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

[Beowulf]

I can't wait for Beowulf's sequel, "What's on this three hundred dollar handheld? Nothing, unless you've purchased a five hundred dollar Playstation 5 first."

I have been so spoiled by retro handhelds over the past few years that buying a new, empty system of any sort is going to blow my mind. (I have a hard time seeing Sony's new handheld passing my five-game rule any time soon. Heck, the Vita never did.)

EDIT: I just went and actually looked at the announcements about the Q, and wow, it's worse than I thought. I figured it would stream and also have a game library of its own; but it's just a streaming device for the PS5, which I don't even own? Hard pass.

Not a rabbit, though.

I didn't take pictures of the other forms, but they look even more dragon-ish.

 

[Beowulf]

211. F22

And now for something completely different! This is a proper vertical shmup. I was able to hunt it down on TCRF: It’s a hack of the Famicom version of 1943. The initial release was by Inventor, and a later release by Waixing which removed the cutscenes (which is what I think I have here).


212. Abscondee

Another of the maze-obstacle games; you play as an alien and try to collect items in the level while avoiding obstacles along the way. Also called Adventurer, Panda, and Super Mohica.


213. Agile Mice

As predicted, this is a hack of Mowing (#145).


214. Alone

Another Gallagant (#28) hack.


215. Archer

Not to be confused the “The Archer”, this is a Buzz Bombers hack, like we first saw as Man in Red (#42). The character in this is a centaur, so they really could have differentiated it by calling this “Centaur Archer” or something.


216. Sky Dreamer

This is another Nature Clan game, and this one is a platformer. You need to jump across a lot of floating islands while avoiding enemies (but you have a life bar!). The wiki claims that you can collect fairies and get power-ups from statues; I couldn’t get far enough to find either, because this is painful to play. The screen tearing and slowdown are particularly terrible. Your hitbox extends well outside your sprite, and most of the jumps seem to be blind jumps. This was also released as Sky Zone.


217. Skywing

This is another new-to-us vertical shmup where you control an airplane shooting enemies and collecting items along the way. It feels more like a standard cheap Nice Code game—the hotbox is too big, the controls are too sluggish, and the power-ups don’t do anything. Also called Battle Plan.


218. Zooming

A dodge-em-up where you’ve got a ship flying through space, collecting blue orbs and avoiding flamethrowers and random aliens. There are turrets that shoot at you, but you have no ability to shoot back. Originally released as Zoom, where you’re more clearly a robot.


219. Fishing

Though it shares the same name, this is a completely different game from Fishing (#190), and doesn’t appear to be a hack. It’s not the hack of Magic Pond (#85) called Fishing, either. “Fishing” is clearly a very popular name!


220. Basketball

And clearly so is “Basketball”, because this is not a hack or duplicate of Basketball (#84), it’s a different game where the hoop moves around and you need to shoot the ball from a first-person perspective. (There are no other players.)

 

[Violentvixen]

Season Garden

The title made me think this would be a Harvest Moon/Farming game knockoff, but then I realized that's probably too complex for this type of system.

 

[Beowulf]

221. Mahjong
222. Roulette
223. Craps
224. Oldmaid

Four table games of varying quality; hopefully you know the rules from other sources.


225. Shrew Mouse

A competitive snakes game originally released as Snafu. (The key is just to box your opponent into a smaller space than you have, and then not mess up.) There’s also a version called Star. The original Snafu port only has one CPU opponent, but the hacked versions (including this) have two opponents.


226. Crazy Eightes

And another card game, this one with a misspelled title.


227. Knock Time

A hack of the whack-a-mole game Rural Goblin (#202).


228. The Hacker

This is another hack of Dragon Co.'s Felix the Cat. We saw one of these as Super Hero (#10). In this one, the juxtaposition of your character looking like Neo from The Matrix but dying in a wacky fashion every time he gets too close to a clown-monster is really striking.


