STARGATE

We have never seen the Stargate TV show or movie or anything, but we can say we’ve played the game! Our wife has seen the films, and showing her some game footage she said it ‘fit,’ so there you go. As someone with no experience with the franchise uh…

huh…

Hm.

I see.

OK, we knew it was sci-fi but we didn’t know there was an ancient egyptian god alien aspect to it. So yeah, there is! It’s sort of goofy, fights for control of space-time junctions being represented by puzzle game fights. In Puyo Puyo the stakes are never this high, well you do fight Satan but he’s just a perv.

So, this game plays as sort of a mash-up of Klax and Tempest, you have a circular arena, 12 pieces around and 8 pieces deep. Pieces fall from the top and you have to match three of them to clear them. You can only match vertically, not horizontally. Where the game gets interesting is that you can see two tiles ahead of what’s currently dropping, but only the obverse of the tile. The reverse of each tile is random, so you can flip it over and play that side instead. At the top of the screen is a list of hieroglyphs that you have to match to clear a round. Each glyph can always spawn, but you only want 8 types to advance.

There are two game modes, Skill and Battle. In skill mode you’re playing endlessly, trying to get as far as you can before topping out and losing. In Battle Mode, you go against Ra to try and conquer territory. At the start of the mode, Ra picks a tile on the 7x5 board to attack. You go against them and if you win, the Stargate on that tile is yours and you get to pick the next one to contest. If Ra wins, they pick the next one. We think winning a gate next to another one flips it, because Ra did that to us and that bastard took our Stargate! We need to go stop him or, whatever the movies about. Can’t find a manual for this game online but a longplay shows that gate flipping happening.

The game only has one music track, and it gets grating. The Game Boy doesn’t really have the resolution for a game this complex, meaning that when you get to the bottom of the play field it’s very hard to make out what glyph is down there or how high the stack goes. This is especially a problem on an actual Game Boy’s tiny potato screen that’s so dim you can’t see what’s what. The Game Gear port, from screenshots, looks to do a bit better at this. In single player the game sort of lacks fun. But in multiplayer…

Yes, this game has Link Cable support, and when played against another real person it sounds like exactly our jam! Part light strategy, part puzzle, part weird kusoge, it makes us wish we had another Game Boy to play this with a friend, in fact it may sell us on just that someday. But for now, Stargate is just a fun novelty. We’re happy they didn’t just do a generic platformer like the home console movie tie-ins. Stars I wanna play this muitiplayer, put a pin in that.