As a Patreon request, we've skipping ahead a couple of years for a quick look at one of the true technological marvels of the Game Boy library: Argonaut's X, a first-person, free-roaming, mission-based, ground and air shoot-em-up. While I'm saving a proper dissection of its game mechanics for whenever we get to Game Boy World 1992, there's more than enough history and trivia surrounding this release to make for a meaty discussion.

(Special thanks to David Morton for this episode request.)

A startlingly good conversion of the classic arcade brawler (or the NES version of it, anyway). But there's one tragic flaw keeping this otherwise excellent port from sitting within Game Boy's top rankings...

The arcade classic makes the trip from NES to Game Boy with all the grace of a young child skipping his training wheels period to ride a mountain bike into traffic. This portable adaptation of a solid console port of a coin-op great totally misses the mark, with terribly compromised gameplay and some gratingly out-of-tune music.

The NES gets its very first rendition of American football — and on launch day, too! All thanks to Irem, who provide the second third-party Black Box title with this conversion of the arcade game by the same title. It's not a straight port, though, adding an entirely new aspect to the game, as well as a multiplayer mode.

The very first third-party release for NES... mostly. Developed by Irem, based on an Irem arcade game, yet published by Nintendo in both Japan and the U.S., Kung-Fu is something of an edge case. Whatever the case, though, it sure did look awesome back in 1985, with its bold graphics and proto-fighting-game mechanics.

Mario's final outing before his first adventure in the Mushroom Kingdom has little to do with any other game he ever starred in, and yet feels very much like an evolutionary step in the character's development.

This cooperative platformer occupies a somewhat unfortunate place in history: It attempted to build on the concepts of the original Mario Bros., but it arrived just before Super Mario Bros. set a new standard for run-and-jump action. It's an amusing and quirky game, but its awkward controls leave it completely overshadowed by the masterpiece that was to come.

The second half of 1990 gets rolling with the handheld debut of world-class developer/publishing combo Tamtex and Irem. Don't expect anything on the level of Metal Storm here, though; Shisenshou was a visually painfully conversion of a softcore arcade game (minus the smut, of course). Not really getting off on the best foot, alas.

Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, this motocross game is anything but your typical racer — with its side-scrolling design and emphasis on physics and jumps, it feels almost like a rough draft for Super Mario Bros. Ah, but there's a dark and terrible secret lurking in Excitebike, hidden just off the main menu... a sign of just how much Nintendo was making up the NES launch as they went along.

Gyromite's companion release constitutes the only other game