229. Hard Mission

A vertical shmup which makes up for having a very large hitbox by having a life meter. The only power-up I could find was rapid-fire, which was reasonably useful. I couldn’t find anything about this game’s provenance online and it doesn’t seem close enough to any of the Nice Code standards to be an obvious hack.


230. Adventurer

Remember Worm Dream (#69)? This is another Pindable Crystal Ball hack, like that was.

 

[Kirin]

In this one, the juxtaposition of your character looking like Neo from The Matrix but dying in a wacky fashion every time he gets too close to a clown-monster is really striking.

That sounds kind of delightful honestly.

 

[Beowulf]

Whole lot of variant-repeats in this batch.

231. Labyrinth

A hack of Burrow Explorer (#175).


232. Star Fighter

A hack of Astrosmash, which we first saw as Earth Fighter (#74). This one has you as a tank shooting up at spaceships.


233. Trooper

And this is ALSO an Astrosmash hack! This one has you as a single trooper, shooting down enemy paratroopers.


234. Baseball

I’m reasonably certain this is Nice Code’s port of Intellivision’s World Championship Baseball, hacked to make it much nicer-looking. (It’s an Atari-level game with SNES-level graphics!)


235. Soccer

Clearly made by the same folks who did Table Tennis (#24) as it shares the same style of title screen and country-choice screen. And then it’s just first-person shooting into the goal.


236. Blobman

A variant of Bug Catcher (#108), where you’re a beaker-man in a sewer, collecting colored drops.


237. Silent Hunter

Originally Sub Hunt; you’re using a submarine to try to sink an enemy sub (or just a ship; it isn’t quite clear because I’m not sure what each of the different tasks represents or how to do them).


238. Cowpoke

Another variant of Spider-Man, which we first saw as Warrior (#68). No, I don’t know why the cowboy has a web-gun.


239. Robot

Yet another version of Gallagant (#28). You’re a robot shooting missiles up out of your head at the various enemy jets.


240. Fairy

And a variant of the horizontal shooter Vigilant (originally seen as Poleaxe, #50) starring a fairy. You fight bees, goblin-flies, ghosts...and cannons.

 

[Beowulf]

241. Hearts

The card game hearts. I remember the rules of this one!


242. Hurry Burry

Interestingly, this is a clone of Zeek the Geek that steals a bunch of graphics from the original. The music, on the other hand, is from Adventures of Lolo 2. This was also released as Soy Bean Story.


243. Radish Field

A hack of Assart (with a rabbit and carrots, not radishes!), which we first saw as Crystal (#72).


244. Masked Man3

Nice Code made a third Spider-Man game (that is, Spider-Man 3) that was hacked into this. You need to save people from a burning building by climbing up the building and rescuing them through the window.


245. Bird Eggs

You control a small bird who must collect eggs while avoiding bald eagles, all in a top-down view. It feels like it was hacked from a vertical shmup into a dodge-em-up game. Credit in that this has a pretty cool scrolling background.


246. Goblet Tower

Controlled by a pointer, it’s a Tower of Hanoi game with rows of goblets you need to stack up.


247. Forest Adventure

The original Nature Clan version of the platformer we first saw as Jumping Weald (#38).


248. Mouse Hero

The original version of Heroes Mice (#31).


249. Music Moment

The goal of this game is to collect the falling music notes to play a song (which is a tune Nice Code used elsewhere, including as the music in Octopus); this task is actually impossible to do, but there’s no penalty for failure.


250. Texas Hold

Texas hold-em poker!

 

[RT-55J]

242. Hurry Burry

Interestingly, this is a clone of Zeek the Geek that steals a bunch of graphics from the original.

Excuse me?

Next you're gonna tell me this has a clone of Paganitzu or the Adventures of MicroMan or some nonsense like that.

 

[Beowulf]

251. Panda

I first thought this was the hack of Abscondee (#212) called Panda, but I was wrong! It’s a platformer called Panda Adventure made by ABAB Soft. It’s entertainingly bad—there’s no screen scrolling, so each “stage” is a single screen where you have to avoid birds, stomp on a ground animal and/or jump over a hole.


