What’s on this $10 Handheld? Two: My Arcade Go Gamer Edition

31. Funny Face
Flipping one tile also flips all adjacent tiles and you need to flip them all to happy faces in the smallest number of flips. They’re preset puzzles and at least the first half-dozen are easy if you’re at all familiar with the style.


32. Happy Smile
Flipping one tile also flips all adjacent tiles and you need to flip them all to happy faces in the smallest number of flips. Yeah, its a different version of the same puzzle set. This actually flips faster, which I approve of. This version also gets harder faster.


33. Pass Maze Road
Guide the bubble through the maze (to the blue swirl in the upper-right) while avoiding falling into holes. The screen wraps top-to-bottom, which becomes important starting at the third level. The fourth level introduces arrow obstacles that move when you do, but only in one direction. This is actually pretty clever despite the simplicity. There appears to be an Android game with the same name, but I’m not sure if it’s the same and it gets lost in a sea of different “Maze Road” games.


34. Return Capsule
This is a labyrinth game! You need to move the blue bubble in straight lines to the green exit, and it only stops when it hits a gray block. (If you slide off the screen, you lose.) The later levels introduce blocks that disappear after you hit them, which makes this more strategic. My searching couldn’t find the actual game, but did find a Youtube video of it. That, in turn, lead me to the Millennium Arcade 202-in-1 portable game console, which the Bootleg wiki confirms was another variant of the Family Sport that was released.

And that gave me another avenue to search on. Want to watch a gameplay video of the racing game from the main menu? Or this video has Mini Fighter, Racing, Crazy Moto, City Battle and a Crazy Tank game in Action that isn’t on my device!


35. Telescope Pole
Clicking on the pole makes it telescope and grab the ball; you need to get the ball into the hole by moving it around with poles. This is another clever little puzzle game that can bend your brain for a few minutes. I found this game on a mathisfun.com with extra explanations on how to play.


36. Memory Test
This seems like a refugee from from the Education section—similar title screen, similar music, and the same “success/failure” reactions. I’m not sure why it was moved here, but I’m guessing it originated in that pack. It shows you two cards, and you have to pick the one that it hides from four choices. It’s not hard.

And that’s all for the Puzzle section!

Beowulf said:

35. Telescope Pole
Clicking on the pole makes it telescope and grab the ball; you need to get the ball into the hole by moving it around with poles. This is another clever little puzzle game that can bend your brain for a few minutes. I found this game on a mathisfun.com with extra explanations on how to play.

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing the link to this one, I had fun with it.

I'm glad to hear that people are enjoying the games I can find online. (I reiterate that if you recognize anything that I haven't found, you should share it.) The Puzzle section, at least in terms of what I'd find this handheld good for, has definitely been the best so far. While forgettable, at least a dozen of them have been worth 10-20 minutes of entertainment.


But now we're onto Venture Games! What does that mean? I don’t actually know! My best guess from my initial search is was a broad “casino games” header, but that breaks down very quickly. Honestly, I don’t think a lot of effort really went into sorting these games.


1. Super Memory
An interesting take on the memory card game: You have a few seconds to memorize the cards, then need to flip and match them, and sometimes the game force-flips cards for you. The heart meter fills as you succeed and empties as you fail.


2. Black Jack
Pretty standard computer blackjack. You have $500 and can place bets against the dealer with the usual rules for hitting and standing. I remember playing computer blackjack on my Atari 2600, but as an adult I don’t really see much appeal to it—it’s pretty much mechanical, hitting on anything below a 17 and otherwise relying on luck.


3. Gather Eggs
The chickens above drop eggs and the weasel needs to catch them before they hit the ground. This is either a clone or heavily-inspired by Nice Code’s game Mad Xmas (aka, Angel, Care Bear, Lucky Time, and Small Dinosaur), itself a clone of the Atari game Kaboom.


4. Cups Changing
A classic shell game. I’m pretty sure the dealer isn’t cheating, which makes it different from 99% of other shell games.


5. Polar Slot Machine
Place bets, win money (or not). I also don’t like slot machines. Like, it’s what we did for lootboxes before there were games wrapped around them, and we all agree that lootboxes are terrible.


