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My subsequent collection was average at best, pieced together with random purchases and cast-offs from friends, severely lacking many of the classics: no Metroid II or Street Fighter, Kid Dracula or Gargoyle's Quest; Super Mario Land's grander sequel, Six Golden Coins, briefly borrowed and completed; my attention segued to the SNES by the time Pokémon was released.Instead, I developed a blinkered, fatherly love for nearly every game I owned. Sunsoft's Speedy Gonzales—an early favorite—was a shameless rip-off of Sonic (even down to the impatient foot tapping), but a decent one, imbued with a woozy, "La Cucaracha"-riffing soundtrack; while Kirby's Dream Land 2 was perhaps the superlative Game Boy platformer, a psychedelic mess of inventive level design and brilliantly cutesy graphics that stands as one of the bulimic puffballs's finest outings.'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' gameplayElectronic Arts' non-linear Gulf War shoot 'em up Desert Strike showed that the Game Boy could be gritty rather than twee, gung-ho Americanisms and taste-baiting subject matter be damned. Ropey film tie-ins were rife—even I could tell that Beetlejuice was a nadir—but I played Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to the point of nausea on long drives to the Dordogne, flitting between ant-like melee battles, side-on duels and torpid wandering, ever-confused that the developers had rendered most of the character portraits accurately enough save for Costner's protagonist, who looked exactly like David Hasselhoff.
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