Snoopy's Magic Show (Game Boy) Playthrough
168A playthrough of Kemco's 1990 license-based action-puzzle game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Snoopy's Magic Show.
Snoopy's Magic Show (or "Snoopy Magic Show," according to its title screen) was the second Peanuts-branded game that Kemco released in North America, coming along six months after Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular for the NES (https://youtu.be/3-dInCKXd5E).
Being an early Game Boy release, Snoopy's Magic Show was, like so many of the handheld's 1989-90 offerings, a simple but incredibly fun single-screen puzzler that was designed to be able to be played in bite-sized chunks on the go.
According to the story, Snoopy messed up a trick during one of his performances. His magical balls have gone rogue and are attacking, and Woodstock and his freshly created army of doppelgangers are trapped and must be saved from "more than 100 levels of escalating jeopardy."
You really have to admire how hard marketing teams worked back in the day to come up with such contrived justifications for random gameplay mechanics, eh?
The goal in each stage of Snoopy's Magic Show is to collect all four Woodstocks before time runs out or Snoopy gets caught by an enemy. In the first sixty stages, the main challenge involves avoiding the magical balls as you navigate your way through mazes filled with conveyor belts and movable blocks. Stages 61-120 feature the same layouts as 1-60 but are much more hectic since you also have to contend with being chased by Spike. It's a good challenge, and it's one that never gets too obnoxiously difficult thanks to how generous the game is with extra lives and passwords.
The graphics are cute, clean, and easy to read on the Game Boy's blurry screen, and the music is immediately recognizable as Kemco's work. It even borrows a few tunes from the company's other games, like Shadowgate.
Snoopy's Magic Show is an excellent fit for the Game Boy, and I spent many happy hours as a kid playing through it over and over again. If you're a Game Boy fan who hasn't yet had the pleasure, treat yourself and give it a spin. You won't regret it.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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