Castlevania: The Adventure

Castlevania: The Adventure is a game I picked up almost 10 years ago and have played very little since. I saw this sitting in the little case at a Half Price Books store for $1 and figured I couldn’t go wrong. The label is very reminiscent of the NES Konami games, so I figured that alone should tell me all I needed to know about this gem. I felt like I had really scored here. A Castlevania game for a $1? I had to have gotten one over on old Half Price Books. I was ready to set off on a grand adventure, THE adventure as the game’s title assured me, but things weren’t as smooth as I had hoped they would be.

Castlevania: The Adventure isn’t exactly the same as the other Castlevania games of its era, especially considering it’s a portable version. The game consists of four fairly short stages filled with monsters to defeat throughout, each ending with a stage boss battle. The player starts off with three lives, consisting of ten hit points each, but this time around hearts are actually used to restore health. Along the way the player can also collect 1UPs as well as golden crosses that will grant the player temporary immunity to enemy attacks.

What would Castlevania be without a robust weapon system? It would be this game, that’s what. This time around there are no sub-weapons, but your whip can be upgraded by collecting crystals along the way. The whip can be upgraded twice, the final form being a flame whip, but any enemy damage will cause the whip to be downgraded.

Each stage has, what feels like, an erroneous time limit in which to complete the level. Even with this game being as slow as it is, which can sometimes be painfully slow, it doesn’t take anywhere near as much time as you’re given to complete each stage. And that’s where things fall apart for me, the speed of this game. Every Castlevania I’ve played has felt smooth, but this game is so slow. Was this a limit of the hardware? Maybe, but I feel it was done more to stretch the gameplay out since this is such a really short game.

For what Castlevania: The Adventure is it’s not terrible, I mean it’s slow but the graphics are actually really good. Considering the Nintendo Game Boy was released merely months before this game was released shows Konami took their time making it look good, but didn’t seem to worry about it being as smooth as its NES siblings. The game is extremely short and replay value is kind of there, I guess. Again, this game isn’t terrible it’s just different to the point that I feel one time around is enough.

Posted October 18th, 2021

Wave Race for the Nintendo Game Boy

Believe it or not I didn’t know the Wave Race series began on the Nintendo Game Boy until I found and purchased a copy a few years ago. Produced by the ever popular Shigeru Miyamoto, Wave Race was released on the Game Boy all the way back in 1992, but only for North America. Europe had to wait until June 1997, making it feel more like a portable sequel to Wave Race 64, while Japan seemingly never received a local release of Wave Race at all. Wave Race still sold well enough on the Game Boy that it achieved Player’s Choice status. Is it any good? Let’s find out.

Wave Race allows the player to play alone against AI, practice alone or compete against up to 3 of their friends, pending everyone has a copy of the game, a link cable and someone has the four player adapter. The overall goal of Wave Race is to race through 16 different circuits in 8 different locations and earn enough points to unlock faster, although also more difficult to control, watercrafts. There are two styles of racing available: circuits will see the player competing in a lapped series of races where finishing in a higher position will gain more points. The other style is slalom, which will pit the player against other players to see who can collect points pylons. Points here are solely dependent on collecting pylons and the race is over once all points pylons have been collected.

Along side competition, the player must also contend with varying track conditions and the inertia of the watercraft itself. Strewn about the tracks might be shallows, whirlpools or heavy currents that may all cause the player problems in their attempt to compete. To combat these setbacks there are also power ups in the form of a dolphin or octopus. Once a power up is collected the watercraft will flash and afford the player one of two abilities: collecting a dolphin will give the player easier maneuverability while collecting an octopus will allow the player to bump into opponents and steal some of their turbo.

Speaking of turbo, the only thing that confused me about this game was the button arrangement. B is throttle and A is turbo, where I’m far more familiar with things being the opposite way around, but that’s just a minor gripe. Competition, however, is pretty fierce and will bump and jump your watercraft off the course. If you manage to miss a pylon on the circuit tracks you will be forced to go back and go around it properly, and the AI knows this.

I have to be honest here, the whole time I played Wave Race I felt like someone cut down Micro Machines to just the boat stages and made it the whole game. That’s not to say Wave Race isn’t a great game in its own right, in fact I think the fact that it made me think of Micro Machines should be considered a good sign. I’m more familiar with Wave Race 64, so finding out the series began life on the Game Boy was a shock, but Wave Race is a really fun game and I’m seeing now why it achieved Player’s Choice status.

