Mary-Kate and Ashley: Pocket Planner

---

story | gameplay | my thoughts |
level structure | controls | options

---

BASIC INFO:
Title ....... Mary-Kate and Ashley: Pocket Planner (North America, Europe)
Players ..... 1 (with limited multiplayer functionality)
Genre ....... edutainment
Subgenre .... organizer
Platform .... Game Boy Color (2000)

---

STORY:
None.

---

GAMEPLAY:
Upon starting the software for the first time (or everytime after the battery dies), you are prompted to set the date and time. Then, you are asked for your first name, middle name, last name, street address, zip code, city, state, phone number, birthday, favorite color. You can skip all of these except entering your first name.

In the main menu, there are 6 options:

• Calendar: Look at the calendar, add and edit events.
  
• Friends: Reveals a submenu with 4 choices -
  
  • G-mail: I'm taking a guess here, but I think this is something that lets you send messages to friends with a copy of the game.
    
  • Friends: Maintain an address book.
    
  • About You: You can edit your details here.
    
  • Match Up: Have a friend type in the same stuff you did when you first booted up the game. You will then be told how much you have in common.
    
• To Do: Stuff that is on the calendar for you to do today.
  
• Fun Stuff: Reveals a submenu with 6 choices -
  
  • Games: Reveals a submenu with 4 choices.
    
    • Drop to Shop: Help MK and Ashley shoplift! Catch the goods that one of them drops, while avoiding mops.
      
    • Fash Machine: Slots. You aren't actually betting anything, though.
      
    • Sliders: A 4x4 sliding puzzle.
      
    • Match 'em: Memory. 30 cards are turned, face down. You turn them over, 2 at a time, trying to make matches. Matches are removed, non-matches are flipped back onto their face.
      
  • Crush: A "Crush Indicator". You are instructed to point the Game Boy and press A, with the implication that you will find out whether or not the person you are pointing at has a crush on you. Apparently, my laptop has a pretty big thing for me (I love you, too, Lappy).
    
  • Ask Ashley: Magic 8 ball, essentially.
    
  • Clue: A pet sim. Feed and play with a dog named Clue.
    
  • Sun Sign: A horoscope...thing. No, it doesn't tell you how your day will be in vague terms. It tells you how compatible you are with people of other signs.
    
  • Pic Gallery: View pictures you unlock. Gamefaqs indicates that a new picture is unlocked for every 10k points you win in games, and that 16 pictures can be unlocked in this manner.
    
• Tools: Reveals a submenu with 6 options -
  
  • Stopwatch: It's a stopwatch. Does not show time until you stop it.
    
  • Phone Dialer: Apparently designed to dial phone numbers for you by screeching into a handset. Kind of neat, if not entirely practical.
    
  • Beam: Appears to be some sort of multiplayer connectivity.
    
  • Clock: It's a clock.
    
  • About You: Like the one above, it allows you to reset (or set for the first time) information about yourself.
    
  • Help: A small, in-game manual.
    
• Options: The option menu lets you adjust music and sound. It also lets you change the date and time, and shows you how much memory is taken up by all the stuff you've typed into the software. There's also a mysterious "color" setting, which has "on" and "off" options, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

This software is compatible with the Game Boy Printer. On the vast majority of screens, there is a print button, allow you to...well, print stuff, I assume.

---

THOUGHTS:
This is one for the collectors. I particularly like the Phone Dialer (haven't used a landline since I was a kid) and the in-game manual (still waiting for this to become standard).

The games are terrible. If you just want a fun game, don't get this.

---

LEVEL STRUCTURE:
There are levels in the shoplifting game.

---

CONTROLS:
D-pad .... move cursor
select ... main menu
start .... start screen
A ........ confirm choice
B ........ cancel

---

OPTIONS:
You can turn music on or off. You can turn sound on or off.

---

Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise

---

story | gameplay | my thoughts |
level structure | controls | options

---

BASIC INFO:
Title ....... Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise
Players ..... 1
Genre ....... platform
Subgenre .... n/a
Platform .... Game Boy (1990)

---

STORY:
"In this high skill action adventure game, Mr. Chin is in hot pusuit of his favorite treat. He has come all the way from China to eat as many luscious gourmet peaches as he can before anyone else discovers how to eat this unique treat. As Mr. Chin, you must pursue the mysterious Momos and zap them into peaches with your demoe beam. So hurry up and run, jump, zap and eat as many peaches as you can before they make dinner out of you!"

---

GAMEPLAY:
In Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise, your goal is to eat every enemy on the screen. By doing so, you advance to a new, more difficult stage, where you are once again tasked with eating all the enemies. And so on.

In order to eat an enemy, you must first make it safe to touch. To do so, you must trap it between two fryers*. You can set 1 fryer down with the B button; if you set a 2nd fryer down on the same horizontal plane as another, they will immediately zap anything that lays between them. If an enemy is zapped, it turns into a walking white peach. Touch it to eat it.