6. Soda Pop
Hey, it’s a Tapper clone! People arrive at the four levels of the bar and are sad if they don’t have “soda pop” (it’s beer, it’s clearly beer). You need to slide them beers and then catch the cups when they return. (You can’t slide beers to empty tables.) Points seem to depend on play time and also on whether the person gets there and starts crying before you get them a beer. An entertaining quirk is that your bartender changes size as he shifts lanes to create the illusion that there’s depth, but the movement is instant while the size-change is a slight delay behind it. So your bartender shifts lanes and then magically changes height shortly after.

7. Follow Me
The angel traces a path around the level. You need to follow in her footsteps, but avoid moving obstacles like monsters. (I’ve been frustrated by the fact that so many of these games have really generic titles that are hard to Google or have a zillion different games that could potentially fit the description. And I feel like if I could find one site that had one of these games, I might be able to find more.)


8. On Fire
You’re a little white fox trailing a lit fuse. As far as I can tell, you need to light each of the grass segments on fire, but if you’re standing in one that’s on fire you die. Moving directly through one space keeps you safe, but two (or turning a corner) gets you caught. I’m guessing there are other rules that I’m missing. Alternately, it’s unwinnable, there’s only the one stage, and this game is just about the fact that arson is bad.


9. Good Fisherman
This fuzzy creature (a beaver, maybe?) is not, in fact, a Good Fisherman. This is basically a primitive claw game, where you need to time dropping the hook so that it intersects the mouth of a fish just as they pass by. The hook drops continuously as you hold the button and immediately retreats fully when you let go.


10. Open Gold Box
The Bootleg wiki had something to say about this: "An entirely luck-based game where the player opens treasure chests, trying to earn as much money as possible. All four players are different colored Pebbles from The Flintstones." I’ll add that the player selection screen actually determines the turn order, so you can decide whether you want to go first or last opening random chests.


11. Gas Station
Clearly originally intended as a tappy game, this is a “gas station simulation” where you move cars to the pump, fill them up (and wait while they fill up), then take their money and move the next person in. (The attendant needs to slowly walk from place to p[lace to do these things, mind you.) There’s only one pump in the first level, so there isn’t exactly a lot of strategy—the next person in line just has to wait while the current one fills up.

Beowulf said:

9. Good Fisherman
This fuzzy creature (a beaver, maybe?)

Click to expand...

I see whiskers so I think it's supposed to be a big, chubby cat.

12. Cake Store
A cake store simulator. Grab dough from the bottom rack, put it into the oven that corresponds with what each customer wants, then drop it in their bag and get money. Yet another game really hurt by the need to move the pointer with a D-pad, because on a touchscreen this would hold my attention for a while. I think this is a clone of Cake Mania (though not as full-featured).


13. Brain Age Test
A series of semi-memorization math puzzles: There are four foxes and the mushroom house comes down to hide them. One fox slides in. One fox slides out. How many foxes are there? That sort of thing. I don't think this is related to the actual game series called Brain Age--I think they just used the name.


14. Forest Adventure
I think this is a clone of Elvish Boy, or another game using the same engine. It’s basically the same either way--another platformer with bad physics and the ability to stun enemies with balls that throw at inconsistent angles. Any chance that giant goblin looks familiar to anyone?
(I found a video of someone playing Elvish Boy. Apparently that’s also available as an APK for Android.)


15. Pirate Landing
A vaguely Angry Birds style game: You tilt the cannon, fire out a boat, and then tilt the boat to try to stay level and go as far as you can. Distance gets you gold that you can spend on upgrades to your boat, though I’m not clear on what effect they actually have. (You really just want to be lucky enough to land on animals or land mines, which bounce you back into the air and keep you moving.)


16. Cafeteria
You’re controlling those three arrows in the center and can change the left-right and up-down ones with the D-pad. As the waitresses come in, you need to use the arrows to get them to the correct one of the four tables, and each correct order gets you points.