252. Happy Adventure

A hack of upwards-shooting game The Archer, first seen as Hunter Alone (#81).


253. Power Robot

The original version of the platform-jumping game we first saw as Spring Jester (#61).


254. Red Dog

This appears to be a betting game called “Acey-Deucey” that I’m not familiar with.


255. Link

This is a solitaire variant, with the pointer controller.

It’s not really related, but it’s so good I want to share: I want everybody to read about this backport/bootleg version of Link’s Awakening (“Feng Yin Dao”) that Nice Code made. There’s an Any% run on Youtube if you want to see it in action, too. (Disappointingly, I doesn't appear on any of my devices.)


256. Baseball

A decidedly different game than Baseball (#234), this one is done in a much higher quality faux-3D with voiced calls while you’re batting.


257. Slap Jack

The card game. You watch patiently until a jack comes up, then press A to slap it before the CPU does.


258. Sudoku

I think the controls for this got messed up—there doesn’t seem to be a way to change which number you’re putting into a cell; you’re just stuck assigning 1s. Which is a shame, it seems like a pretty decent set of Sudoku puzzles otherwise.


259. Fisher

A variant of The Farmer, first seen as Arena (#172).


260. Fire Base

A Gallagant (#28) hack, and if I recall correctly, this was the very first Nice Code game we saw on the original thread, before I even learned what Nice Code was!

 

[Beowulf]

261. Fighter
Another hack of Buzz Bombers, first seen as Man in Red (#42).

262. Eidolons Revenge
Another hack of Hammer & Nail, first seen as Irrigate (#35).

263. Defensive
Another hack of Gallagant (#28).

264. Baccarat
Seriously, my knowledge of card game rules is seriously lacking. I think I overwrote it with D&D rules at an early age.

265. Corridor
Another hack of Pobble, first seen as Speed Man (#60).

266. Convection
Another hack of Gate, first seen as Teleport (#93).

267. Bumbee
A more “advanced” hack of Vigilant (first seen as Poleaxe, #50). You play as that bumblebee and you spit projectiles at your foes. The triple shot is really useful. (Also, the walls don’t kill you in this version.)

268. Volleyball
Original created as Spiker: Super Pro Volleyball and then hacked into two different games called Volleyball and also Beach Volleyball.
Ironically, an official Atari plug & play mistakenly uses this game, listed in the menu as “Realsports Volleyball” (which is an actual Atari 2600 game).

269. Bugbear
A hack of the whack-a-mole game Toad in the Hole (#162).

270. Bug's War
And we saw this as Undersea Arena (#210).

 

[RT-55J]

That Bumbee title illustration is lifted from Maya the Bee (the GBA game, at least).

 

[Kirin]

And the volleyball illustration is totally a trace of the main character from Love Hina, on the cover of the first manga volume.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

267. Bumbee

Your reminder that Waldermar Bonsels, creator of Maya the Bee, was pro-Nazi.

 

[Beowulf]

271. Bubble
The original Astrosmash-like we first saw as Falling (#75).

272. Animals Rescue
There’s nothing in the bootleg wiki about this one: Animals wander down from the top, and you need to press left or right to change the arrow and get them to walk to the correct habitat.

273. Angel
A hack of the Kaboom! clone Mad Xmas (#41).

274. Space Destroyer
According to the title screen, this is “Space Destroyer Exploration,” though it’s not like there’s any exploration involved. It’s a fairly simple vertical shmup, fast-moving and hard and without any power-ups that I could find. The backgrounds are single screens that repeat and then randomly switch, so planets seem to teleport around.

275. Dragon Den
Another hack of The Archer, first seen as Hunter Alone (#81).

276. Dune War
Originally created as Space Hawk and then hacked into this and Star Attack. You have a dude with a rocket launcher who runs through the featureless desert and controls like a tank (A fires, holding B moves, and left and right rotate you), fighting planes that fly by and shoot projectiles that you can shoot down.