Nintendo Gameboy Reshell Tutorial and Review.

There are many good reasons to buy an aftermarket housing for your old handheld games console. Whether it’s purely for visual appeal or, as with mine, your Gameboy develops a bad case of post mushrooming (a term I made up signifying the tops of the screw posts mushrooming out and no longer holding the screws properly), aftermarket housings are readily available online.

A few years ago I bought an aftermarket Gameboy Color housing thinking I could convert one of my many bright green consoles over to yellow. This experience quickly taught me that aftermarket shells for handhelds aren’t always as good as OEM. That’s why this time I opted for a custom feel and bought the transparent orange and black kit to reshell one of my DMG-01s.

Immediately I was blown away at just how beautiful the transparent orange was; I really tried to capture it in photos but I simply couldn’t. Secondly I was pleasantly surprised that this kit not only comes with tools to put it all together, but also a spare speaker. I decided to leave the old speaker in because it still works, but if I ever need one down the road, I have a spare. One of the downsides though was that this kit does not include new screws to put everything back together. It did come with a small bag of mismatched screws that were fairly useless to me, but regardless I already have the screws from the original DMG housing, so everything was fine.

Now that we have selected our aftermarket housing we’ll get started by taking the old one apart. The first thing you’ll need to do is flip your DMG-01 over and find the six screws located on the back. Sometimes these are tri-wing and on older DMGs these will simply be philips head, so don’t panic and think your childhood DMG is a knockoff if yours has the latter.

Once you’ve removed those six screws you’ll want to be careful not to separate the two halves just yet, as they are still being held together by a ribbon cable that easily detaches from the back portion. Carefully, and firmly, grasp the ribbon cable and give it a gentle pull downwards. It should release fairly easily as it simply slides in to make contact.

Now that your DMG is in two halves you still have quite a few screws to undo. In the front portion you’re going to have a total of ten screws holding the screen and controls board to the shell, while on the back you’re only going to have four screws holding in the cartridge slot and headphone jack to the back portion.

Once all fourteen of those screws are removed your DMG is now homeless, but hopefully only for a short time. From here on out everything should be fairly obvious. All you have to do is swap out part for part and reassemble in reverse order, thus I didn’t take the time to include photos of these steps.

Your first choice of the build will be whether to use the old buttons or new ones included with the kit. Using the new ones seems like the obvious choice, but this may come with a small caveat. The A and B buttons included in my kit have slightly deeper back recesses than the originals, leaving a gap between them and the rubber pads. If left this way the A and B buttons rattle around, and worse become difficult to press once the Gameboy is in play position. The included sets of rubber pads are perfectly fine, it’s simply a deeper mold on the new A and B buttons. I easily fixed this problem by folding some electrical tape and pushing it down into the recess. It’s not perfect, but in the end it works fine and the new buttons aren’t as mushy as they were straight out of the package.

Once all the buttons are swapped out to your liking you’re going to want to grab the black rubber bar that goes along the screen’s ribbon cable and put that on the new shell. Gently place the screen and controls board into the new shell, make sure everything lines up and prepare to install the screws. Now this is where things get a bit difficult, but with a little patience not too difficult. The newly cast housing has posts for the screws, but no threads have been cut, so be careful when you’re placing in the screws not to cut cross threads or to apply too much torque and strip the post completely. Out of all the screws only one screw stripped on me.

The back portion of the DMG is even easier as everything should align perfectly and, if you use the exact same precaution as you did with the front, these four screws should go in without any problems. Make sure you didn’t forget to install the new, or the old, power switch before you button everything up. The same caution should be taken for the six screws used to hold the whole thing together. After you’re done you should have a brand new looking DMG-01. (comparison pics below)

What I like about the kit: The transparent orange is absolutely beautiful. It came complete with the tools to put it together, a spare speaker, the matching port cover and battery cover, as well as a brand new lens. The molding matched up perfectly, meaning neither of the halves were twisted or distorted. Finally an old, faithful DMG-01 has a house it can live comfortably in, show off a little bit and look and feel better in the process.

