Let's Play Every GameBoy Color Game, Part 3
Updated: Feb 22, 2021
In which most of the games aren't quite what you'd expect.
A Bugs Life would have been in this list, but I couldn't get it to start. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was developed by Tiertex again.
Bugs Bunny & Lola Bunny - Operation Carrot Patch (Infogrames/Bit Manager, 1998)
It's another licensed character platformer. This one is notable because the carrot pickups are 3D and because I fell in a seemingly inescapable hole about 30 seconds in. The hole had pickups, so you're supposed to go down there, but Bugs can't jump out and it's a dead end on either side.
Burger Burger Pocket: Hamburger Simulation (GAPS/Biox, 1999)
Japan-only roll and move board game about a fictional burger company. Seems like you're competing to have the most money after x turns and can buy properties to generate income. It's not the worst of these I've seen.
Burger Paradise International (GAPS/Biox, 2000)
What better way to follow up a roll and move game than with a business sim that is barely explained at all? I bought a few restaurants (mine are the shakes above) and then watched the date counter very, very slowly tick up. My best guess is you were meant to turn it off and come back later when the timer would've moved a few years, but there's nothing in game to explain.
Bust-A-Move 4 (Club Acclaim/Crawfish Interactive, 1999)
It's Bust-A-Move! Everything is pretty much what you'd expect other than that they have some multicolored orbs that are kind of unpleasant to look at. They do technically make the game colorblind accessible, but I doubt that was the intent. Interestingly, this GBC port came out in NA/EU before Japan.
Bust-A-Move Millennium (Club Acclaim/Dreams Co, 2000)
Now with a story mode and 100% more yellow tint. The story is about as bad as you'd expect, and the first battle is against a computer player that barely even bothers to shoot bubbles. Still, it's probably a decent time on the strength of the original design.
Caesars Palace II (Interplay/Runecraft, 1999)
I'm not going to pretend to understand why anyone would want to play a bunch of purely luck casino games on GBC. It's more financially responsible than going to a real casino, I suppose.
Cannon Fordder (Codemasters, 2000)
This one gets two screenshots because holy crap, they got 3D animation working on the GBC. It's just a menu scene and the helicopter blades are the only thing that move, but that would've blown my mind in 2000. The game itself is kind of an RTS-thing where you point-and-click your dudes around and shoot at the enemy guys before they kill you. Kinda fun.
Cardcaptor Sakura - Itsumo Sakura-chan to Issho! (Forever with Sakura-chan) (MTO, 2000)
It's a point and click adventure game that looks surprisingly good. The story is completely unintelligible to someone who knows nothing about this series, but that's probably how it should be.
Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoe Shogakkou Daiundokai (Tomoe Elementary Field Day) (MTO, 2000)
Track and field sims were more popular on GBC than I ever realized. This one features schoolyard events like the three legged race, but also Sakura's adult bodyguard is allowed to participate, and that seems like cheating. The controls didn't make a ton of sense. That may be down to bad design, or to me trying to read Japanese instructions quickly and misunderstanding something. Might come back someday and find out. Regardless, you get to pick your characters for each event and they all have different stats and stamina values, and you can choose to play as the blue or red team. That's way more effort than they needed to put in.
Also, the Wikipedia list I'm using to weed out duplicate games for some reason has the wrong translation of the title. It calls it "Tomoe Elementary School Battle Athletes" instead of "Field Day". Weird.
Carl Lewis Athletics 2000 (Ubisoft/Planet Interactive, 2000)
Oh, right, this was an Olympics year. That's where all these are coming from. Anyway, this one doesn't even attempt to explain its mechanics in game, so I'm left running at a third of the speed of Carl Lewis up there even though my power is way higher. You also can't pick your athletes and half the modes are locked by default. In conclusion, go play Cardcaptor Sakura instead.