277. Edacity Snakes
A slow-moving, low-quality snakes game. You have one life and do all the usual snake things.

278. Garden War
Yet another hack of Gallagant (#28).

279. Grot Kid
Another version of Cub Adventure, first seen as Devil Palace (#113).

280. Hit Mouse
The original of the whack-a-mole game we first saw as Knocking (#39).

 

[Torzelbaum]

276. Dune War

I see we have another case of faulty font follies here because to me that looks like "Oune War".

 

[Beowulf]

281. Antiquarium
The original weird fishing game first seen as Magic Pond (#85).

282. Aimless
Another hack of Space Battle, first seen as Harbor (#79).

283. Jungly Guy
A hack of Tactful (#181).

284. Aether Fighter
Yet another hack of Gallagant (#28).

285. Lawn Mower
A hack of Mowing (#145).

286. Memory Test
This is a simple matching game, but I think we’ve hit the beginning of the back-end new games we haven’t seen before. (The other handhelds often did this too—because you can wrap backwards, they put a bunch of non-repeats at the very end.) There’s a variant of this game called Partner.

287. Paigow
A poker variant I’m not familiar with.

288. Spinball
A minecart/racing game where you need to follow a maze-like track with a time limit. I think they might have been trying to make a really low-quality clone of Sonic Spinball? Maybe? This was apparently made for a JungleTac device called the Tiltboy, which I’ll talk about more in my next entry.

289. Puzzle
A very basic four-by-four klotski puzzle, in case you didn’t have your copy of Final Fantasy handy.

290. Penta Base
A hack of the non-moving soldier game Five Days (#76).

And the final post is almost all games we haven’t seen before. Get excited!

 

[Beowulf]

291. Bingo Zap
You have 60 seconds to try to get the ball into the glowing hole (and none of the others) as many times as possible. The ball controls like a labyrinth game, with weird momentum. I have no idea where the name “bingo zap” came from.

Apparently this game (and a number of the following) was produced by JungleTac for a device called the Tiltboy. The Tiltboy is an uncommon plug & play where the controller is physically rotated to control movement. This release is the only major VT02 production by JungleTac (excluding those from the unknown affiliated developer). Runner Car (#200) was also made for this device, as was Spinball (#288) that I noted last time.

292. Birdie Nest
Here’s a really weird one: You’re balancing the bird on that dotted line as it drops eggs (which you need to catch) and poops (which you don’t). You lose lives if you miss eggs or catch poops, but get an instant game over if the bird touches the bushes. Also a Tiltboy game.

293. Pinball Track
Another labyrinth variation where you need to move the ball along the tracks without falling into the holes. In this case you need to collect keys to open gates. I’m guessing there’s a stage ending, but several of the holes seem to be much wider than the sprites indicate and appear to be impassable. Also for the Tiltboy.

294. Insect Chase
Move the net around the screen and catch the butterflies. Each time you snag one, the game announces “You get it!” Each five you catch is a new “mission” and more decoy bugs are added to the stage. If you catch one of those, you lose a life and are told “You lost!” The net itself has rolling-ball labyrinth physics to keep things exciting. And I think some of those graphics are from Link’s Awakening. And yep, it’s from the Tiltboy.

295. Strafe
A different hack of the non-moving soldier game Five Days (#76).

296. Aero Engine
Horizonal shmup with a Gradius-clone feel to it. (The Bootleg wiki explicitly calls it a Gradius clone!) This is another Tiltboy game, though I have no idea how the controls worked in that case. Apparently there’s an alternate version of this game called Alien Attack.

297. The Farmer
The original of the game we saw as Fisher (#259).

298. Last Cabra
A vertical shmup. Has some issues with screen tearing and enemies appearing out of nowhere, but also has a decent set of power-ups and actual bosses. Another for the Tiltboy, and I really don’t get how the controls worked for that.

299. Ocean Quest
A racing boat game (hold A to go fast) that feels like a horizonal version of Pobble. You need to collect fuel canisters to increase your time gauge and you can bump other boats without harm. (You seem to et points from passing other boats, which are infinite.) And yes, it was on the Tiltboy.

