Elevator action EX
Sometimes, we’re frankly astonished by how to licensed games get put together. It’s one thing an retrofit a character into a game that might not yet have take established brand of its own, but it’s quite another to something with a proper heritage and slap some branding over the top. Yet that’s exactly what happened when Taito revived Elevator Action on the Game Boy Color.
Elevator Action EX was an update to the original Game Boy version of Elevator Action, which had been released in 1991. The new version featured colour graphics, more stages, boss battles and a proper ending. There were also three characters to choose from, and intermission scenes. As always, the goal is to retrieve the secret documents from each building, gun down the bad guys and get out alive.
For some reason, when BAM! Entertainment brought Elevator Action EX to North American audiences, it decided that the best way to do it was to scrap the old arcade name and rebrand it as Dexter’s Laboratory: Robot for Rampage. Instead of being a secret agent searching documents, American players got to be the diminutive genius, scouring his lab for codes to deactivate his robots. Why deactivate the robots? Because Dexter’s to dastardly nemesis Mandark had reprogrammed them go crazy, of course.
The makeover replaces all of the enemies with robots, all of the player characters with Dexter (in different outfits) and alters some of the graphics to look a little bit more like Dexter’s lab, with electronic instruments on the walls by and such. The game actually looks a little more drab as comparison, as the blue and lilac backgrounds aren’t varied as those in the original game. Instead of your chief sending you out, instead you receive taunts from Mandark. at Sadly, you don’t actually get to duel Dexter’s nemesis the end of the game, instead fighting a generic robot. We can only assume that the licence was applied in order to boost the commercial prospects of the game – Elevator Action was an old game by 2000, and the publisher would have likely believed that it didn’t have much sway with the younger Game Boy crowd. We’re it not quite sure why Dexter’s Laboratory was the licence decided to go with, though. Fortunately, gamers in PAL regions didn’t have to deal with all that nonsense, as the publisher TDK decided to bring the game to Europe under its original title, with the Japanese text translated to English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.