What I don’t like about the kit: The area around the D-pad isn’t concave like OEM, making using the D-pad feel a little weird. The included A and B buttons need a little modification to be used. The new power switch isn’t as tall as the OEM, it still functions but you may need to have a bit of a finger nail to use it. The port cover is far too loose and within the first half hour of having this kit I had lost it three times (possibly fixed by gently adjusting port’s outer metal shield). The screws included were of absolutely no use, but I already had an almost full set from my OEM housing.

Whether you want a custom look or just need to get your old handheld out of a shell that is falling apart, (not only did mine have post mushrooming, but some posts were even broken off completely) aftermarket shells are a good investment. As I stated before, most aftermarket housings won’t be as good as OEM, but with OEM housings only getting older these kits provide a cheap and simple way to extend or renew the life of your handheld. And, if worse comes to worst, these kits are cheap ways to make an old beat up Gameboy that may not even work a beautiful display piece.

I bought mine from Orient Mall on Amazon. You can get yours here.

Posted March 19th, 2018

Game Boy Carry All by Nexoft / Asciiware

The Nexoft Gameboy Carry All was something I was seriously wanting to add to the portable storage article I wrote a while back, but I couldn’t manage to win one off ebay until recently. Although I’ve never seen one out in the wild I wouldn’t consider these storage cases to be rare, but they seem to be fairly hard to find! Always with an OCD for storing my video games and portable systems I had to own one, and here it is.

GameBoyCarryAll

Mine says Nexoft, but I’ve seen them by Asciiware as well. From what I’ve seen online they are the exact same thing, just different company names. I’m assuming they were produced in the same factory and the names were printed on in different locations of that factory.

GameBoyCarryAll(4)

This case holds a Gameboy, up to 8 games, the Gameboy link cable, a pair of small earphones and possibly spare batteries, all within this compact unit. My only real annoyance comes not from the case itself but from Gameboy game cases. If you use game cases this will only hold a maximum of 4 games, but without cases you can store up to 8. Its not the carry all’s fault, but why would you only want to carry around (or store) 4 games?

4 games without cases or 2 with, why would you need cases within a case?

4 games without cases or 2 with, why would you need cases within a case?

A very useful feature is the way it holds the Gameboy inside with a stationary bit in one corner and a quick release tab at the top. This keeps the Gameboy nice and snug within its own side, so you don’t have to worry about loose cartridges falling out when you close the unit up, just close it with the game part down.

GameBoyCarryAll(3)

I’m not sure whether this is common or maybe this particular one wasn’t used very often, but it doesn’t close well at all. I really have to give it a fair bit of pressure to get it to close. Being as old as it is I’m slightly worried about the plastic being too brittle. But once it all aligns the unit is held closed with a very sturdy clip, which holds it closed tight and secure.

GameBoyCarryAll(5)

As I only use it for storage the Nexoft/ASCIIWare Carry All serves its purpose of storing and protecting my Gameboy and a handful of games and accessories. Its small, light and compact with a carry strap, which I’ll never use but I’ll leave on anyway. But as I stated before with the plastic being this old it seems slightly brittle, so I couldn’t use this as a travel carrying case.

Posted December 31st, 2013

Game Boy Screen Magnifiers

PV_Bann

After my last article I decided to pull out all of my screen magnifiers and give them a run through, to see if they were truly as horrible as I remember them being. Now I’m not knocking their ability to magnify the screen, I’m actually complaining about their wildly varying and not so useful attempts to light up the Game Boy screen. No matter how well they do magnify the screen, they simply can’t add enough light, or do it in a proper manner, to make the screen look good in the dark.

To start this off right I will state at this point every single one of the four magnifiers I currently own have had to be repaired. The two Performance brand magnifiers were easy fixes as they used extremely cheap wires that snapped, but left me enough wire to do a quick resolder. The Light Boy, however is quite well built, inside and out, but the manner in which they used to transfer power needed a good steel wool rub down. The High Frequency for the Game Boy Color needs a complete rewiring, as it suffers from the same problem as the Performance brand, yet they didn’t give me enough wire to just strip and resolder.

GameBoyMagnifier

Another issue that these magnifiers suffer from is quite visible in the High Frequency below, scratches! Over the years these things gather scratches as if it were dust, but for the most part they don’t bother me as much as scratches on the Game Boy (or in this case Game Boy Color) screen itself. The High Frequency magnifier does a good enough job, but as I stated above it still needs repaired, so I can’t critique its lighting system. But I will say that it only requires two AAA batteries, making it light and comfortable to use with the Game Boy Color.

