Thursday, July 25, 2024

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Game Boy, 1990)

 

The last game from the Game Boy Player's Guide that I had on my list of things to check out (where it has been for, no joke, 30 years). Always kinda knew this would be the last thing I played from the guide, for whatever reason. I've got kind of an unusual link with this one, which I'll get into in a moment here. Also this is THE WORST GODDAMN GAME EVER.


My favorite part of this section of the guide? You guessed it, the enemies/bosses page. Lot of interesting foes in this game. I was never really a Gremlins fan or anything, though I thought Gizmo was cute enough in his fluffy form. This game really appealed to me thanks to this guide, though, and I probably would have gotten it if I'd ever seen it in a store.

Herein lies the part where the game has an interesting connection to me: I really liked the boss designs, particularly the Spider Gremlin, which kickstarted a bit of an obsession I had with giant spider bosses. 

At the time I was filling a notebook with drawings and maps of the 12-area "Metroid 4" (bear in mind that this was in 1994). For the ultimate metroid, at the very end of the game, I designed a giant spider-metroid that was pretty similar to this guy. Even though there was no such thing as any kind of spider-metroids in the series as of 1994. I just figured it'd be the best thing to evolve into as an ultimate form.

Eight years later, we finally got another Metroid game with Metroid Prime. And what's the final boss? A giant spider-metroid. So that was pretty wild for me to see realized on screen. And what was the genesis of my idea, that ended up coming true? This game. Or rather, the coverage of this game in this guide.

Eventually maybe I'll try and dig up those old notebooks and see if I can do a post on my version of Metroid 4. I actually finished designing the game, as far as I can remember. The twelfth/final area, the Pyramid, might not have been done.

As for the rest of the coverage... we've got four levels here, and they're extremely straightforward. Is it really necessary for them to draw a line showing you exactly where to go? It's a sidescrolling left to right game!

............actually yeah, it is kind of necessary for them to draw a line through the levels. These levels are mazey, and often unclear about how you're supposed to actually negotiate your way through them. So the line is, surprisingly, very helpful. Also, this game may be a mere four levels and about the size of Kirby's Dream Land, but it's also SUPER HARD. And not in the good way where it's a fun challenge, no. More like the shitty way where it feels like things don't work right and you constantly die as a result.

At least the title screen music is pretty good. It's the only track in the game that's pretty good, but I like it, and in another universe I've probably got some sort of sentimental attachment to it. Then when my kids fire up the game I look on proudly, only to minutes later have to duck under a flying Game Boy when they HURL IT AT ME.

The game starts off inconspicuous enough, and Gizmo is adorable.

The first of the game's strange items that I find is the Toolbox, which makes you invincible and lets you plow through evil Gremlins temporarily.

However, Gizmo's main attack is swinging a pencil like a sword, which has an incredibly short range. And this is the main weapon they give you for the entire game. A pencil. You have to defeat your foes...with a fucking pencil!

Suffice to say it barely extends outside the range of his body so good luck hitting anything without getting hit. Also, on every level you have to find the pencil before you can even attack anything. Why did they do it like this?? Why???

Well, the other special weapons are cool, like the range-attack musical note. Problem is, you hardly ever find any of them. I figured the game would be full of them to make up for the terrible basic attack. Nope.

Watch out for this Sexy Gremlin, however, as she fires hearts that fly in this bizarre pattern in the air and good luck dodging them with anything besides luck.

The game is totally obsessed with springs. I kinda like springs from the Mario series. Well this game totally messes them up! More on that in a bit.

First boss is Mohawk, the tomato-throwing Super Shredder form of a gremlin.

His attacks seem to have no rhyme or reason, so this fight is pretty much a tossup as to whether or not you win.

Between levels is this "press A+B as many times as you can in 10 (actually 20) seconds" minigame.

I manage to punch in 80+ button presses over 20 seconds. What's my reward? Absolutely NOTHING!

Note: Next time this popped up, I got to 99 presses in 18 seconds, which got me a 1-Up. Looks like reaching 99 is the goal and will get you that extra life, and that's about it. It's kind of a pointless reward given the unlimited continues and lack of checkpoints. Gives you one first go with more of a fighting chance and that's it.

Stage 1 wasn't too bad. Nothing particularly awful, nothing super fun either, just kind of there. Which is noteworthy because it's probably all I would have gotten to play as a kid. Stage 2 starts you with this leap over a pit using springs, and this leap pretty much lays bare all of this game's glaring issues.

