Simply Ambitious – Shayne Warden

Wow! Killer Instinct on the Game Boy! What an ambitious port! The graphical hurdles alone would have had me thinking the powers that be were looney tunes, but having to also drop four buttons compared to the SNES game…geez!
Admittedly, I’m not a fan of this game as a game. Playing it as the August game of the month for Yokoi Kids was my first exposure to this version of Killer Instinct, and I found it a frustrating experience to try and combo; the real meat-and-potatoes of KI (could be more a ‘me problem’ and less the game, but I promise I’m good at the SNES game…promise!).
That said…
I really have to applaud this game for its graphical chops and its faithful recreation of the characters (also, those character portraits are awesome!) and to a lesser degree, its backgrounds. Beyond that, the music is equal parts fantastic and impressive; more than once, I’d get thoroughly trounced, sit at the start screen and let the audio loop. In the end, Ken Lobb and company did an impressive job bringing a game that I never thought could make a competent transition to the Game Boy a reality!–Shayne Warden

Summer’s winding down, but ‘bbq + beach = awesome’ is still very much early days here on the island! @JazzyJazzerton

Killer Instinct: Probably Good? –Peter P.

I have to admit that I was disappointed in this month’s game selection as the voting process did not go the way I was hoping (Battle Arena Toshinden). The truth is that I suck at Killer Instinct. I always have. Arcade, SNES, didn’t matter. I sucked. Other fighters, no problem. Some of them I’m legitimately good at. But for some reason, KI has been a puzzle that I can’t solve.

I had never played it on Game Boy, however, so I went into this month hopeful that narrowing down to two buttons would make the game a bit more accessible to me.

It legitimately took a full week of playing to win a single match and I only won a second match twice in the past two weeks.

Bearing that in mind, I will try and describe what I think of the game. First, the positive: the gameplay is smooth and really feels like playing Killer Instinct, which is the most important part of being a Gameboy port, though it can get button-mashy trying to find combinations since there are only two buttons. The negative is that the graphics leave something to be desired, particularly the player sprites. I understand it’s GB so it is not going to be as good as the SNES, but there are times where I legitimately could not make out the player sprites in action, particularly having a hard time distinguishing them from the background. That said, the artwork is terrific when colorized through a GBC or Super GB (though the sprites are still difficult to distinguish from the background). As for the sound, the music absolutely rocks, especially the title screen, though the sound effects are weak.

So, in sum, this is probably a good game but I just suck so badly at it that I can’t say for sure! –Peter P. (@dmachetto on Twitter)

August 2022: Killer Instinct (1995)

It’s August, my friends, and Killer Instinct is our new game of the month! We here in the Yokoi Kids Backroom didn’t have any game submissions lined up so we fancied a Twitter poll might be a good way to pick something. We decided to do a fighting game and the options were:

Raging Fighter

Battle Arena Toshinden

and

Killer Instinct

Voting was fierce and furious with BAT taking an early lead, only to have KI come from behind and win by a few percentage points! BAT is a sleeper hit for the Game Boy that’s been steadily going up in price over the years so it makes sense that the winner for our little group here was the cheapy. It actually seems to get decent reviews all around so I’m pretty excited to get into it and see how the mechanics transfer over to the little fella. Once was a time when I was really into the arcade game when it was new. I even went to Walden Books and bought an unauthorized guide to the game! It was full of errors! That’s what I get.

Enjoy!

-IF