Only 4 enemies can appear on-screen at any given time, including edible enemies. However, a stage may require you to defeat more than 4 before moving onto the next stage. In such a case, when you eat an enemy, the next 1 spawns from the top of the screen.

Each stage is strongly reminiscent of a stage from the classic Mario Bros. arcade game, with a few Super Mario Bros. elements thrown in. Stages are composed of multiple, thin platforms upon which you and the enemies walk. These platforms are composed of bricks which you can destroy by jumping up repeatedly into them. Occasionally, power-ups are revealed within bricks. They are as follows:

• bomb ... turns all on-screen enemies into edible peaches (most common)
• flan ... grants Mr. Chin the ability to fly by repeatedly pressing the A button (2nd least common)
• sushi ... grants Mr. Chin temporary invincibility (2nd most common)
• Mr. Chin head ... extra life (least common)

Another similarity to the early Mario games is the pipe. At the center of the bottom of each stage is a pipe that Mr. Chin can use. It will drop Mr. Chin from the center of the top of the screen onto whatever platform is directly below. Enemies can also use this pipe.

For the first 8 stages, platforms have dashed holes which only Mr. Chin can drop through. After beating the 8th stage and being sent again to the 1st stage, enemies will begin dropping through these holes, as well.

There is a bonus round every 2 stages. These seem to serve no particular purpose other than giving you a chance to earn points (counted as KCAL). Points do not appear to do anything.

Game play appears to be endless. Each stage gets progressively harder for at least the first 16 stages (enemies start dropping through holes they couldn't before, and more enemies spawn). After a while it just repeats.

*The fryers actually look like half a head of lettuce, and act like bug zappers. The game doesn't give them a name. I'm calling them fryers, cuz why not?

---

THOUGHTS:
The game has an old, arcade-y kind of feel and simplicity to it. I played it for several hours in one go while hiding in my hotel room from the Nevada heat. I found it very relaxing and kind of interesting, in that 'window into the past' sort of way.

Objectively, I will say that this is not a very good game. The gameplay is far too repetitive, and I mean that as literally as possible. After a few minutes of play, the levels repeat themselves, over and over, without significant change. If you are looking for hidden gems of the era, you can pass this one by.

However, if you are interested in gaming history and curiosities of the era, keep an eye out for this one. Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise, with its blatant cosmetic and gameplay similarities to Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros., is a great example of the kind of highly derivative content found during that era.

---

LEVEL STRUCTURE:
There are 8 levels. Upon completing the 8th level, the levels repeat, with slightly increased difficulty. Levels appear to repeat indefinitely. After every 2 levels, there is a timed bonus stage.

---

CONTROLS:
D-pad .... move Mr. Chin
select ... (doesn't appear to do anything)
start .... pause/unpause
A ........ jump; press repeatedly to fly (with power-up)
B ........ place fryer

---

OPTIONS:
None.

---

Q Billion

---

story | gameplay | my thoughts |
level structure | controls | options

---

BASIC INFO:
Title ....... Q Billion (North America, Japan)
Players ..... 1-2
Genre ....... puzzle
Subgenre .... spatial reasoning
Platform .... Game Boy (1990)

---

STORY:
You are a mouse in a house and you seek to get out. But in order to reach the outside, you must make your way through 30 rooms, each with a myriad of stacked boxes. Since you are an obsessive-compulsive mouse, and cannot leave a room that has stacked boxes, you must unstack all the boxes in order to leave the house. Silly mouse.

REAL STORY:
None that I know of.

---

GAMEPLAY:
Q billion is a spatial reasoning game. You are presented with a puzzle in which there are several stacks of boxes. These boxes have numbers representing how tall these stacks are. Your goal is to reduce all stacks to 1 box high. However, there are limitations.

First, you can only push a stack that is 1 box tall.

Second, you can only topple a box that you are directly adjacent to; that is to say, if you want to topple the topmost box on a stack of 4 boxes, you must be sitting on a stack of 3 boxes next to it.

Finally, you cannot topple a stack of boxes, only the topmost box in a stack.

There is an additional mechanic with magical disappearing blocks, but that is explained better in-game than I could possibly do here.

All in all, this actually makes for a fun puzzle game. I haven't quite played anything else like it, which is a shame, as the game would play MUCH better with modern graphics (the game is presented with a top-down perspective, and the numbers on the boxes are quite nonsensical until you figure out the relationship between them). I'd love to play a sequel that looked like Picross 3D.

1 player mode has a GAME A and GAME B. There is also an editor for constructing your own 1 player puzzles.

GAME A presents you with a series of unique, one-room puzzles. Upon completing the 30th puzzle, you receive a password that unlocks 10 additional puzzles.

