. I love that kind of lazy weapon, but if you keep that for the final boss, you’re going to be forever shooting that boss. It’s so weak it just takes forever. This whole game, there are no really strong weapons.
You’re never going to get anything like, you know, some of these games, you get some weapon, you’re like, oh, I can’t believe it. I’m just destroying everything. I don’t want to lose it. There’s none of that because you’re not picking up power ups like in the same way as you usually do in these games. You’re buying them. Watch out for scrolling damage.
There are some levels where there are blocks and if you get squished behind a block, it doesn’t kill you instantly. It kind of pops you ahead. I found this whole game was very forgiving compared to a lot of these shoot them ups. It’s difficult, but the stores show up exactly when you need one of those stores. The difficulty is not really that crazy. It is challenging, but it’s not completely out of this world. So it sounds really good, huh?
Well, here’s the problem with Magical Chase. The TurboGrafx 16 version is very rare. Therefore, it is one of the most expensive games you can get. Magical Chase on the TurboGrafx starts at 500 bucks. It goes into the thousands. Even the Japanese version, you never see it anywhere. Like it’s always, you see it behind a glass case. Even though the Game Boy version isn’t that rare compared to some other Japanese Game Boy games, the reputation of Magical Chase being such a rare, expensive game has caused the Game Boy version to go sky high. I’ve seen a loose cart for around 50 bucks, 5,000 yen, and I can see just from looking on Rakuten if you want something in a box, you’re looking at 150, 200 bucks, which is why I played this on an emulator.
And so will you. It’s an okay game, but it’s not worth that much money. I would say 20 bucks at the most. It’s not one of these games you can go back and play 100 times. It’s, you know, you play the easy, you play the medium, you play the hard, and you’re pretty much done. If you want to try to find the Japanese version of the game, look for cgb-aifj-jpn.