17. Water Rescue
You control the three boats. As the cruise ship catches fire, people will jump out the windows and you need to catch them. Like Gather Eggs, this is another Kaboom variation. (I'm guessing somebody made this based on that concept, rather than directly cloning anything.)


18. Heroboy
This is basically a slow-moving runner game. The screen slowly scrolls as Heroboy runs past various burning buildings. You can hold A to fly. At each building, you need to fly to an upper window and save a kid, bringing them to the ground. Crashing into the UFOs will cost health.

Honestly, my guess at what’s going on here is that the UFOs are responsible for the entire goddamn town being on fire and Heroboy should be punching them, but what do I know?


19. Tower Defense
A relatively primitive but true-to-the-name tower defense game. I don’t have the patience for most tower defense games that don’t have a fast-forward option, and tend to be less interested in ones without a good multiple-rounds upgrade system. (Like, Kingdom Rush is decent, but I really like the later two entries in the Gemcraft series that’s on Steam.)


20. Ice Cream
This is a second Tapper clone that changes the graphics from Soda Pop but is in all other respects identical. Well, except that it does the size-changing correctly as you move so it’s not as funny. I think that both of them start too slow, and at least in the first level you generally only have one customer at a time. The fun in Tapper is that it’s frenetic. This is kinda boring.


21. Gigi Cooking
This looks like it was an online game, but there are so many “games for girls” in vaguely this style that I can’t differentiate it. Apparently there’s a reality TV star named Gigi? (Also, I hate that cooking games are specifically “for girls”. I played five different Cooking Mama games, thankyouverymuch.) In this game, dishes will come across and you need to pick the correct tool for each task, like the spatula to serve a fried egg or the peeler to peel potatoes. Wrong choices penalize your time meter. This includes Cooking Mama-style voiced announcements, which makes me think it’s a deliberate knock-off.

That was a really mixed bag in the Venture games!

And now for some “Table” games! (I’m guessing it’s supposed to imply they’re tabletop games or based on such? They aren’t, though.)


1. 100 Floor
Hey, it’s the guy in the red hat again! I’m certain all of his games go together, I just need to figure out the source. In this one, the screen scrolls upward and you need to jump down from platform to platform (if you fall off the bottom, you die), but some of the platforms move, some are trampolines, some drop after a few seconds, and some have spikes (that cost you hearts). Also, the laser across the top of the screen will hurt you, so while it pays to wait and see where you’re going to land, you can’t wait too long. It's all randomly-generated runner-style, so you can end up in situations where there aren’t any good options pretty easily.


2. Sub Warfare
And finally something else we might be able to attribute to Nice Code! This is very clearly a clone of Air Sea Battle for the Atari 2600 (the Game B section). Nice Code made at least two of those, Coast Guard and Pounce. You’re the destroyer at the top, you need to drop bombs on the submarines that zip along below you and sometimes shoot up. The “Ammo” meter is indicating that you can only fire three bombs at a time until one hits the bottom or a ship.


3. Bubble Destroyer
This feels like I should recognize it, but I’m not placing it. The girl in the blue cap can fire a rope (or something) straight upwards, and you’re trying to hit the bouncing balloons. When you hit one, it splits into two smaller balloons, and hitting the smallest (yellow) balloons destroys them. Clearing them all finishes the stage. If one hits you (not during your invincibility window, which is admittedly very long), you lose a life.


4. Balloon Shooting
Same girl, same movement, but this time you need to shoot the balloons to pop them. You get points for each balloon (and for presents that fall from the sky) and lose hearts if balloons escape. The point meter at the bottom tells you how many you need to finish the stage. At least some balloons transform when hit and therefore require multiple shots to pop. There are also power-ups, like clocks that freeze the balloons, triple-shots, and bombs that explode when shot.


5. Up Stairs
Red-hatted guy again. This time, he runs back and forth out of your control, and the bar above his head is a jump meter—the longer you hold A, the higher he jumps when you release it. You need to climb the platforms (which have conveyor belts and springs and other complications) and if you fall off the bottom you die. Also, running into balloons costs you health.

The bubble games are based off of Pang (also known as Super Buster Bros).

"Table" feels like a slantways translation of "platformer."

