Nintendo just added two games to their Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy app. Let’s have a look at them!
Here’s what I thought of each:
Game Boy App
| Game | Genre | # of Players | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balloon Kid | Platformer | 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless / Online) | D |
tl;drA sequel to the NES game Balloon Fight, this game plays less like a Joust knockoff, and leans harder into the original game’s Balloon Trip auto-scrolling gameplay. The controls are clunky and the limited screen size makes the game more awkward and difficult than it needs to be. You have countless better options on this app. | |||
| Yoshi | Match-2 Falling Block Puzzle | 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless / Online) | C |
tl;drThis falling block puzzle works well enough, but doesn’t really do anything that really makes you want to keep playing like the best games in this genre do. What’s more, there’s no reason to play this when you could just play the superior Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game instead. | |||
What a dull thud of a pair of releases. Balloon Kid is outdated, clunky, and simply not as good as the original Balloon Fight, and Yoshi is an extremely “mid” Falling-Block Puzzle game that’s rendered pointless due to the existence of the superior Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game, and if you can play this release on Nintendo Switch Online, you can also play that version.
If all Nintendo had remaining was the bottom of the barrel that they needed to scrape to get more good titles on the Game Boy app, this would be more easily forgiven, but we’re still missing plenty of great first-party games.
To give you an idea, even if we limit our scope to only first-party games and only games that don’t have potential rightsholder issues, on the original Game Boy, we have yet to see the release of Game & Watch Gallery, Kirby’s Block Ball, Kirby’s Pinball Land, Mole Mania, Pokemon Red and Blue, and Wario Land, and on the Game Boy Color, we have yet to see the release of Game & Watch Gallery 2, Pokemon Yellow, Silver, Gold, and Crystal, Pokemon Pinball, Pokemon Puzzle Challenge, and Wario Land II.
You know, I understand that Nintendo keeps a tight grip on their Pokemon titles, and maybe they’d rather not release a Wario game right now since the Virtual Boy app is about to release with Virtual Boy Wario Land and they’d prefer not to oversaturate… but even so, how the heck did we get a release of a second version of Yoshi before we got Mole Mania? And that’s not to mention all the great third-party releases we haven’t seen…
Anyway, I’ll end the ranting there. Let’s just suffice it to say that this is pair of Game Boy releases is disposable at best, and terrible at worst. What a disappointment.
tl;dr – The Game Boy app gets two games – Balloon Kid and Yoshi. Balloon Kid is far too clunky and outdated, and Yoshi is a mediocre Puzzle game made worse by the fact that we already have access to a better version on the NES app. What a disappointing pair of releases…
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