Chalvo 55 takes the form of a pure action game, a sort of puzzler in which you play as a bouncing robot trying to work your way through tricky platforming challenges with a combination of brains and twitch skill.

Like Game Boy Wars, this one never made its way to the U.S. Here’s an odd one: Chalvo 55 came out incredibly late in the Game Boy’s life, and it was a sort of semi-sequel to a Virtual Boy game that never actually shipped. An overlooked high point of the Game Boy’s early days.Ģ6.

The result is an interesting and one-of-a-kind hybrid of American adventure game and Japanese RPG, where players navigate the world and solve environmental puzzles in the style of the former but need to fight off monsters with a combat system taken from the latter. A year after Shadowgate, Kemco reworked the Icom interface and style into something that hewed closer to the likes of Dragon Quest. Remember Shadowgate and those other classic Icom computer adventure games that showed up on NES? Those were converted to the system by Japanese publisher Kemco, and the company took notes. The Sword of Hope (series) (Kemco-Seika, 1990) While never officially localized into non-Japanese languages, there’s a partial fan translation for the Turbo re-release that significantly reduces the CPU’s thinking time and greatly speeds up the pace of the experience. You control an army unit-by-unit, jockeying for territory by putting your forces against the other side and allowing the computer to determine the winner of each engagement. While it doesn’t look quite as pretty or have the wacky leader personalities of the later games, the fundamental design and appeal remains the same. We know this series as Advance Wars in America, but it actually got its start on Famicom under another name before marching along to Game Boy. Game Boy Wars/Turbo (Intelligent Systems/Nintendo/Hudson, 1991) It’s a little hard to describe what makes Trip World so appealing, but there’s no denying its excellence.Ģ8. All of this is framed with some of the finest graphics and sound ever to grace the Game Boy. Along the way, you encounter unique creatures and charming little pantomime scenarios, punctuated occasionally by brief and challenging face-offs against the few hostile characters that appear along the way. It downplays conflict and combat in favor of simply allowing the player to take a journey - a trip, if you will - through its world. This rare and highly sought-after Japan- and Europe-exclusive release looks like your typical action platformer at a glance, but in truth Trip World takes an unconventional approach to the genre. It’s a bit rough, but this is a cart worth owning just to show to your friends as a fun party trick: True 3D action on Game Boy! Its fully 3D wireframe engine allows for free-range movement across a planetary surface rather than being restricted to rail-based motion, and there’s even a mission structure at work. In some ways, X hints more toward Star Fox 2. Obviously, running on a monochrome handheld with no enhancement chips leaves X technologically inferior to its 16-bit sibling, but the spirit is much the same. X (Argonaut/Nintendo, 1992)Īn absolute tour-de-force of Game Boy technical prowess, X came to us from the same people who would deliver Star Fox a year later for Super NES.

Gameboy roleplaying games