yokoikids

Snow Bros Jr, A Port in the Storm – D’Arcy Briggs

In the frosty realm of classic gaming, few titles encapsulate the essence of 90s portable entertainment quite like Snow Bros JR for Game Boy. As with many games of the era, Snow Bros underwent the rite of passage known as the video game port, transforming from its arcade roots to the palm-sized wonder that was the Game Boy. The JR monicor seems fitting, going from arcade to NES to Game Boy. There are even more ports out there, but I’ve only played the NES and Game Boy versions. There are others out there: Genesis got one, Amiga, mobile, and even cancelled ports for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. This metamorphosis consistently raised questions about the fidelity of a given conversion- which one was ‘the best?,’ or ‘arcade perfect?’ This is a phenomenon that gamers today still debate, but we’ve got a pretty good one here.

The highlights for me were the sprite work and animations that grace the tiny screen of the Game Boy. The characters, paired down to a single-player experience, are rendered with a charm that epitomizes the retro aesthetic, and their icy antics against the backdrop of various wintry landscapes are fun and un-intrusive. The game, reminiscent of the classic Bubble Bobble, thrives on the same addictive gameplay loop of trapping enemies in snowballs and then kicking them off the screen. The controls feel as crisp and clean as a winter’s day – it’s easy to navigate screens and allows for some fun maneuvers.

Despite the limitations of the hardware, Snow Bros on the Game Boy manages to maintain a level of playability that certainly saw me grinning while playing this for the November 2023 entry. The difficulty curve strikes a balance between challenging and addictive. Each level presents a new puzzle to solve, a new strategy to employ, keeping players engaged and nailing down that ‘just one more level’ feel.

However, Snow Bros JR is not without its quirks (Not Kwirks, that’s a different game). The music could have used a bit more variety. A few additional tracks would have added A LOT to the experience. It’s not a bad track you listen to, but it gets old real quick.

The port successfully captures the essence of the original arcade release, showcasing the prowess of the developers in adapting the game for a portable console. Yes, it’s missing the two player option and some enemy and level designs were changed to take into account the monochrome screen, but this is a great game. With its tight controls, captivating sprite work, and a difficulty curve, Snow Bros JR delivers a frosty blast of puzzle platforming goodness. Playing through the game (or, playing up to my high score) and discussing on the Yokoi Discord channel had me thinking about ports, and especially ports of games back in the 90s when it was more than normal to just sort of… get and love the version of the game you had, a feeling I think a lot of us had and maybe miss.

D’Arcy Briggs is an educator and gamer from BC, Canada. He plays and collects mostly for Game Boy, PS3, PSP, and Wii U. When not writing about video games, he’s improvising onstage with The Bakery, swimming in the ocean, or listening to music. @darcyska_gaming

November 2023 Snow Brothers (1992)

October is over! I capped it off last night by watching The Lost Boys and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! Now we get to look forward to the winter months. It won’t be bad here in San Diego, but I hope you all in the colder climes are bundling up and getting out your silly hats with the pompoms on top.

This month’s game is Snow Bros. or Snow Brothers as it’s called on the Game Boy. The game was created by Toaplan, a developer known for their work on several popular shoot ’em-up games. It was published in the US by Capcom for the Game Boy and NES. I remember seeing it in Nintendo Power and gathering that it was a single-screen action game similar to Bubble Bobble. When I finally got to play it it turned out I didn’t like it very much! I’m excited to revisit it this month because I feel like it is definitely a game I should enjoy and maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Maybe the NES version wasn’t up to snuff? We’ll see. I think it could be the perfect sort of game for the Game Boy so I think I’ll think much more highly of it this time around and hopefully, you’ll like it as well.

This is an expensive one these days so as always feel free to emulate or whatever!

-IF

Bubble Bros – Nolen Tabner

This is the result of an old unfinished Bubble Ghost submission and being inspired by the Japanese box art for Milon’s Secret Castle on the Game Boy. That might explain why he’s more blonde than usual.

Hunt down Nolen at Nolentabner.com

September 2023: Milon’s Secret Castle (1993)

It’s September and I always get just a touch depressed during this month! A part of my brain still registers it as “back to school season” and that’s just an awful time to be a kid What better way to get through it than with a NEW GAME BOY GAME and your pals the Yokoi Kids!

Once again the boys in the back room have had to come up with this month’s title so let me take this moment to remind you, also a Yokoi Kid, to make some contributions so you too can pick a game! Give us a break!