RT-55J said:

The bubble games are based off of Pang (also known as Super Buster Bros).

Click to expand...

Checking out Pang (which I'd never played): Yes, that is absolutely correct. With the whip-thing and everything.

6. Maze Combination
Pressing the buttons slides every block in that row as far as it can go, and you’re trying to arrange them in the same format as the picture above in the fewer number of moves. This wouldn’t have been out of place with the puzzle games—it’s an interesting idea, but a little slow-moving.


7. Precipice
You’re given a randomly-generated collection of tetrad-like pieces and need to fit them into the 16 blocks to build a continuous bridge from the man in the upper-left to the path in the lower-right. Once I got the sense of it, this also turned out to be a half-decent puzzle game. (I really feel like this must be online somewhere, but I can't find it and I'm frustrated.)


8. Monkeys
You’re the monkey in the bathing cap (?) on the right, and you can climb up and down shooting suction-cup arrows straight across. If you hit a banana, it gets carried to the monkey on the other side and they give you a heart. (If you miss the banana, or the banana doesn’t hit a monkey, nothing happens.) If you go too long without giving a monkey a banana, they get angry and leave. You need a certain number of hearts (ten in the first stage) to complete the level.


9. Happy Night
On this happy night, you’re a yellow bird trying to long-jump as many cars as possible for a high score. The yellow meter on the right is your flight meter, and you can double-jump back into the air as long as you have juice in it. Sometimes blue potions will float by and you can grab them to refill your flight meter; but sometimes hot air balloons will get in your way and knock you down. If you land on a car you collect your points and can continue jumping on a refilled meter, but if you’re hit by a car or land on the ground, it’s game over. The high score is 20,000 and my best didn’t crack 2,000, so I’m guessing you’re intended to play for a while.


10. Bumper Balls
You control the red balls, and each round you “fire” one to try to knock your opponent’s balls off the table. (I think you only get 5 balls to the opponent’s 6 because you always go first.) It’s basically marbles as I remember it from the schoolyard , if every marble was one of the fat “shooter” ones.


11. Castle Smasher
An Angry Birds clone with a more sensible premise: You’ve got a catapult and want to destroy a castle. You get a limited number of stones and set the angle and power each time you fire to try to take down the entire fort. (Is Angry Birds still a thing? I feel like it was a massive franchise with Lego tie-ins and a movie and everything but then I haven’t heard anything about it in years.)

If you want to try Castle Smashers, I found it online. (It’s credited to Donut Games, but nothing else in their catalogue looks familiar here.)

Remember Rolling Box from the Puzzle games? I found that on mathplayground.com, if anyone wants to try it. It's pretty decent, like many of the puzzle games.


12. Escape the Trap
The villain above you will drop blocks (up to and including tetrads) in an attempt to squash you. You need to dodge them when they fall and let them stack up so you can climb. Functionally it’s very similar to Jumping Ball from the Action section, though it’s different enough that I suspect two different developers just worked from the same idea.


13. Spin Match
Spin 2x2 sets of balls to make the pictures match (which is easier than it sounds). Later stages add colored balls that have to get to certain spots. I found a review of this as the Flash game Spin-n-Match, but I can't get the link to actually play the game itself because of an emulator issue.


14. Herculean Guy
I was trying to guess what makes this guy “herculean”, and wouldn’t you know, it’s actually because he’s really strong! You need to shove the blocks so they hit the enemies (and make them explode). If the enemies touch you, you die, so most of the challenge here is maneuvering so you get a block between you and them.


15. Cartoon Puzzle
Each stage is a 3x3 puzzle and a time limit; you can swap any two pieces.


16. Jumping Eggs
Pressing A causes the egg in the bottom basket to jump into the air. You want it to land in the next basket up, but the baskets are moving and their hitboxes are small. The bootleg wiki says this is a clone of The Amazing Dare-Dozen, and I’d argue it’s just the same game with a different name—like, it’s as close as any version of one of these games I’ve found online. (I didn’t see any other games that looked familiar in a cursory search of that site.)