300. Motor Rally
And finally, a simple motorcycle racing game. Hold A to go fast, bumping other cycles makes you stop (though you don’t explode or anything cool like that). This was the final Tiltboy title, so the entirety of that system’s games are on this device.

And with 75 posts and 520 games, we’ve reached the end of both My Arcade Go Gamer handhelds! Woohoo! Let’s wrap everything up.

 

[Beowulf]

Okay, so, the My Arcade Go Gamer Retro, by the numbers:

Of our 300 games, there are actually no exact duplicates! There are hacks and re-release variants, but the same rom never appears twice.

The big winner for most variants is Gallagant, with 8 different versions. Vigilant is the runner-up with 5. Then there are four variants each of Buzz Bombers, Astrosmash, Polar Bat, The Archer, and The Farmer.

There were 99 titles that matched games on the FC500 (though in some cases they were the VT03 versions of games we had in VT02 there); and 103 matched the GamesPower, with the same caveat. There were 87 games on this that I don’t think we’d ever seen elsewhere in any form, though more than a dozen of those were card and table games.

As you’d probably guess, 283 games appear to have been produced by Nice Code Software. Five were “unconfirmed” Nice Code games; ten were from the JungleTac Tiltboy; one was by JungleTac’s unknown developer; and one was definitely by Cube Technology.

I finished this leg of the project on the same set of batteries that I started with; whereas I needed three sets to get through the first leg. Apparently this version of the hardware is much more energy-efficient; though to be fair I also spent less time playing the games because it was easy to recognize the duplicates.

The My Arcade Go Gamer Retro is really the Nice Code Museum handheld. If you want to play pretty much anything Nice Code ever made, it’s very likely to be here and in the prettier SNES-level graphics VT03 form. That said, there is very little that Nice Code produced that’ll actually entertain you for more than a few minutes. They produced a lot of Atari-level casual games and they made attempts at things like platformers that generally didn’t pan out. As we noted last time, they’re really great at titles…but that was most of their skillset. Honestly, your $10 is better spent on something like an FC500 because you’ll get a decent selection of actually-good NES games and then a Nice Code collection. (Or go $30 on a PowKiddy Q90 that supports save states and also plays the GB, GBC, GBA, and GG libraries and can kinda do SNES and Genesis, too.) Could this entertain your kids on a car trip when there were no other options? Probably. Does it feel mean to hand them this when comparable handhelds that play Super Mario Bros exist? Absolutely.

I would like to shout-out to @Kirin for calling my attention to these in the first place and providing me with this ridiculous spring project; and to thank everyone at Talking Time for your patience and attention to this ridiculousness.

And having completed this project, the two My Arcade Go Gamer handhelds no longer need to live in my house. Would you like them to be yours? Send me a message and express your interest in either:

• My Arcade Go Gamer Classic – The Family Sport 220-in-1 (black), a collection of Wii mockups, flash game clones, terrible educational titles and potentially entertaining puzzle games.
• My Arcade Go Gamer Retro – The Nice Code Museum (white), an exploration of graphically-improved versions of all of Nice Code’s ports, clones and original messes.

Free to a good home!

Thanks for reading!

 

[Kirin]

Haha, you’re very welcome and congrats on getting through it all! Good to know what I dodged spending twenty bucks on.

(I’m almost tempted to volunteer to adopt the Retro, but honestly I should probably do better things with my time than trying to play Nice Code games.)

 

[Johnny Unusual]

283. Jungly Guy
A hack of Tactful (#181).

This game title is definitely not the most Homestar Runner-sounding but it's fairly that.

 

[Violentvixen]

292. Birdie Nest
Here’s a really weird one: You’re balancing the bird on that dotted line as it drops eggs (which you need to catch) and poops (which you don’t). You lose lives if you miss eggs or catch poops, but get an instant game over if the bird touches the bushes. Also a Tiltboy game.

I don't know why this one seems the weirdest to me of all the things you've listed over the course of this but it does.

This was super fun, thank you for making this thread!