We’ve chosen Milon’s Secret Castle this month. I’ve messed around with the NES game a bit, but never really put a whole lot of time into learning its weirdness. It’s definitely considered a vague and obtuse game and frankly, I’d rather play that on a portable system where I’m not passing the frustration on to other viewers.

Pick it up and give it a whirl! Can we figure this one out? If not, at least we’ll have discount school supplies to look forward to, if you’re into that stuff. -IF

August 2023: Yoshi’s Cookie (1992)

Your friend here is a cook, not a baker. I’ve loved cooking since I was eight, which is when my mom taught me how to scramble my own eggs. For a long time that was my favorite food. Any time of day! Give me some scramblers with ketchup and a sausage patty, boy was I ever set. Anyway, cooking has been a lifelong hobby of mine. Baking? That never seems to go so well. I’ve been working on making soft pretzels lately. It’s an extremely easy recipe (many say). I’m getting better at it, but I still need to work on my kneading times and such.

Luckily I can’t screw up the oven treats for the club. We’ve got an ace.

Yoshi is an excellent baker.

That’s right! A new month, a new game. Yokoi Boy Nolen suggested a puzzle game and that sounded wonderful and breezy to all of us here in the backroom. He suggested Yoshi due to fond memories from childhood, but a brief revisit reminded us that there just isn’t a whole lot to it! Yoshi was a new kid on the scene and Nintendo was chomping to get him into something for the NES and Game Boy. What easier way than a very simple puzzler? Rick and Nolen remembered Yoshi’s Cookie being a fair bit better, and I had never played it, so that became the game of the month! It’s a return to cheap games, so if you like adding to your Game Boy collection then this is a painless one to snag. As always, emulation and alternate methods of play are totally acceptable! Just play it!

OK! Stay cool folks. It’s really dang hot out!

-IF

Berry White Ramp Session – Rick V.

Here are past Yokoi Kid contributors Chris Eugene, Matt Wissig (angrylanks), and me doing a not-so-impressive Retro Rocket Ramp session on the Berry White* ramp. It’s not meant to impress anybody, just to show off a bunch of old nerds having fun. This ramp has a bit of a story though:
Back in February, my friend Em told me that her mom was moving out of her childhood home that housed a mini-ramp in the basement. Em had built that ramp with a friend in the late nineties when she was fifteen years old. She wanted to know if we wanted it for any reason.
My friend/bandmate Prather is usually up for some grueling task involving wood and was up for the task of tearing it down and transporting it somewhere else. Wood is expensive right now, and if anybody wanted to build a ramp, it would be very expensive. So if anything, Prather could have used the wood for scraps for other ramps.
Matt had recently been dreaming of a backyard ramp and was excited about the prospects of getting a janky ramp made by teenagers.
In the Spring, Em broke down the ramp in her mom’s basement and Prather and I took two splinter-inducing trips an hour away from our city to deliver it to Matt’s backyard. Before it could be erected and rebuilt, there was some digging and leveling, and more wood purchasing. And in between all that, there was a bunch of shitty weather that kept a lot of that from happening sooner. Some of the wood became downright disgusting.
After a few weeks of small ramp-building sessions in the backyard including some modifications to make it wider, it finally became skateable in early July.
It’s awesome making something that would have been trash usable again and keeping some fifteen-year-old kid’s poorly designed creation alive almost twenty-five years later.

*The ramp is not called Berry White. I just call it that because it’s white and you end up smearing it with the berries that fall from nearby bushes.

Rick V. draws comics and does punk things. itsmerickv.com
Matt Wissig plays drums and speedruns video games. twitch.tv/angrylanks
Chris Eugene skates and does punker things.

Kirby and Food, Food and Kirby – The Two Go Hand-in-Hand. –D’arcy Briggs

While playing through Kirby’s Dreamland 2, not only was I struck with how this game builds and improves on every possible aspect from the first, but how much love Kirby has been getting in recent years. There’s so many amazing Kirby games on the recent handhelds and Switch. It’s all enough to make a person hungry.

With a few quick online searches, I found a lot of food that was inspired by Kirby in terms of shape and colour, but not really Kirby’s essence. From pink lattes to cakes and macarons, there’s a lot of cute stuff out there, but I usually see Kirby as a pizza and cheeseburger and hot sauce kinda dude, he’s not always rainbows and candy.