Beowulf said:

14. Herculean Guy
I was trying to guess what makes this guy “herculean”, and wouldn’t you know, it’s actually because he’s really strong! You need to shove the blocks so they hit the enemies (and make them explode). If the enemies touch you, you die, so most of the challenge here is maneuvering so you get a block between you and them.

Click to expand...

Could they not get the rights to Greek mythology?

Johnny Unusual said:

Could they not get the rights to Greek mythology?

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Zeus' estate has been intestate for how many centuries now? This is why you need a will, especially when you have a bad relationship with your heirs!

17. X Training
The game tells you READY and then a zillion colored dots swarm in from all sides. You need to maneuver the red face in the center (I think it’s the same face from Jumping Ball, actually) to dodge them all, because touching any one of them will cause GAME OVER. I think “X” is just censoring “bullet hell” in the title, because this really does feel like training for bullet hell. I actually did decently once I realized you need to start moving immediately as the first wave converges or all of your exits will close. That said, you can try it yourself!


18. Super Pizza
You need to place the toppings so they match the right pizza as closely as possible—like, being off by a pixel means the difference between “Good!” and “Not Bad!”. This feels like another touchpad or mouse-based game; it doesn’t work well with the pointer and frankly it’s too exacting anyway.

I’ll also have you know I played through all of Yummy Super Pizza only to find that, no, none of the minigames were this.


19. Eat Bean
This is a Pac-Man clone, with notable changes including fewer ghosts (at least in the first few levels), no Power Pellets, and you start in a corner rather than the center. I feel like we determined in the bad translations thread that “Eat Bean” was the name of Pac-Man in Asian markets.


20. Block Construction
Tetrads (and three- and two-block pieces) come along on the conveyor on the bottom. You need to pick them up, rotate them and fit them in to fit up the puzzle board; but time is ticking down. The biggest problems, though, are that once you put in a piece it’s locked (so you can screw yourself fairly easily) and once you pick up a piece you can’t put it down. I grabbed a piece that could no longer fit into my board and then was just trapped until the timer wasted the rest of the round.


21. Fruit Family
Tap matching fruits with the magic wand to make them vanish and work towards clearing the screen. My issue here is that the hitbox for the wand is about a sprite-length to the left of it, where the head tips to when you press the button. There’s no time limit and there doesn’t seem to be a penalty for incorrect matches, though.

That last one is clearly a variant of Shanghai (and some other related city names), an old freeware staple originally played with Mahjong tiles.

Beowulf said:

17. X Training
The game tells you READY and then a zillion colored dots swarm in from all sides. You need to maneuver the red face in the center (I think it’s the same face from Jumping Ball, actually) to dodge them all, because touching any one of them will cause GAME OVER. I think “X” is just censoring “bullet hell” in the title, because this really does feel like training for bullet hell. I actually did decently once I realized you need to start moving immediately as the first wave converges or all of your exits will close. That said, you can try it yourself!

Click to expand...

Kinda neat. Best strat I found was to go up to the top and then down to the bottom to weave through the first couple, more structured waves, but at that point things get random and you have to improvise. I could regularly around 16k score but the "guiding bullet" that comes out around that time almost always got me. Managed to evade it once and got a high score of 24.4k before getting caught in a cluster.

Edit: oh dang, just noticed my 24.4k would be 10th highest on the leaderboard on that site? All the scores are from 2009-2012 though so who knows if it's even still functional. But evidently nobody lives that much longer, the highest scores are still under 40.

Beowulf said:

Remember Rolling Box from the Puzzle games? I found that on mathplayground.com, if anyone wants to try it. It's pretty decent, like many of the puzzle games.

Click to expand...

Stage 13 is a bastard but I finally got it. Really should be getting back to work now...

Beowulf said:

19. Eat Bean

Click to expand...

Perfect title, no notes. Somehow explaining it shatters the beautiful illusion.

I'm glad people are having fun playing along--I'm doing my best to find the games online where I can.