GAME B is a kind of versus mode that you play against the computer AI. Sorta. There are 5 "levels." Upon choosing a level, you are taken to a tic-tac-toe board, where you must choose 1 of the 9 squares, each of which represents a unique puzzle. If you solve the puzzle on this square quickly enough, you get to mark the board with your color. Your goal is to score 3 in a row, and then to win 5 "brackets." It's not all that exciting, except that you get 45 different puzzles out of it.

I have not been able to play using the 2 player mode, which I assume requires a second copy of the game, two Game Boys, and a link cable.

---

THOUGHTS:
I consider this a hidden gem and a must-play for puzzler fans, particularly retro puzzler fans. This is quite fun and presents some very challenging puzzles.

However, I must note that the visuals are absolutely terrible, and it may take quite some time to figure out what they are trying to depict. This game would be much better with a rotatable isometric viewpoint. I'd love to see a rerelease for iOS or another modern platform.

The music is really obnoxious, too.

---

LEVEL STRUCTURE:
GAME A has 40 levels. The first 30 are immediately accessible and the last 10 are unlocked with a password (received upon completing the 30th puzzle).

GAME B has 5 selectable "levels," each with 9 unique puzzles. No unlocking is necessary.

All puzzles are non-randomized.

---

CONTROLS:
D-pad .... move cursor
select ... cancel out of a menu (in some places)
start .... choose menu item
A ........ (in puzzle) push block
B ........ (in puzzle) undo last move

---

OPTIONS:
In GAME A, you can choose slow, normal, or fast. This controls how responsive the game is to your button presses. I prefer fast.

---

Quarth

---

story | gameplay | my thoughts |
level structure | controls | options

---

BASIC INFO:
Title ....... Quarth
Players ..... 1-2
Genre ....... shooter, puzzle
Subgenre .... vertically-oriented shoot 'em up, tile removal
Platform .... Arcade (1989), Famicom/NES (1990), Game Boy (1990), MSX2 (1990), Sharp X68000 (1990), mobile phone (2005), PS2 (2006), Wii Virtual Console (2010)

---

STORY:
There is a story to this, I bet. I'm sure it's a paper-thin, Arkanoid-esque story, but it's there. Hell if I know what it is. It's not explained in-game, I don't have the manual, and can't even find a copy online.

---

GAMEPLAY:
This is a hybrid between a vertically oriented shoot 'em up and tile removal block puzzler.

You are a ship. You shoot things. Enemies advance on you in a set pattern throughout 27 levels.

You shoot puzzle blocks. Your enemies are puzzle pieces formed from similarly shaped blocks. If you shoot at these pieces, your bullets will attach to them, changing their shape. Your goal is to change the shape of enemy pieces so that they form a rectangle, which destroys them.

Score a lot of points to get some power-ups to help you on the more difficult levels. A lightning-bolt shaped power-up will destroy all pieces on screen, while an arrow-shaped power-up will temporarily pause the advancement of enemies so you can destroy them at a more leisurely pace. There's at least one other power-up whose use I haven't yet figured out.

---

THOUGHTS:
This game is weird and I feel weird after playing it.

Did I just play a puzzle game? I love puzzle games! I love building up giant combos so I can blow up as many bricks as possible. It's like being a kid again, and making a giant tower of blocks so you can knock it down.

Did I just play a 2D vertically oriented shoot-em-up? I thought I hated those. I hate the monotonous rote memorization of enemy patterns, and Quarth certainly has that. It's even worse than a normal scrolling shooter because all the blocking enemies blook blike the blame blocking blocks.

Normal shooters at least let you mash the shoot button, which is nice and cathartic. But Quarth takes away this pleasure. Should you get trigger happy, blocks will stack up too far and crush you. For shame, Quarth! The ability to shooting indiscriminately is one of the few things I like about scrolling shooters!

On the other hand, the enemy in Quarth produce no projectiles and move in a very simple pattern. They're perfectly harmless until, you know, they crush you. Their slow, inexorable, and perfectly predictable advance provides an excellent opportunity to set up a line of kills. It feels good, methodically dispatching each fearsome block in the most efficient manner possible.

In the end, there is only 1 conclusion I can come to about the game: Quarth is weird. I don't know if I can say that like it, but I keep playing it.

---

LEVEL STRUCTURE:
There are 3 worlds, each with 9 levels. 1-1 is the easiest to beat while 3-9 is the hardest, with difficulty determined by the speed, density, and complexity of "enemy" advancement. You begin the game with access to all 27 levels.

---

CONTROLS:
D-pad .... move cursor; during a puzzle, press LEFT or RIGHT to move ship and press UP to speed up block advancement
select ... select 1P or 2P match
start .... choose menu item; pause/unpause
A ........ shoot
B ........ use powerup

---

OPTIONS:
There are 6 ships you can choose from before beginning play. This slightly affects the graphics of the puzzle, and changes the background music.

---