www.denofgeek.com
The Game Boy is still a widely beloved handheld for gamers who grew up in the 90s. Sure, it was woefully underpowered, a color version didnt even come out until the handheld had been on the market for almost a decade, and even then it lacked any sort of backlight. But the games were just plain fun, and in terms of battery life and library, it was leagues better than any of its competitors.At least thats how we mostly remember it. But for every classic like Pokmon Red and Blue or The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening, developers shoveled dozens of terrible games onto the Game Boy in the hopes of luring in unsuspecting buyers with a big license or impressive box art. These are the 15 worst Game Boy games ever made.15. X-Men: Mutant WarsX-Men: Mutant Wars is actually not a terrible looking game. The graphics might even be considered kind of good given the limitations of the Game Boy Color. At the very least, you can easily tell who the X-Men are supposed to be when you look at their sprites. The trouble starts when you actually play the game.This is a generic beat em up with stiff, unresponsive controls. Thats if you even bother fighting the bad guys. You can just jump over them in most cases if you want, but that just means youll get to the frustratingly lengthy boss battles even sooner. Even with those drawn out fights, the game only takes about an hour to beat, but that hour would be better spent doing literally anything else.14. Buffy the Vampire SlayerBuffy the Vampire Slayer was a great TV show in the late 90s and early 2000s, and The Collective even managed to make an awesome underrated original Xbox game out of it. Apparently, they did that by taking everything about the Game Boy version of Buffy and doing the exact opposite. Barebones is a generous description of this Game Boy title.You play as Buffy walking through Sunnydale. A single vampire appears. You press A until it falls down, then you press down and A to stake it. Theres no real platforming. There are no collectibles. Theres really nothing else to do. It just kind of goes on like this for eight tedious levels until it just sort of ends.13. Raging FighterRaging Fighters box art should really be a stark warning for anyone even thinking of picking it up to avoid it at all costs. First off, the logo is so poorly designed it looks more like Raging FighteB, whatever the hell that is. But maybe the artist was psychic, because they managed to draw what sort of looks like 90s fit Steven Seagal kicking modern old Steven Seagal in the face.If anything about this game lived up to that premise, it would be an underrated classic, but theres nothing redeeming here. Raging Fighter features seven characters who barely look any different from each other in-game, and play exactly the same. And all of their punches and kicks feel like theyre being thrown underwater. Despite this, every last one of them can completely annihilate you in a few seconds when controlled by the computer, even on the easiest difficulty.12. Star WarsStar Wars on Game Boy gets credit for its ambition. For a game released in 1992, theres quite a bit of variety, including traditional platforming, top-down speeder sections, and even first-person shooter segments. Unfortunately, regardless of the level youre playing, the gameplay still sucks.The Game Boy game is similar to the better regarded NES version, but with the graphics zoomed in and with much less detail since everything is monochrome. What this ultimately means is that there are a lot of blind jumps, or youll just blindly run into things in the landspeeder levels. What little goodwill this title gets from its setting, it quickly throws away by being aggravatingly difficult and not very fun to play.11. Castlevania: The AdventureHey, its Castlevania, on the Game Boy, what could possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything it turns out. Castlevania: The Adventure arrived at around the same time as the third NES game in the series, and learned absolutely nothing from what made that trilogy great.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Subweapons are bafflingly absent, so you just whip stuff. A lot. And very poorly, because the controls are extremely sluggish. Making everything even more aggravating is that the four levels here are painfully long, and if you lose the three lives you start with, youll have to begin each level all over again. Konami went on to make quite a few excellent portable Castlevania games, but theres really no reason to ever go back to where it all began.10. Grand Theft AutoThe original Grand Theft Auto was a funif dated, even back thentop-down action game. Certainly, the sequels improved on the first in every way, but even the original featured the really great sense of freedom that garnered the series quite a bit of attention from players. It was also a pretty good showcase for what the original PlayStation and PCs of the 90s could do. The Game Boy simply wasnt up to handling any of that.Grand Theft Autos biggest offense is that, with the Game Boys limitations, there simply arent that many cars around to hijack at any given time. When you do find one, the cumbersome controls make it a pain to actually steal a vehicle. The developers had one job: to make the one mechanic referenced in the games title at least halfway enjoyable, and they really missed the mark.9. Bart Simpsons Escape from Camp DeadlyFun fact: even though Escape from Camp Deadly has a similar plot to the classic Simpsons episode Kamp Krusty, where Bart leads a rebellion against a shady summer camp, the game was released a year before that episode made it to air. I mention that here because its really the only remotely interesting thing about the game.Like virtually all Simpsons games released in the 90s, Escape from Camp Deadly is pure licensed schlock. This is another stupidly difficult game that requires precise platforming despite the finnicky controls. Combat is just plain unfair, with unlimited numbers of enemies teleporting in from the sides of the screen. If you decide to subject yourself to this game and manage to beat it, seeing the ending is a matter of dumb luck.8. Tasmania StoryYoure probably thinking Tasmania Story, thats more licensed garbage based on Taz the Tasmanian Devil, right? That would make sense, and yet youre absolutely wrong. Tasmania Story is actually based on a little-known Japanese drama about a boy reconnecting with his father in Tasmania after the death of his mother. Its never been released outside of Japan, and it wasnt a particularly popular film there either.Nothing about the origins of this game makes much sense, and it gets even weirder when you realize that developer Pony Canyon