GameBoyColorHighFrequency

Next up is the cheapest of my two Performance brand magnifiers and even after repairs this thing doesn’t work right. This poor thing screams super cheap, starting with the way they branded their name on the front and finishing with the junk wires and switch inside. Again the screen magnifier does well but the LEDS are fairly dim, when they decide to actually work. Powered by two AA batteries, which are often hard to insert or remove, this one balances well on the Game Boy.

GameBoyPerformance2

Now this one has been mine since its purchase; I remember opening it on Christmas morning with my Game Boy and quickly shoving it aside. The lens of this one is noticeably bigger than all the rest and the LEDs give off a decent amount of light. Again, powered by two AA batteries this one also balances quite well, my favorite of them all.

GameBoyPerformance

And finally we reach the officially licensed Light Boy, from Vic Tokai. This one was a bit of a pain to get working, but it didn’t require any soldering as this unit doesn’t even have wires. “But how does it work without wires? SORCERY!!”. No, the real answer is that they used a clever series of copper strips connected in such a way that it made an electrical circuit. The issue there is that over time the copper strips had oxidized and turned green, but the real issue was popping this thing open when it was secured from the inside like a Famicom cartridge!

After painstakingly popping the unit open and giving all the key points a good steel wool scrubbing, I slapped in the batteries and it came to life. The magnifier, again, works as to be expected and the LEDs aren’t very bright, but my main issue is with the H.R. Giger’s Alien look to the unit. Unlike the other 3 magnifiers this one has the batteries (again two AA) hanging off the back of the Game Boy, throwing the balance of the whole system off. Its only a minor complaint while actually playing, but if you need to sit the Game Boy down it never looks comfortable.

GameBoyLightBoyGameBoyLightBoy2

So there you have it, my quick review of the screen magnifiers I own. All of them do a good job of magnifying the screen, but none of them do an adequate job of lighting the screen, atleast not to my liking. If you need a screen magnifier I would suggest any you can find, with minimal scratches of course. If you’re in need of a decent way to light your screen while also using a screen magnifier you may want to track down a NUBY Game Light Plus, or modify your Game Boy with a backlight kit.

Posted November 7th, 2013

NUBY Game Light for Nintendo Game Boy

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For the past 6 months or so I’ve had a neat little peripheral sitting in a drawer that I wanted to use so bad, but due to the state of corrosion on the battery contacts I packed it away and never really bothered with it. The overall condition wasn’t bad so when I saw it at the outlet store I tossed it in my bag anyway; whats the harm in buying a vintage gaming peripheral even if it may never work again? That peripheral is the NUBY Game Light, a neat little device that slides on to your original DMG-001 and lights up the screen so you can play in the dark.

NUBY-GameLight

When I originally found it I popped it open to make sure there were no batteries left inside, if I’m paying by weight I’m not paying for old, corroded batteries too! The corrosion didn’t alarm me until I got home, to have a deeper look inside the unit itself to see exactly what was going on and to map out how to fix it. All of the contacts were covered in a thick blue and rust colored layer of corrosion, so I reluctantly just packed it away in favor of doing something easier.

It looks bad, but I never give up on a patient!

Oh boy, thats not going to be an easy fix, or is it?

I put the NUBY on one of my DMGs that doesn’t have a screen protector, hoping that the Game Light would keep anything that would do the screen harm far enough away. So every time I opened up that drawer to grab my working Game Boy, there it was, staring me in the face, almost begging for help. After a while of seeing it, and wondering what it did exactlty, I decided I would take on the challenge to clean the contacts, but how?

I did some research online as to what would remove corrosion from battery contacts, the most popular result was to use vinegar but I didn’t have any handy. After a quick rethink I went to the old standard way of cleaning and polishing small metal parts, STEEL WOOL! The steel wool polished up the contacts on the door quite well, which turned out to be brass, but the contacts deep inside the Game Light were a bit harder to reach.

Well that explains a lot!

Well that explains a lot!

The poor man’s ingenuity kicked in! I grabbed a pair of needle-nose pliers and grasped a small chunk of steel wool in the end. After giving all four of the inner contacts a good rubbing, or as good as I could get, they turned out ok.

Not perfect, but it will do.

Not perfect, but it will do.