At least the spikes don't kill you. Here's the thing though. The spring physics are beyond borked. Normally in a Mario game (or really, any action game with springs) you can get momentum running towards one and bounce off it to clear an obstacle. Not in this game! Run towards a spring and try to hop and bounce off of it, and you'll just slide off of it instead. ANY momentum whatsoever and you slide off of it instead of bouncing.

So what you have to do is jump straight up off a spring, THEN hold to the right after you leave the spring and hope you can move to the right enough to clear the jump. I usually can't. And if you press right even a millisecond too early, you slip off the spring instead of jumping. So you have to find this small middle-ground where you won't slide off the spring and won't jump straight up with no momentum rightward.

Is this really necessary? Why is there a wall here? The pencil should be the first thing it gives you in every level and it should be right out in the open. Or better yet, just start you with the damn pencil! At least Mario has the decency to have mushrooms near the beginnings of most levels. And you don't HAVE to have a mushroom to fight anything in those games!

Next up is Bat Gremlin, who is a real jackass. He uses super-fast swooping attacks.

The key is to bait his swoop, then sidestep it and slash. Though good luck because with that micro-range, you're likely to either miss or get hit anyway unless you're on JUUUUUST the right pixels.

What kind of a name is Clamp Centre? What IS Clamp Centre anyway? Why should I care about Clamp Centre? It sounds like some sort of research facility for the study of nipple-clamps, where scientists dilligently work day in and night out to develop newer and better nipple-clamps for the ladies to wear.

Man, the developers of this game were really into these stupid springs. I can only imagine how frustrating this would have been for me as a kid. I doubt I would have beaten this game, even with unlimited continues.

Then there's this infernal abomination. A spring with a block right above it, JUST to make it super tedious to get out of the pit. The spring keeps banging Gizmo into the block which causes him to fall straight back down, and meanwhile that gremlin on the right is pelting him with fireballs (or something) that I can't get out of the way of because I'm stuck in this hellish spring catch-22.

Oh, nice, I wonder what's down there? Got no choice but to fall off this cliff, so I hope there's a floor down there! Imagine playing this without the guide and having to do random leaps of faith.

Lucky me, a spring! ...right next to a pit! Good luck clearing that without dying over and over.

Man, every little thing in this game feels like they did something to make it as un-fun as possible. Here's a regular old jump across a pit where they decided it was really important to put a block right above the pit, causing you to bump into it and fall straight down into the pit unless you do another pixel-perfect leap.

All of that said, nothing so far could prepare me for this part. Everything else was poorly-designed, but doable. Now there's a block that ZIPS AROUND while you try to stay on it.

Even if you know exactly what you're doing, you're going to take a bunch of hits here. Could they have made this block go at a normal speed instead of zipping all over the place? Was this game just designed to punish kids?? Imagine buying this with your parents money! Maybe it's the only game you could get that week, or that month, or that year! And they're gonna punish you for it? Why? WHYYYY?

Get past that and we're face-to-snout with the Electric Gremlin, probably the hardest fight in the game.

This guy turns into a lightning bolt and zips around the screen like Armored Armadillo (just way faster). He's pretty much invulnerable 90% of the time.

I game over...a lot. I don't even see how this fight is particularly winnable. It's like the very worst of Mega Man bosses, the kind you'd find in the depths of Mega Man DOS or something, in a game where you can't shoot and only have a one-inch melee attack. According to the guide it only has 5 HP, and I've managed to hit him 3 times a bunch, so I'll keep trying.

The key is to whack him with your tiny pencil every time he lands from bouncing around, which is when he's vulnerable (yes, just like Armored Armadillo). However this requires you to be right next to him during the one second (yes, one second) that he's vulnerable, while also not bumping into him. In short, good luck.

Finally, level 4 is here! After many many tries at the previous boss, at last, I can finish this infernal game once and for all. It starts with a spring jump...directly into a spike. Couldn't they have just let the player have ONE JUMP without there being some annoying obstacle involved?

But wait. That was nothing compared to the next jump. I have to jump up and around, with basically no room whatsoever to change direction, and if I press right before I'm mid-jump, I'll just slide off onto the spikes. So you have a split second to steer in midair, plus the space above is only one space wide and you have to shift back to the left as you bounce up towards it.

This might be the most pixel-perfect jump I've ever seen in a game, and it's at the beginning of the level, so you'd have to repeat it every time you die.

It's a little bit like that jump in Mega Man X2 that you have to do to get the Shoryuken ability in X-Hunter Stage 3. Except 10x harder and with messed-up controls.