22. Wonderful Pompon
You’re the little reddish ball-dude in the center, and ball-dudes sneak in from the sides and come towards you. You can drop one bomb at a time and it explodes a few second later, destroying any nearby ball-dudes. Various power-ups (extra bombs, freezer, a potion that I didn’t see an effect from) spawn periodically. In the upper right, the blue numbers are your kills and the purple ones are you remaining bombs. 40 kills completes stage 1, but later stages appear to be the same.


23. Nimble Stone
The balls in the center all move back and forth. You need to maneuver the green block from the left to the right without touching any of them. There’s no life limit but there is a death counter. It’s vaguely Frogger-like, but clearly intended to require more “twitch” skills because there’s smooth motion and granular movement. I’d be shocked if this wasn’t a renamed Flash game, but I haven’t been able to find it.


24. Bombman
This is a Bomberman clone (starring the red-cap guy!) that manages to remove everything cool about Bomberman: The bombs just destroy the area around them, not a cross-shape. The power-ups are fewer and only last a short time. There are only two characters. Despite power-ups, you never seem to be able to drop more than one bomb at a time, so you can’t create chains. Bah!



25. Block Squad
So...in this game, you need to place the arrow blocks around the stage. (The first stage is a tutorial.) When you’re ready, click on the yellow TARDIS on the left and a kid will walk out. When he hits an arrow (or more specifically, the glittery bits in front of the arrow), it will fire him in that direction until he hits another arrow. Your goal is for him to headbutt the rabbit on the right. I feel like this must have a greater mythology behind it…or it’s using stolen sprites I don’t recognize.


26. Overmaze
The red block will slowly slide along the line. You need to move the big shiny block so that the red block doesn’t collide with it, and let the red block reach the green one. Something your box changes size, sometimes the line is invisible. Also, your box and the red block don’t move at the same speed, making this feel like an escort mission as a puzzle game. (Kongregate has this one online!)


27. Four Boxes
Colored gems emerge from the four sides in a clockwise sequence and stick to the center block (if you maneuver them correctly), but the colors are random. You need to match four of the same color to make them disappear. If a block goes off the side, game over. It’s a match-3 color game with the gimmick of coming in from all four sides in sequence rather than always dropping from above.

Fun note as we wrap up the Table games: I think I need to change my batteries again, as the battery alert has reappeared. I haven’t kept careful tabs on how long each charge lasts, but it’s at least a couple of hours of play time.

Beowulf said:

15. Pirate Landing
A vaguely Angry Birds style game: You tilt the cannon, fire out a boat, and then tilt the boat to try to stay level and go as far as you can. Distance gets you gold that you can spend on upgrades to your boat, though I’m not clear on what effect they actually have. (You really just want to be lucky enough to land on animals or land mines, which bounce you back into the air and keep you moving.)

Click to expand...

Digging back a few days here but this seems more like a launcher / launch game instead of like Angry Birds / Crush the Castle.

Torzelbaum said:

Digging back a few days here but this seems more like a launcher / launch game instead of like Angry Birds / Crush the Castle.

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Yes, I'll agree with that assessment; I'm just generally unfamiliar with launcher games. Got any good examples?

Beowulf said:

27. Four Boxes
Colored gems emerge from the four sides in a clockwise sequence and stick to the center block (if you maneuver them correctly), but the colors are random. You need to match four of the same color to make them disappear. If a block goes off the side, game over. It’s a match-3 color game with the gimmick of coming in from all four sides in sequence rather than always dropping from above.

Click to expand...

I can't decide if this should be the title of the most mundane Fire Emblem game or Zelda game.

Also, singing this song with new lyrics.

Beowulf said:

Yes, I'll agree with that assessment; I'm just generally unfamiliar with launcher games. Got any good examples?

Click to expand...

I don't play them all that much but I believe the ancient ancestor of them all is NANACA†CRASH!!

There are a lot of them on Flash game sites but unfortunately many of them aren't playable anymore. I think the older ones are still playable if you use Ruffle. I was able to play Hedgehog Launch on Kongregate using it.

You can also find these games for smartphones but those usually have ads and/or in-app purchases.

Hey other tyrants - do any of you have some Launcher Game recommendations for Beowulf?