really just used the Tasmania Story license as an excuse to port an obscure MSX game called Fruit Panic which itself was just a rip-off of Mappy. Except the controls are much worse, the game is absurdly difficult, and there are only 10 stages. Id like to say that this game was at least a good idea on paper, but its hard to understand how anyone writing this down ever thought that this could be a profitable business venture.7. Toy StoryThe 16-bit version of Toy Story is a divisive game, especially when compared to much better regarded Disney games of the era based on movies like The Lion King and Aladdin. At the very least, most gamers could agree that the prerendered graphics of the console versions were impressive.The first problem the Game Boy port of Toy Story is that those prerendered graphics look like complete garbage when shrunk down to a tiny screen that cant show color. Suddenly, you cant even tell which objects Woody can and cant jump on, not that jumping is much fun to begin with due to the terrible floaty controls. This is clearly a game that was made to meet contractual obligations, and nothing more.6. Street RacerAfter Super Mario Kart hit the scene in 1992, other developers rushed out their kart racing clones as quickly as possible to cash-in on the newfound genre. Street Racer on the SNES is a perfectly adequate, if forgettable, Mario Kart clone. The problem with porting Street Racer to the Game Boy is that there was no possible way the handheld could handle a visually demanding game like this. Notice how as much as Nintendo loves money, even they didnt bother making a portable Mario Kart game until the much more powerful Game Boy Advance released in 2001.Street Racer actually looks promising when you launch it on the handheld. Theres a nicely animated title screen. The characters are a little generic looking, but at least have some nice accompanying artwork. Even the music isnt bad for a Game Boy game. But then you hit the track and its gray on top of more gray. Maybe thats another racer in front of you. Or possibly a cow? Are cows in this game? Is that a tree, or maybe a soccer goal post on the side of the road? Does that make any sense? There could actually be an okay game here, but good luck seeing what the hell is going on when youre racing.5. Batman ForeverIf youre not familiar with Acclaim, they were a publisher infamous for pumping out some of the worst licensed games that have ever seen the light of day in the 90s. The company went out of business in 2004, but they left behind quite the portfolio of questionable titles. Its just surprising they managed to last as long as they did when they were putting out games as terrible as Batman Forever in 1995.Even though this is a traditional beat em up, it uses the Mortal Kombat II engine for some reason, which really doesnt work with this style of gameplay. This was bad enough on the SNES, but was even worse when Acclaim haphazardly ported the game to the Game Boy. The graphics are horrendously plain, the controls barely register your inputs, and its almost impossible to figure out where to go next half the time.4. Men in Black: The SeriesWith limitless potential for creative weapons and unique aliens, Men in Black has all ingredients for a fantastic video game adaptation. Men in Black: The Series takes all of that potential, and completely squanders it on a lazy licensed cash-in. Youll walk. Youll jump. Youll shoot. All of this feels extremely slow and uninteresting, and even though the game claims to have 12 different types of alien enemies, theres barely any difference in how they react to you.Curiously, as boring as the gameplay is, Men in Black: The Series features some oddly high-quality animated sequences for the Game Boy Color. Its worth looking those up on YouTube to see where the games entire budget went, and then completely forgetting about it.3. Shrek: Fairy Tale FreakdownThere are a lot of different routes to go with a Shrek video game. Platforming seems to be the most obvious. Theres also kart racing, or maybe just a general party mini game title. One genre that never seemed like a particularly good idea for the franchise is a fighting game, especially one made specifically for the Game Boy Color.At least characters like Shrek, Fiona, and Lord Farquaad are here, even if they look like something an untalented first grader would draw. You can use them to kick and punch each other and not do much else because the controls are so bad you cant even pull off the combos that are supposedly in the game. Theres also no two-player mode, even though other, only slightly better Game Boy fighting games included that feature years earlier. Its clear that no one really cared about this game and rushed out the cheapest working game they could in order to meet the deadline for the films release.2. Mortal Kombat 4Even the arcade version of Mortal Kombat 4 is considered one of the weaker games in the series. At least its a serviceable fighter, though. The same cant be said about the Game Boy version. The compromises that were made to bring this title to the Game Boy are an affront to the silicon and plastic that make up these cartridges. First, about half the roster was cut for the Game Boy game. That kind of thing was par for the course with Game Boy ports, but it just gets worse from there.The gore was toned down to get a Teen rating from the ESRB, but its not like you can make out much of whats going on anyway. The fighters and backgrounds look like they were made in MS Paint, and the entire soundtrack is composed of about four notes, played on repeat. Beating a tower then becomes an endurance of whether youll get a headache first or just turn the game off out of boredom since you can beat it in about 15 minutes by just crouching and kicking.1. Pit-FighterAs weve repeatedly seen on this list, fighting games just didnt work on the Game Boy. The handheld didnt have the power to run them well, or even enough buttons to make them playable. This was tough for more traditional 2D fighting games, and it was a death sentence for something like Pit-Fighter, which was a little more experimental, with features like letting you move up and down on the screen.The obligatory cuts from the arcade game were made here, and the lost features are sorely missed. Power ups and melee weapons, which actually made the original version of the game kind of fun, are completely absent. The digitized graphics were lazily ported, with no attempt to make them look any better on the underpowered Game Boy. The controls are so fussy that its difficult to get past even the third fight. Pretty much every bad thing about Game Boy games is on full display in Pit-Fighter, easily the worst game on the system.
.jpg)
