35 years ago this week, a key piece in the evolution of Metroidvania games hit the U.S. market: Atari's Adventure, a simple but ambitious console adaptation of the concepts behind William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure — the same Colossal Cave Adventure that inspired Zork. In fact, Atari's Adventure works as a sort of console counterpart to Zork: The answer to the question of how one might go about making an adventure as complex as Zork work within the limitations of a console. Obviously, the answer was "it can't, and has to be simplified," but despite its restrictions Zork was a bold and important chapter in the evolution of game design.

We're almost through Game Boy's releases for 1989, and there's still good stuff to be found! Boomer's Adventure in Asmik World may not be an earth-shaking classic or anything, but it's a load of fun. It's also suspiciously similar to game that would hit Game Boy a few weeks later, Heiankyo Alien... how strange.

This episode marks another technical milestone for Game Boy World: I'm now capturing RGB video from a Super Game Boy 2. The Japan-only second SGB revision included hardware that was more accurate to the actual innards of a Game Boy, resulting in games that ran true to the original hardware (as opposed to slightly too fast, and with negligibly pitch-shifted music). Honestly, this is probably about as good as it gets in terms of video quality. Please enjoy this luxury, made possible by enthusiastic and very generous Game Boy World viewers such as yourself. Thanks for watching and supporting the show!

It's a game about a mouse who pushes boxes. But it's not Boxxle, because that was a dude in a ball cap. Seta's 1989 puzzler belongs to the endless ranks of Game Boy releases that stood alone and were largely forgotten by the world, and will never be seen again thanks to corporate mergers, acquisitions, shutdowns, and lapsed trademarks. Let this be the game's lonely monument. Amen.

For more portable 8-bit games, keep on reading gameboyworld.com