The guide makes this look all simple and easy. Well it isn't. The spring mechanics single-handedly ruin this game, and their placement of obstacles that knock you downward mid-jump are the second-worst thing about it.

Well, I tried. I got to level 4, and I tried to make that one spring jump about 30-40 times and couldn't do it. Then I realized something. If a minor jump takes more than 30-40 tries to make successfully, maybe LEAVE IT OUT OF THE GAME?

Did anyone even test this game? Like legit question, was it tested at all? And then I realized something else. After trying to make a jump 30-40 times, I no longer care if I beat this game or not. They literally walled me out of the final level and don't even seem to want the player to be able to play said level, so why even try?

I got to finally play this after 30 years and played 75% of it. What am I getting from beating this game? Absolutely jack shit. To the Youtube!

Thanks to Classic Gaming Room longplays I can see the rest. So it looks like that jump at the beginning of level 4 was just the beginning of a horrendously designed level full of spikes.

They really liked the "spring up and around with almost zero room to manuever" thing. So much that they did it again a bunch of times WITH SPIKES. If the springs worked like they do in other games, this would still be very challenging, yet fun at least. Instead it's just mind-bogglingly tedious and annoying.

Again, I can deal with challenges in games, and if a game is good, then challenges are good. This is just bad, untested design, the kind of stuff that makes you angry and want to throw the game out a window. It takes a LOT to make me want to throw a controller (or worse, a Game Boy). Matter of fact I can't even remember the last time I felt like that. Well, this game achieved that multiple times over!

The level just goes on and on and ON, and there's this one section where you can't even see Gizmo and have to jump over a bunch of spike traps while riding conveyor belts. WHILE YOU CAN'T SEE YOUR CHARACTER. Again, did anybody test this? Did any of the developers actually try to beat their own game?

Well, it turns out you can get through this part a lot more easily by bringing the musical note weapon, which puts a note above Gizmo's head and lets you see where he is. So there's that at least. After that, you'd think the level would be over, but nope, a bunch more cheap spike pitfalls await, before the final boss:

Spider-Gremlin. Cool to finally see this thing firsthand after 30 years. This fight is basically complete RNG, a roll of the dice whether you win or not. You have to latch onto this web that's moving around and fire arrows at the boss' head while getting hit by falling mini-spiders. Long as you make all four of your shots, you'll probably win before running out of health from the unavoidable mini-spiders that the web just moves you right into. However you might just die. Again, it's a bunch of RNG.

Also, why couldn't they have let you have the bow and arrow for THE ENTIRE GAME? It would have made this game infinitely more playable and fun. Do that, get rid of some of the near-impossible jumps and some of the more annoyingly-placed spikes, and this game could have actually been really good. It isn't far off from being good as it is, but it's absolutely ruined by a bunch of bad decisions.

For the ending screens we get this gross image of gremlins melting. This game is for kids? Also, New York City isn't safe at all, stop telling lies. Yeah, a bunch of leathery imps are the last of that city's goddamn problems at this point.

Gizmo is reunited with Billy and Kate and everyone lives happily ever after. Well, glad Billy and Kate are doing well! They didn't do SHIT for this entire game!

Gizmo had to do everything himself with his one-foot tall frame and a pencil. A fucking pencil!

This game RUINED MY EVENING.

And I've said it before about stuff like Mega Man III GB and Terminator 2 and other games, that if I'd played them as my first game I might not have gotten into the medium. Well that was totally hyperbolic. Those games are hard, yeah, and T2 is pretty unbalanced, yeah. However Gremlins 2 is on a whole other level. I think this game would have made me throw my Game Boy into the trash. Legitimately think I would have tossed it or given it away to somebody and never even touched a video game again if this had been the first game I ever owned. It's THAT off-putting.

30 years ago when I read this guide, all I really had to go off of were Metroid II, Kirby's Dream Land, and the Mario and Mega Man games. Basically I thought all video games, or at least the ones good enough to be featured in this guide, would be at that same level. Welp, in recent times I've discovered that what I lucked into playing wasn't the norm, it was the exception. Most of the other games from the NES and Game Boy eras that I missed...turned out to be pretty turd-like. So it turns out the entire game industry at the time was basically a sea of terrible games, with some huge standouts that luckily were carried by word of mouth. Those standouts are what we remember, but they certainly aren't representative of the whole era.

Next up: My top ten Game Boy games, and the Game Boy Guide wrap-up.




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