1942

Pros • An excuse to blow the dust off that Game Boy Printer • Even the forelobe-deficient can play • A good portable version of the original	Cons • I'm almost certain the cruddy old arcade game had immeasurably better sound than this
Bottom Line Move, shoot, power-up, die. If you dug the arcade machine, you'll dig this---it's only a "5" because its nature precludes it from being more. 1942 is, I think, what most non-gaming people imagine Game Boy games to be, as a whole---simple, twitchy, pretty and, no offense, dumb as a sack of air fresheners: Mere vertical scrolling and shooting, and it matters not whether the opponents are Japanese Zeroes, Incredibly Gross Bugs From Space, Russian nuclear missiles, or sea monsters opposing the advance of your sailing ship to the New World (oh wait, that's "1492"). Sometimes, there is a place for such things. We can't play Zelda DX or Mario Golf all the time, nor would we want to. Think of 1942 as a reminder of that glad epoch before submenus, plot and mood. (Or, to put it another way: "When I was your age, we didn't have 'survival horror' games: We got up at four in the morning, in the snow, and walked uphill to the graveyard and dug up our grandparents, and then we ate them...")

You're one stalwart P38 WWII flyboy plying the unfriendly skies toward Tokyo, faced with endless waves (well, 32, actually) of luckless, evidently retarded and in some cases actually headless enemy pilots. While most of them will go down with one shot (so will you, so don't get cocky), there are special "boss" bombers that require more attention, as well as tight-formation wings of fighter planes which evolved in later video games into the formations (of spaceships, bugs, aliens, what have you), that would yield such spectacular point bonuses. Here, cleaning out an entire formation will earn you power-ups---from workaday double-cannon mounts to point bonuses, to extra Loop maneuvers (escape moves to worm your way out of onscreen deathtraps) to the ultimate reward, two wingmen who offer a satisfyingly deadly spread of forward firepower for as long as you can keep them alive (lose a wingman and you and the survivor can plow onward; lose the big plane in the middle and you're down a life).

No review of 1942 GBC would be complete without a few words about all the fancy updates and year-2000 add-ons to the classic game: There aren't any. (Oh wait, I tell a lie; you can actually use that Game Boy Printer of yours to---hold on to your garters---print out the save-game passwords. This is an example of a practice known in game-publisher circles as "left handed value," and the people who pass its like as a bonus are consigned, per Dante, to the Vestibule with the Uncommitted, those too salted for heaven and not spicy enough for hell. Alighieri's Game Boy, of course, was a slotted-board difference engine that occupied several storehouses in suburban Florence).

To reiterate: This is simply an age-old vertical scroller in your pocket. Action-packed, to be sure. Faithful, yes. Good-looking, you bet. Deep, hell no. This is the kind of game meant to be played with two thumbs, if you have them, and a small section of brain-stem.

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