Battle Bull

[Discoalucard]

www.hardcoregaming101.net/battlebull/battlebull.htm

A cute little Bomberman-type game for the original Game Boy, where you control a horned tank.

[Ace Whatever]

I borrowed this game from a friend and finished back in elementary school. Ran through it again just a few months ago. Still a fun game.

That said, I have a few nitpicks about this article:

- First of all, can the vehicle really be called a tank? My understanding is that a tank by definition has some kind of built in weapon by default, and in both versions of the box art all I see is a futuristic bulldozer that can optionally be equipped with a weapon.

- Speaking of which, the article didn't mention that the jump unit and weapon launcher are mutually exclusive so you can only equip one of them.

- The vehicle that appears when the timer reaches zero spawns on the same line you are on, cuts through leaving a line of movable blocks in its wake then respawns at your current line every 3-4 seconds. The article seems to bizarrely imply that the benefit of having new blocks on the stage outweigh the fact that you now have a death machine homing in on your location which will definitely screw you over early on when you don't have upgrades.

- Here's the big one: Is this one of those games that had a massive localization change? The author implies from the Japanese boxart and the ending that the game is taking place in some kind of futuristic battle arena, but the back of the US box clearly states that you're a mercenary tasked with destroying berserk mining robots on a remote planet. So which is it? Can anyone translate the blurb on the back of the Japanese box to see what it says? If the arena thing is legit then obviously that change needs to be mentioned.

[Discoalucard]

It seems to have treads, which generally qualifies it as a tank. Then again, in the original submission, "Tank" was capitalized so I wasn't sure if it was a proper name or just a general one. Seemed to make more sense lower case.

As for the story, I don't think the back of the JP box says anything about the setting, but the Japanese ending and the American ending are the same:



www.vgmuseum.com/end/gb/a/batbu.htm

Which implies more of a tournament.

So I'm going to assume that the person writing the copy on the back didn't actually know the story (or writing the manual, if it's in there) and just made something up that didn't reflect the game. (Which is something I should add, because why not?)

The other stuff I'll need to go back to the author to confirm.

[l]

I'm working on getting someone to translate that box right now.

[vetus]

I never knew about this hidden gem. Thanks for the article.