Concept kinda confusing, gameplay is okay but a little clanky for the DS, but the graphics and music are AMAZING!

Good start to this story I love so much, but really bad gameplay and game design overall sadly...

As someone who's deeply invested in the world and story of these games, this is complete shit.

Kinda cool seeing all these icons playing dodge ball of all things, but the game itself is really simple.

Yakuman, or 役満, was released in 1989, made by Intelligent Systems and distributed by Nintendo.

It's Mahjong, I'm horrible, that's all, there's not much to say beyond that.

2 stars.

It's genre defining, but it has a lot of problems, technical and story-wise, all that said I LOVE this game.

Tennis, or テニス, was originally released in 1984 and was ported to the Game Boy in 1989, which is what I'm going to talk about here.

It's a normal tennis game, without a lot of gimmicks or different modes, just the usual one-on-one game.

And like practically all sports games at the time, it's very basic and very... bad...

In the game you can walk and hit the ball, one button launches it faster and lower and the other launches it higher and slower, and that's all the strategy involved in the game, plus a lot of luck, plus the computer that sometimes simply becomes the best Tennis player in the world.

There's not much else to say about this game, the only notable thing about it is that Mario is the referee in it, which I thought was pretty funny when I saw it.

And my rating for the game is: 1 star.

Same problems as the first one in the gameplay side, but without Yoko Taro's flavor, so... Yeah...

But is not as bad as a lot of people say.

The greatest portable fighting game ever!

Not that good technically, but god it's addicting.

Hyper Lode Runner, or ハイパーロードランナー, is a "sequel", in quotes, to the classic "Lode Runner", developed by Tose Software and distributed by Bandai. Officially, it was the first game released for the big Gameboy in 1989, and, well, it's certainly a game that exists...

As I mentioned, this isn't the first game in this franchise; in fact, it's the tenth. The first Lode Runner was released six years earlier on all possible and imaginable platforms and, in turn, was a "clone" of the also classic Space Panic.

Despite being a classic, nowadays many people don't even know that Lode Runner exists, although the franchise still exists in a way, with almost 30 games, the latest of which was released in 2017.

But back to the topic of the video, what is Hyper Lode Runner about? As a classic game, it's quite simple. The story is basically non-existent, with just a simple premise: you control a space soldier who fights an army of aliens to take back the gold they stole from humanity.

The gameplay revolves around this; the objective in each stage is to pick up all the scattered piles of gold and then escape. You can't actually defeat the aliens, only create holes in the ground so that they fall in and don't catch you. You also have to use the holes to escape from them or reach other places.

The gameplay is quite simple and, both in this version and in the classic one, which I also played to see what it was like, it's complicated due to the technology of the time. Sometimes you don't have much precision to create the holes, and the game has some problems with the artificial intelligence, which sometimes goes crazy for no apparent reason.

However, there's no denying that the game is addictive. Even with these problems, it finds a very good point in its simplicity; you get stuck in the game for hours without realizing it, trying to find other ways to get through the levels, which is a positive point.

As for the levels, the game has 50 of them, with different layouts and even innovations in the gameplay cycle at times. On the whole, however, they end up being quite repetitive. One positive point is that you can also create your own levels. Unfortunately, however, you can't save them, which makes this feature somewhat redundant.

Essentially, that's all I had to say about Hyper Lode Runner. It's a simple game with a few problems and it gets repetitive quickly, but it's a classic for a reason; it knows how to hold your attention.

My rating for it is: 2 stars.

There's some decisions I don't agree so much, but overall one of the best narratives ever put in a game!

Nice animation and a good message about 'wanting to be alive' but the games feels dragged out by the really heavy dialogue and repeating process of walking and talking to everyone, that makes a short game seem very long.