June 1990 brings the very first Game Boy sequel to an earlier Game Boy game. Naturally, that sequel is Boxxle II. I mean, everything else on Game Boy has been based on Boxxle, so why not a proper sequel?

As this episode details, however, Boxxle II honestly has no reason to exist — Game Boy's glut of puzzlers has given us brain-teasers far more inventive than this straight port of the original box-pusher. Including, I'm afraid, the game that immediately precedes Boxxle II: SNK's Game Boy debut, Dexterity.

With the Boxxles as bookends, I've also taken this opportunity to offer a recap of just HOW MANY puzzle-like games we've seen on Game Boy to date. Buckle in — it's about to get funky.

Thanks for watching, and please be sure to check out the Game Boy index I'm building at http://www.gameboyworld.com, or support this project through Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) or by picking up related books at Amazon! (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline...)

A double dose of licensed mediocrity for you! Far more information than you could ever need on the tragic failings of two games based on Japanese TV, toys, and anime: Ultraman Club and Zoids Densetsu. These games were never released in America, and it turns out for good reason.

Coconuts Japan brings us a Game Boy release with a terribly deceptive title; this is THREE card games, not just one. By far the most mundane and straightforward bit of Game Boy we've yet seen, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you want to play card games, well, here's Card Game.

A look back at Nintendo's Wild Gunman, the first-ever NES light gun game, and a shooter whose simple design belies its remarkable heritage. Best known in the U.S. for its faked-up cameo in Back to the Future Part II, Wild Gunman was to Japanese fans at the time the latest entry in a line of product evolution that stretched back more than a decade.

Both Florent Georges' book The History of Nintendo 1889-1980 and the Before Mario blog (www.beforemario.com) were invaluable resources as I researched this retrospective. Be sure to check them out!

Game Boy gets its first old-school dungeon crawler, one of the least common genres on the system. This one offers an atypical setting for the genre (ancient Japan!), which is aesthetically cool yet somewhat frustrating in practical terms: The game text, which has never been localized or fan-translated into English, displays entirely in cumbersome traditional hiragana script (even English loanwords like "damage"). So it's a bit tough to play if you're not comfortable with reading awkwardly displayed Japanese text—and the heavy need for grinding up experience points doesn't help. It's not a bad RPG, though! Just a bit unfriendly to foreigners.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of another puzzle game sounded like pure suffering. Thankfully, some janky imports put things in perspective... and, of course, it helps that this latest puzzler—Asmik's Catrap, a remake of 1985's Pitman—is pretty darned good on its own, too.

Game Boy certainly didn't lack for puzzle action games in its early years, as we've seen. And here's another one! Lock ’N Chase, however, isn't merely some quick-and-sleazy money grab (despite the fact that the box art says, "Take the money and run!")—this game has an impressive history behind it, and its design reflects an attempt to build on Data East's arcade heritage. And it's pretty fun, too.

Here we have the first NES release that wasn't based on a sport... yet it's hardly a bastion of creativity. By 1984, when Pinball debuted on Famicom, pinball had established itself as one of the most popular subjects for video games. Pinball stood apart, though, due to its remarkable quality... thanks in large part to a pinch-hit assist from future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

Though it tends to be overlooked in studies of role-playing history, Venture iterated on the concepts of Atari's Adventure in a way that made the action RPG viable as an arcade experience—a forgotten yet important influence on metroidvania games.

Game Boy gets its first-ever boxing game, and it's almost pretty good. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite hit the mark due to an interface that stumbles over the line between "perfectly complex" and "bizarrely overcomplicated." It attempts to channel the spirit of and even improve on Nintendo's Punch-Out!!, but unfortunately it only duplicates the obvious part of that masterpiece rather than the design choices that make it so good.