Let's Play Every GameBoy Color Game, Part 5
Updated: Feb 22, 2021
Chessmaster (Mindscape/Park Place Productions, 1999)
It sure is chess. Unlike yesterday's chess game, it does prevent you from even attempting to make legal moves, and it plays an annoying little jingle after every one of your moves while the computer thinks. It's not very good despite spending all that time thinking, and I didn't see any difficulty options, so it's unclear who this is for.
Chi to Ase to Namida no Koukou no Yakyuu (Blood, Sweat, and Tears High School Baseball) (J-Wing, 1999)
You're out to become a legendary HS baseball coach in Japan by accumulating 2,000 manager points. Winning the all-Japan championship is only 100 points, but every step of the tournament gives you more, so you could probably get a few hundred in a season. You can play as any one of likely several thousand schools they coded into the game, although I have no idea if they're actually different. Wouldn't be surprised if they are, because as you can tell from this screen, it is unbelievably in-depth. It also has the worst font for Japanese I've ever seen, which made it very hard to follow at times.
Chibi Maruko-chan: Go Chounai Minna de Game da yo! (Little Maruko: Let's play games with everyone in the neighborhood!) (Epoch, 2001)
Yet another roll-and-move, but this time with an about a million screens of pointless exposition before you can get to the game. It's even more basic than most of these. You get different amounts of points for landing on different spaces, and my game was set give the win to whoever had the most after 20 turns. You could also set a golden point total, but otherwise it plays itself.
Chicken Run (THQ/Blitz Games, 2000)
Licensed spinoff of a movie no one remembers. The first level wanted you to get all the hens to go in the coop, but I didn't finish because it was boring. At leas the music is good?
Choro-Q Hyper GB (Takara/Electronics Application, 1999)
I'll be honest: I was really done with translating loads of pointless Japanese exposition after Maruko-chan, so I mostly mashed through this. That was a mistake, because it's a game where progression seems entirely dependent on talking to people and then doing, uh, something. All my options at every point in town were just "talk" and "leave", and none of them advanced anything. I don't know what this game is.
Classic Bubble-Bobble (Metro3D/DreamsCo, 1999)
More or less what you'd expect, and with the same theme as ever. I clipped through a wall without even trying and the bubbles would only pop when hit at a really specific angle, so it doesn't seem very well put together. You could do worse, I guess.
Colin McRae Rally (THQ/Spellbound, 2001)
Probably the best racing game I've seen on GBC so far. It's surprisingly close to the rally experience on higher fidelity systems, and they even have audio callouts from your navigator for every turn and jump. D-pad controls inevitably leave a lot to be desired, though.
Columns GB: Tezuka Osamu Characters (Media Factory/Game Studio)
Columns of three gems drop down and you need to create matches of three vertically or horizontally. You can't rotate sideways, but you can cycle the gems so that any of them are at the bottom. Astro Boy! characters are on the side and contribute nothing to the game. That's about it.
Command Master (Enix/Brain Dock, 2000)
As you can probably tell, this game didn't work. I assume that's because it used a tilt cartridge like Yoshi Topsy Turvy. Apparently you played rhythm minigames with tilt and that powered up your robot for battle. Sounds kind of neat.
Commander Keen (Activision/David A Palmer Productions, 2001)
This was intended as a sequel to the original game, although id was only involved in an editorial role. I've never played the earlier entries and can't speak to the quality of the overall franchise, but this one is pretty unremarkable. It's yet another side scrolling platformer, and nothing about it is special next to all the others. But hey, at least it wasn't a roll-and-move.