After all the contacts were cleaned I checked inside to see which way the batteries went, when the sheer excess of the NUBY Game Light hit me. This thing takes four AA batteries, thats the exact same required to power the DMG-001! Four AA batteries to power 2 LEDs compared to the same to power everything needed to have a complete handheld gaming experience in your hands, it didn’t make sense. But these were the 90s, when technology wasn’t as sharp as it is now, so I will let it slide.

Four AA batteries in the same hole at the same time? No comment!

Four AA batteries in the same hole at the same time? No comment!

After popping in the thirsty beast’s battery requirements I slide it on to my Game Boy and flipped the switch, success! The LEDs are very bright and since they are in direct contact with the screen, as opposed to the LEDs in a magnifying unit that are so far away from the screen they barely do any good, the NUBY Game Light actually brightens up the screen pretty well. I was pleasantly surprised with the results to say the least.

2 ridges coincide with channels in the DMG shell, holding it firmly in place.

2 ridges coincide with channels on the front and top of the DMG shell, holding it firmly in place.

With advances in modern technology, and the modification community, many people are using custom backlight/frontlight kits for their old DMG Game Boys. Admittedly I would love to have a backlit DMG, but I don’t want to modify any of my Game Boys, perhaps I’m too much of a purist in that sense. Over the years I’ve owned many of those hokey magnifier units that only slightly brighten the screen, but thats never been good enough. With the NUBY Game Light I can see much better, although its far from perfect, especially with its battery requirements, but it does a lot better than any alternative I’ve tried.

Shine on you crazy Game Boy!

Shine on you crazy Game Boy!

Posted November 6th, 2013

Vintage Gaming Cleaning Kits

In the days when cartridges ruled the world it seemed as if anyone and everyone put out a cleaning kit to keep your systems in working order. Which was a big selling point made all too easy by the NES and its, more often than not, ability to put on a light show rather than play a game. If there is one thing I believe about retro gaming, it has to be the fact that if you keep your systems and games clean they will last longer and give you much better functional results.

Although I now know the true cause of these glitches, I was still taken in by the cleaning kits propaganda when I was younger. They made promises to keep the blinking NES, or just a black screen on other systems, away forever! Almost every cartridge based video game system had some form of cleaning kit, and although most of the time it worked for just a short while, the fact that it worked at all made them feel like essential hardware.

My first cleaning kit was a Doc’s Fix-a-system, which had what I still feel is a genius idea in the clip on NES cleaner. You simply took any NES game cartridge, clipped the contraption to the front of it and you proceeded to stab the living daylights out of your NES. Doing so cleared unwanted dirt and gave way to a few more minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.

I still love this idea, it still works great!


After that cleaning kit was lost or broken, I’m sure, I purchased a Player’s Edge NES cleaning kit. This one was a stand alone unit with a handle, and everything you needed fit conveniently inside the unit itself. Again you just took the unit and stabbed the living daylights out of your NES and you were good to play for a little while longer.

Years of use on this thing, does it show?


That would be the last cleaning kit I bought for nearly 14 years, until one day at a Salvation Army store I found a Player’s Edge cleaning kit for the SNES. Later, at another Salvation Army, I found an incomplete Doc’s 2000 kit, which brought back a flood of memories of the good old days. Sadly the NES clip was broken, but I decided to take what was left of it and turn it into a cleaning kit inside of an old Gyromite cartridge I had laying around. (Original article: Here)

Same system, only one fits perfectly into the NES so I can shut the lid.


It seems nowadays I go through thrift stores and find cleaning kits for almost every system, and if they’re at a reasonable price I’ll pick them up. Just this year I’ve accrued quite a few system cleaning kits, and although I may not use them I still pick them up when I can.

My current collection of boxed cleaning kits.


As an adult, I know the best way to keep my systems running is to clean both the games and the systems. But it seems a good Q-tip with rubbing alcohol thoroughly rubbed through a game keeps all my systems running well. Admittedly I have had some hiccups with my Sega Genesis, N64 and SNES, but nothing a good game cleaning hasn’t remedied, so far!

Back in the day cleaning kits were pushed in our faces, and as time went on they faded away. I still get nostalgic for cleaning kits and make room for them in my collection. Though they serve no practical purpose to me, as I’ve learned far better ways to keep my systems running, they still connect me to a time when video games were problematic, but so much fun.

Posted November 11th, 2012