This entry, then, concerns some great OCD Game Boy charts I made in 1991.

That is a printout, done in AppleWorks on an Apple //c on our ImageWriter printer, shows my first thirty Game Boy games. Note the price and the date of purchase. For a moment there, I was impressed with the staggering TEN games purchased in the month of December, but then I remembered that's when Christmas is.

One thing that I think really stands out: there's absolutely no first-party bias. We just didn't think of things like that back then. Basically, with the gaming press limited to store catalogs, you just bought whatever had cool box art. When was the last time you saw a list of somebody's thirty Nintendo system games and only noted two Mario titles in the bunch?

Yes, I'm as surprised as you to see Heavyweight Championship Boxing in there. It was a Link Cable game, so either I knew somebody else who had it, or I hoped somebody I knew would get it, or - and this is not out of the realm of possibility - I owned two copies of it just in case. I don't specifically recall owning two copies of Boxing, but I did have a pair each of Fortified Zone, Super R/C Pro-Am, Formula F1, Radar Mission, and I think Gauntlet 2. For the multiplayer.

I have a second printout with the next seven games scribbled in pencil: Lock 'N Chase, Mickey's Dangerous Chase, Rescue of Princess Blobbette, The Punisher, Battle Unit Zeoth, Daedalian Opus, and Maru's Mission. I did not scan that in because it has been covered with even more hand-written glyphs and secret codes. That set takes the chart up to October '91; I stopped dutifully recording my Game Boy purchases after that because I got a girlfriend.

It's about to get weirder.

That chart - and by all means click the image for the annotated mega-legible version - illustrates when I bought each game and when I conquered it. In graph form. That is nuts. Just plain crazy.

Some long-dormant thoughts about those games:

I think I did eventually beat Fortress of Fear; that line would have been extended to a second sheet. I distinctly recall hand-crafting tons of maps for that game.

Gremlins 2 sucked, but Ghostbusters II was actually quite good.

I can still hum the music to Revenge of the Gator.

Out of all the long lines on that chart, Bubble Ghost was the most hard-won. Castlevania I put down for months because it was boring, but Bubble Ghost just kicked my ass forever. It was really unforgiving. It would make a neat DS microphone-based game these days.

I seem to look back on Gargoyle's Quest with a lot more fondness than that chart would indicate. It is still one of my favorites, along with Cosmotank and Balloon Kid.

That Dragon's Lair game sucked ass. But back then anything Dragon's Lair was awesome by default, even though the original laser disc game is probably one of the all-time crappiest games ever made.

Penguins were popular Game Boy foils, it seems. Chalk it up to the two-tone screen display.

The tales the lines don't tell: Ninja Turtles was a disappointment because it was so easy to beat. DuckTales, which has a similarly short line, was super-great because it was all I did for a week.

I went on to buy another thirty-odd games, just without the anal AppleWorks database management. As terrible as this is, it kinda bugs me that I didn't keep noting stuff like this. That would be pretty sweet to have a complete list of dates, prices, and which ones I beat.