With that said, here are a few dishes (with adjustments) that I think Kirby would be into:

Poke bowl with some delicious sauces on the side. I have no problem picturing the pink puff chowing down on an amazing bowl of rice and tuna with all kinds of veggies and an array of spicy, bbq, and mayo-based sauces.
Coney dogs (and sliders). If I got to go anywhere to have a bite with my guy, I hope we’re gonna hop to the local Coney dog joint for a couple of dogs topped with mustard and onions (and maybe add on a Coney slider or two on the side). Obviously, we’ve gotta pair this with a chocolate milkshake and share it all Archie style.
Detroit-style pizza. Moreso than a massive New York slice or a filling Chicago brand, I picture Kirby going for that crispy-edged Detroit-style pizza. It’s a pizza that has a lot of different textures going on (if we add the right ratio of toppings) and has a lot more depth than you might first think (Just like our pink pal).
Italian subs. Buddy, when we’re in line at the deli for these subs, we’re going all in – peppers, onions, mozzarella, pesto, and all kinds of meats, fish, or whatever else we need. It’s gonna be a messy sort of situation, but one that brings a smile to my face.
Corner-store candy. I know what I said before about the sweets, but I really want to live in the world where Kirby enters the local corner-stop, takes up a little plastic bag, and uses those little red tongs to take out his choice selection- I’m picturing those fried eggs, white and green frogs, and cola bottles.

How about you? If we’re in a world where video game characters are real, but the minutia is focused on the everyday lives where our beloved heroes need to think about lunch and breakfast and dinner, what do you see them going for? What does Solid Snake go for? Is Captain Falcon the protein-power bro we all see him as? How does Samus politely ask to have only a few black olives on her sub at Subway even though last time she asked they just dumped them on?

I think it’s fun to imagine the hilarious aspects of these characters in the real world. It continues the imagined narrative we create when playing video games, and for a tiny console like the Game Boy, these sorts of fun things really take that small cartridge and make them a whole lot bigger.

D’Arcy Briggs is an educator and gamer from BC, Canada. He plays and collects mostly for Game Boy, PS3, PSP, and Wii U. When not writing about video games, he’s improvising onstage with The Bakery, swimming in the ocean, or listening to music. @darcyska_gaming

In Defense of the Game Manual – D’Arcy Briggs

Game manuals are, frankly, a thing of the past. When did they start to die out, certainly with the PS360 generation we saw more and more boxes shipped with only a few small inserts and the game. A black-and-white manual became a happy surprise, a full-colour print became a luxury. Why did this happen? Cost cutting and how games are developed now are the two largest culprits. Do you ever play old-school games and feel lost or play newer games and feel overwhelmed with the front-loading of information, or annoyed at the inane chatter of a helper character? These are directly related to the lack or use of manuals.

Game Boy games were generally simple enough that the manual wasn’t actually needed to play the game, but as kids, we knew manuals were simply an entry point into the world we would soon discover. Unique artwork, backstory, and more were always a delight to find included with our game. We never needed to know WHO Wario was or WHY he hated Mario, but it was there along with a cool picture to get our imagination going.

Sports and puzzle games for the platform were often ones that benefit most from a good manual, and Tour de Thrash is no exception. Starting with a cool definition and passport to Stale Fish, an attitude for the game is given. Hey, maybe you’re not much of a skater in real life, but these little touches went a long way to extend the medium. It then gives us the where, the who, the what, and most importantly, the how. Booting up the game for the first time, I spent several attempts just eating the pipe and getting frustrated – there is no obvious method to the madness and the game gives you very little to go from. Finding an archived copy of the manual online, not only was I able to actually start playing the game properly, but relive that joy of building the world of video games through text and images.

The rest of the manual has some fantastic bios for the simple team names used in the game, as well as a lot more specific information on scoring, tricks, and just a lot of info that isn’t included in the game. It even includes tips based on characters to make the world feel more alive.

It’s a manual, it’s simple, and it is there to explain how to play the game, but really, game manuals add so much more to the experience. Manuals are a lost art and something that is also becoming more of a relic. I do enjoy games that are designed clearly, but that doesn’t mean a manual doesn’t always have a purpose. If you’re a fan of retro games, and you’re reading this- you get it- And so does Tour de Thrash.

It’s a manual, it’s simple, and it is there to explain how to play the game, but really, game manuals add so much more to the experience. Manuals are a lost art and something that is also becoming more of a relic. I do enjoy games that are designed clearly, but that doesn’t mean a manual doesn’t always have a purpose. If you’re a fan of retro games, and you’re reading this- you get it- And so does Tour de Thrash.

THE MANUAL