I was going to say that Four Boxes was a clone of Zoop, but apparently the rules to that game are not remotely similar (aside from the "everything comes from 4 sides" thing).

Torzelbaum said:

I believe the ancient ancestor of them all is NANACA†CRASH!!

Click to expand...

Well that bizarre.

I didn't know until this thread that a launcher game was considered a different thing from a catapult-style game but makes sense.

Sport games! (...additional sports games, that is.)


1. Rally
A badly-made car racing game. It takes forever to move left and right along the track and maneuver around other cars (which are the only obstacles). It feels like an even worse version of Racing from the main list, just with different graphics and fewer attempts to make it into an interesting game.


2. GT Racing
But that’s okay, because there are a number of racing game options all in a row, here! Of course, this one isn’t really any better. The only obstacle is, again, running into other cars, and the steering wheel barely does anything on this monstrously wide track that you basically follow automatically.


3. Highway Racing
This one is top-down and gives you things to dodge. If you nudge something you just lose speed, but if you hit something dead on (generally the other cars, but there are also various road hazards) you explode and have to restart from a dead stop. There only appears to be one track, and you get a Game Over when you finish it. I’m reminded of Nice Code’s Racing Fighter, which was a clone of Spy Hunter (without the shooting).


4. Track Racing
Here you can choose your car for top-down racing, and though it’s graphically inferior to the other games, there’s an actual game to it! You can collect Mario Kart-style powerups as you circle the track (shields, speed boosts, missiles) and there are also zippers on the track itself. The walls of the track as very “sticky”, whereas the other racers bounce when you hit them, so most of the strategy is staying in your lane and just trying to not hit the sides. I think it’s intended to be similar to R.C. Pro-Am; and Nice Code apparently made a game with this name and meeting that description. So this might be theirs!


5. Motorboat
One-on-one motorboat racing! Avoid rocks, rafts and tiny islands while trying to hit zippers and collect stars, fish and coins for extra points. This one reminds me of Lightning/Deformable, the Nice Code clone of Street Racer.

Beowulf said:

Avoid rocks, rafts and tiny islands while trying to hit zippers and collect stars, fish and coins for extra points

Click to expand...

This might not be a simulator.

6. Mini Soccer
Despite looking like foosball, this plays more like Pong—you’re the player in pink on the left, and you can move up and down and press A to kick if the ball is in your tiny kick hitbox. (The ball passes through you otherwise. I’m not quite clear on what makes you lose hearts.) The goal is to collect all the coins from behind your opponent before he gets all of yours.


7. Table Football
This, on the other hand, is foosball and includes your choice of teams and player layouts. All of your players move up and down together (which is good, trying to track separate rods would be insane), and the hitboxes feel reasonable. The disadvantage over real foosball is that you can’t change the intensity of your “kicks”--there’s no hard kick or soft tap, though you can “angle” shots pretty well. Overall, this actually captures foosball decently. This online version of table soccer isn’t the same, but feels pretty close.


8. Archery
Unlike normal target archery, where the target stays still, this target gently moves back and forth across the field you need to move back and forth to aim at it. The wind changes after every shot and you need to compensate with where you move and how long you draw. You can’t actually aim the bow, mind you, you always fire straight ahead. I was not good at this.


9. Crazy Push
A four-character sumo game where you wander around trying to push the other players off the board. The AI is terrible, wandering in vague circles and only pushing you if you actively get in someone’s way. The later stages are different in whether you’re pushing the enemies into water or off into empty space. Power-ups, such as a whirlwind attack, a giant hammer, and healing hearts periodically appear and the AI seems to ignore them. If you win three rounds, it says You Win! And returns you to the main menu. I think this is the first game on this device I totally won. I think Crazy Push Off is this as a flash game, but it’s not running properly for me.


10. Motocross
Vaguely a clone of Excitebike, but only vaguely. You can move left and right on the screen (as you move at a consistent speed regardless) and jump. There are rocks that make you crash and lose time, power-ups that give you extra time, and ramps that make you auto-jump. When you reach the finish, you go to the next level, which is city rather than desert.

The player sprite in Motocross looks rather similar to Elastomania.