What the heck is on this $10 Retro Game handheld? Let’s find out!

[Beowulf]

I'm just going to come out and say that the worst part of Famiclones is the unpleasant "sproink" noise that too many of their games make. You've heard it, I'm sure. It makes you cringe slightly and sends a chill up your spine every time it rings out. It's the ring tone everyone's phone has in Hell.

...I think it might bother you more than it bothers me. Honestly, though I try games with the sound on, most of them blend together with eminently forgettable chiptunes.

This looks like a sprite error for Seaport Guard.... but it's a great name anyway.

I hadn't realized that (I was confused what Guarl could possibly be), but yes, I absolutely think you're right.

 

[Beowulf]

453. SEA WOLF

First-person submarine shooter. Rotate to fins ships in your radar, then shoot them. Most of them drop torpedo refills. I’m not sure how the game ends; none of the ships seem to shoot back. By Nice Code, also released as Warfront.

454. SEICROSS

A combination racer/shooter that we first saw hacked into Gradirs (#320). This is another game where the hitboxes make a lot more sense in the original than in the hack.

455. SEIFUKU HEN SHIS

Another one for the list of “Mahjong games I don’t understand.” The title would imply that this is Seifuku Hen - Shisen Mahjong, or Mahjong Trap, but the visuals don’t line up to screenshots I found of that.

456. DONKEY KONG JR M

We saw the Japanese version of this as #374. This appears to just be the US version.

 

[Kirin]

I'm kind of fascinated by the weird aesthetics of Seicross. Here's a less blurry capture of basically the same screen:

 

[Octopus Prime]

Precious little of Seicross was ever especially coherent.

Kind of one of those games where they were throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see if anything stuck

 

[Dracula]

I like it a lot for that reason. There's dinosaur bones that shoot lasers at you, and sometimes you have to shoot through a giant mushroom to rescue a little waving man.

 

[Torzelbaum]

The only time I had ever played Seicross was back when I rented it in the 80s and I think I have forgotten just about everything about it but apparently your race opponents are alien grays on some kind of space Vespa.

(I also remember putting in a game genie code for invincibility and racking up a massive score by running into / shooting obstacles.)

 

[ArugulaZ]

The arcade versions of both Seicross and MagMax use line scrolling to give the playfields more depth. Naturally, these were omitted from the home versions.

Also, what kind of music does Nichibutsu pair with a white-knuckle race for survival on a desolate science-fiction landscape? A jaunty tune you might hear when a man with a waxed mustache takes his bicycle with an oversized front wheel out for a ride. "I simply cannot wait to reach the domicile of my sweetheart Nell, so we can gather daisies while sitting upon a hill in the field!"

 

[Beowulf]

457. DOOR DOOR

You need to run past doors to open them, lure the monsters in, then run past them again to close them. You can jump to dodge monsters and go up and down ladders in later stages to avoid them. (And I want to call out the tutorial first stage as an awesome thing.) This was one of the first games produced by Enix, which apparently opened the door to them creating Dragon Quest.

458. SKY KID

You’re the Red Baron, and need to fly around destroying enemy planes and installations. A shoots, and B lets you flip backwards to get behind enemies, which is cute. It’s otherwise a fairly standard side-scrolling shooter, though it oddly scrolls in the wrong direction.

459. SLALOM

A skiing game that functions like a runner game—you need to avoid obstacles and try to maintain speed to beat a certain clear time for each stage.

460. DRAGON DEN

You’re a ninja (or possibly a tech-knight? It’s hard to tell) and need to fire flaming arrows straight up at the dragon heads while they drop energy balls and acid drops on you. Turning both heads gray lets you move to the next stage.

This was based on a Nice Code bootleg version of the Xbox game The Archer. It was hacked into this, and also released as Happy Adventure, Hunter Alone, and Phantom Archer.

461. DUNE WAR

Clearly an attempt to mimic a twin-stick shooter with Famicom controls, and that really didn’t work. You rotate with the cross-key and need to hold B to move (and A to shoot) as planes come by with bombs or energy balls or something that you need to shoot down. Nice Code ported the Intellivision game Space Hawk, then hacked it to create this and also Star Attack.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I always assumed the guy from Slalom was wearing little footy pyjamas.

Also, it was the last Black Box game.

That’s one interesting fact and amusing anecdote for the same game!

 

[RT-55J]

Regarding Slalom, I think it's hard for us to realize now how gutsy of a business move it was for a bunch of successful British Speccy developers to pivot completely into making games for a system that had yet to be released there, and would never quite prove to be wildly successful there either.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Maybe not *wildly*, but Battletoads still stands out, and Wizards and Warriors got more sequels than it really warranted

 

[Kirin]

I think RT was just talking about how the NES was never as wildly successful in Europe as it was in the US and Japan.

 

[RT-55J]

yeah that's what I meant

 

[Octopus Prime]

Then. Insider my previous statement revoked

 

[Phantoon]

I think RT was just talking about how the NES was never as wildly successful in Europe as it was in the US and Japan.

As the guy with an NES in my friend group I can attest that it really wasn't

 

[Dracula]

I love Door Door. Its origin story is fascinating but it's also just a very solid little action puzzler, and the game does a great job of explaining its mechanics through those little pre-stage vignettes. Also has one of my top five favorite package arts on the console:

 

[Kirin]

That is frickin' adorable.

 

[Sarge]

That tech knight is definitely ripped straight from Wai Wai World 2.

 

[Purple]

Amazing. Have I truly witbessed, here in the 21st century, a discussion of Slalom with nary a Simpsons reference?

