Let's Play Every Game Boy Color Game, Part 43
Microsoft: The Best of Entertainment Pack (Saffire/Classified Games, 2001)
This is the collection I was expecting from the puzzle pack yesterday. It has all the Windows card games you'd expect from Microsoft, but also SkiFree, which I had never played before and have now learned is mostly a game about slamming into things that suddenly appeared from offscreen that you never had any chance of dodging because of input lag. Gotta imagine a lot of that is down to GBC port problems.
Microsoft Pinball Arcade (Saffire/Classified Games, 2001)
Pinball finishes off the trio of Microsoft games, but it doesn't come with the famous table from Windows XP because that wouldn't release until 5 months after this game. The tables you do have are much more elaborate than the other GBC pinball games I've seen so far, but it's still pinball and I don't really ever want to play that for very long.
Midway Presents Arcade Hits: Joust / Defender (Digital Eclipse/Midway, 1999)
Midway really liked to do collections of their old arcade games around this time. The GBA and consoles both got similar, if much larger, packs of unmodified arcade games from the 80s and early 90s. I can't imagine wanting to play either of these games badly enough to buy them, but I'm sure it was aimed at kids who didn't know better.
Midway Presents Arcade Hits: Moon Patrol / Spy Hunter (Digital Eclipse/Midway, 1999)
This is the same thing, but it released two months later. Moon Patrol is probably the game I'd pick if you made me play one of the four from these two collections.
Millennium Winter Sports (Konami, 2000)
I always wondered if there was a winter version of my ESPN International Track & Field cart, and it turns out the answer was "yes, but under a totally different name." It has more or less the same UI and the same style of timing and button mashing-based competition. You only get four sports to start out, which is a bit underwhelming, but there may be others that are unlocked with more play. I'll be finding out, because this gets a spot on the list by the power of nostalgic curiosity.
Minna no Shougi: Shokyuu Hen (MTO, 1999)
If you were a Japanese fan of shogi in the late 90s, the GBC had no shortage of solutions for you to play on the go. This one has a lot more options than the other shogi games I've seen, and it also comes with better graphics and surprisingly great music. I'm certainly not the target audience for this at all, but it's the one I'd go with if I had to pick a shogi game.
Minnie & Friends: Yume no Kuni wo Sagashite (Hudson, 2001)
Yeah, Disney apparently gave Hudson a license to make a Minnie Mouse game exclusively for Japan. It's an adventure/puzzle game about, as the title says, "Search[ing] for the land of dreams." I didn't get very far because (a) I can't stand this IP and (b) the decent background graphics are the only thing that stand out about it.
Missile Command (The Code Monkeys/Hasbro, 1999)
Hasbro released several new versions of this game around this time, but the full 3D remake for PC is quite a bit more interesting than this one that just adds a background. Missile Command isn't the worst ancient arcade game you can play by any means, but why would you want to play it as a standalone game at all on a system that had things like Pokemon and Zelda?
Mission: Impossible (Rebellion/Infogrames, 2000)
It's kind of vaguely a stealth game in the same way that the 007 GBC games I covered pre-blog are. It looks great and has decent music, but the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. These trench coat guys basically ignore you unless you bump in to one of them, in which case they immediately murder you. You can shoot them, but then they all come after you and the clunky controls more or less guarantee you'll bump into a bullet fairly quickly.
Mizuki Shigeru no Shin Youkaiden (Camelot Software Planning/Nintendo, 2001)
Shigeru Mizuki was a Japanese manga artist known for his depictions of yokai and, presumably in separate works, the horrors of WWII. "Mizuki Shigeru's New Yokai Legend" is a card battler based on what I assume are his versions of yokai. It's one I would want to come back to if not for the rather critical flaw of being one of the only games I've ever seen that uses neither kanji nor spaces in its Japanese text, which is to say it's extremely difficult to read
The list:
Golf Ou: The King of Golf
John Romero's Daikatana
Kakurenbou Battle Monster Tactics
Keitai Denju Telefang
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
LEGO Island 2: The Brickster's Revenge
Magi Nation
Mario Golf
Mario Tennis
Metal Gear Solid
Metamode
Millennium Winter Sports