2

5 /5

The Game Boy’s extensive library of games contains a whole host of renowned classics that have forever changed the medium (The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Tetris, and Pokemon, for example), but for every fondly remembered gem, there’s at least two or three games that have been forgotten by the vagaries of time. This is especially the case for games that were only ever released in Japan. Be it due to licensing/copyright issues (the first two Super Robot Wars games), being part of a really obscure-at-the-time genre (Konami’s Cave Noire, a prototypical rougelike), being too Japanese (Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, or “The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls”, the engine of which was re-used for Link’s Awakening), some games were just deemed unmarketable for release anywhere beyond the Land of the Rising Sun. One such casualty was Noobow, a 1992 licensed game based on a Japanese chocolate mascot so obscure that not even the internet can supply any reliable information beyond a couple of short animated videos. It’s actually quite an enormous shame, because Noobow is a pretty good game that just about anyone can get into and enjoy.

Developed by Irem, the folks behind 8-bit cult classics like R-Type, Metal Storm, and the NES port of Spelunker, Noobow is a puzzle-platformer where you take control of a heartbreakingly adorable yellow blob of the same name. The story, as far what can be determined from the cutscenes, is that the sun and rain are having a dust-up. This is causing everyone to suffer extreme cold or heat, and it’s up to Noobow to resolve this mess by helping them out. It should be mentioned that the cutscenes and level title cards are the only parts of the game that contain any text; the rest of the game is completely visual, so there’s no need to worry about needing to know Japanese to enjoy the game.

Noobow is a puzzle-platformer that can best be compared to the Dizzy adventure games by CodeMasters, in so far as you control an anthropomorphized thing that goes around solving puzzles by picking up items and using them where they are needed (for instance, picking up a bucket, collecting water from a waterfall and throwing the water at a sweating mole to cool him down). You walk around the world and have two buttons on hand: one button to pick up/put down an item, and the other to use the item at a very specific location.