 

[Octopus Prime]

Looks that way; I’m seeing nothing at all.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

 

[ShakeWell]

457. DOOR DOOR

You need to run past doors to open them, lure the monsters in, then run past them again to close them. You can jump to dodge monsters and go up and down ladders in later stages to avoid them. (And I want to call out the tutorial first stage as an awesome thing.) This was one of the first games produced by Enix, which apparently opened the door to them creating Dragon Quest.

I think you mean "apparently opened the door door to them creating Dragon Quest."

 

[Beowulf]

I think you mean "apparently opened the door door to them creating Dragon Quest."

I was trying to be subtle with my pun, thankyouverymuch.

 

[Beowulf]

462. SOCCER

As far as I can tell, this is the original NES soccer. (It’s yet another soccer game that isn’t Kunio-Kun and also isn’t Power Soccer. It feels a little primitive, unsurprisingly.)

463. SODOKU

This is either somebody’s homebrew or a bootleg game. It’s a cool concept and I generally enjoy sudoku puzzles, except I couldn’t figure out how to change numbers (I could only put 1s into squares) so I couldn’t complete even the easiest of these.

464. MOAI KUN

Angry Bird (#131) was a hack of this. There are clearly rules to the puzzles that I don’t understand, as I can’t figure out how to do anything with boulders except kill myself.

465. EIDOLON S REVENG

This is a Nice Code game where you need to flatten the dancing stars into the Xs. We saw it as Hammer and Nail (#246), but this clearly has the superior title.

466. SON SON

Somewhere between a runner and a shoot-em-up; you need to jump between the various platform levels and shoot the enemies before they touch you while collecting fruits and things. I don’t think there are separate levels or an actual ending of any sort—it just seems to keep repeating.

 

[MetManMas]

Son Son was not Capcom's first arcade game, but being released in 1984 (in the arcades) it was definitely amongst their earliest ones. It's a looping forever type game based on Journey to the West and it has some pretty cool sprites and music.

Kinda gets repetitive quickly but it's still pretty neat.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I didn’t know there was a Famicom port.

Im not surprised, but it’s news to me!

 

[Beowulf]

467. GOBLIN

Unplayable Flappy! It’s been a while since we’ve seen any of the big repeats. The folks who made this seem to have populated the very end of the list (which it’s easy to scroll back to from the start—much faster to reach than anything in the 250-300 range) with real games, even if some are duplicated elsewhere.

468. ENCHANTER

A Nice Code game with a similar engine to Dragon’s Den. (The same engine, according to the bootleg wiki.) Your wizard can only shoot upwards; you need to shoot the various bats that fly by while avoiding the invincible ghost spiders that drop from the windows. This was also released as Polar Bat, Ghost Palace, and Panzer Attack.

469. SPELUNKER

I had heard of this game and it seemed like an interesting thing to try, but it fights every platformer reflex I’ve ever had, in that falling more than half the height of your character kills you! I don’t know if it was intended to be disastrously hard, but boy, it was for me!

470. SPRING WORLD

A Nice Code original. Maneuver the Nature Clan guy around the maze, avoiding the boulders, sparks and energy balls that bounce between springs. Collect all the stars, gems and coins in each stage before time runs out. Also released as Cool Baby and Swing.

471. SPY HUNTER

An extremely fast-moving dodge-em-up. The fact that you can shoot is deceptive, because like in real life, a disabled car becomes an obstacle you can crash into, rather than vanishing. (This mostly just makes me want to play Vice: Project Doom again.)

 

[Dracula]

SonSon is one of Micronics' better FC ports, in my opinion. It's got lots of sprite flicker and hitbox weirdness, as is usual for their output, but it works perfectly well otherwise and I've had some good fun with it.

I first heard about the game because of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, which had SonSon as a playable character, and reinterpreted as a girl:

She could turn into a big monke and shoot energy beams out of her mouth, like a certain other Journey to the West expy.

Spelunker is one of my favorite Famicom kusoge. It's infamous in Japan for how punishing it is to play. But the game is designed around its unfairness, so if you can get into the swing of it, it's a good time.

 

[Kirin]

464. MOAI KUN

Angry Bird (#131) was a hack of this. There are clearly rules to the puzzles that I don’t understand, as I can’t figure out how to do anything with boulders except kill myself.

Apropos of nothing, I'm just delighted by the Moai head's journey from mysterious South Pacific statue to inexplicable SF shoot-em-up donut laser emplacement to adorable platformer mascot.

469. SPELUNKER

I had heard of this game and it seemed like an interesting thing to try, but it fights every platformer reflex I’ve ever had, in that falling more than half the height of your character kills you! I don’t know if it was intended to be disastrously hard, but boy, it was for me!

Yeah, as Drac just mentioned it's pretty infamous, *especially* if you come to it with any sort of modern platformer expectations. It's really a holdover from old PC mechanics from before platform games got at all friendly in terms of play control and mechanics.

471. SPY HUNTER

An extremely fast-moving dodge-em-up. The fact that you can shoot is deceptive, because like in real life, a disabled car becomes an obstacle you can crash into, rather than vanishing. (This mostly just makes me want to play Vice: Project Doom again.)

I have a lot of nostalgia for Spy Hunter, but it's for the Apple II version. I'm not sure I ever played the NES port and I've got a feeling it's a good bit clunkier.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Drac: I think the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 SonSon is actually the granddaughter of the original... which I guess makes the SonSon from the PC Engine sequel her father.