Monster Max

Monster Max is an arcade adventure video game developed by Rare and published by Titus for the Game Boy handheld game console in late 1994. The game was written by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond. It is very similar in both graphics and gameplay to Ritman and Drummond's 1987 title Head over Heels.

Monster Max is part puzzle game and part platformer. The player plays as Monster Max, a guitar player whose task is to defeat the evil villain who threatens to ban all music from the world. The game is made up of isometric rooms, where the player may proceed to the next room by going through doors. All the puzzle elements reset in the room if the player re-enter it so that it is easy to retry if the player messes a puzzle up.

The objective of the game is to complete levels by collecting or destroying the objects at the end. There are three levels to each floor except the last floor where there is only one. Each level has a briefing and the player is awarded credits depending on how many lives they finish the level with and if they collected any bonus items on the way. To advance to the next floor the player must acquire a certain amount of credits.

There is no automatic saving in Monster Max; rather, there are passwords which the player may use to restart at the point the game was left. While the The Legend of Zelda game The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening used a battery inside the small Game Boy cartridge, as did others prior to the release of Monster Max, the additional cost of integrating a battery save was most likely prohibitive for the publisher.

Source: Wikipedia, "Monster Max," available under the CC-BY-SA License.