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What the heck is on this $10 Retro Game handheld? Let’s find out!
- Thread starter Beowulf
- Start date
Since this is using a NoaC (right?), I feel like the game selection here is only pulling from a narrow selection of cartridge hardware, but I can't quite narrow it down. There have been NROM games, MMC1 games, and MMC3 games, which covers the vast majority of the system's library. Maybe extra RAM on the cart is an issue (and why we haven't seen SMB3).
Given that this doesn't quite match, but it very similar to, several of the game lists on Famiclone multicarts, I have to assume that there's a common list everybody involved in this industry tends to work from. Sometimes they rearrange them, either to look different, or put their favorite games at the front, or to get rid of things they know are repeats; but it's mostly the same list and nobody wants to go to the effort to start fresh. The roms that are Adventure Island copies might have gone wrong in this iteration, or got mixed up and "defaulted" in two completely different iterations of copying.
Having just pulled the No-Intro set because I realized my own NES list was woefully incomplete: That's full of obvious duplicates. You'd have to go through and pull out everything that had 2-5 copies of the same game (US/EU/JA, or v1.0 and v1.1, etc.) if you didn't want anyone to think you padded your numbers in a dumb way.
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108. CORRIDOR
I can’t find any references to this: Apparently you’re flying a plane with limited fuel and you need to collect floating treasure boxes while avoiding other planes and birds. I think going fast enough gets you something, but I couldn’t go fast and also avoid birds.
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109. SPARTAN X
It took me a minute to realize that this was the Japanese version of Kung Fu. Did you know this was originally intended as a tie-in to a Jackie Chan film? (As we go through the deep cuts of the NES library, I’m reminded of being at friends’ houses in third or fourth grade and them having these games, which I hadn’t played before or since. I think Jason had this one.)
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110. TETRIS
This is knockoff Tetris.
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111. TETRIS2
This is real Tetris! (The Soviet Mind Game.) I’m entertained they put them next to each other like this. I love Tetris, but the Game Boy version is my quintessential version of the game.
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112. THE LEGEND OF KA
The Legend of Kage falls under arcade/NES deep cuts that I’ve never played before, but are pretty decent. Kage has a really impressive range of motion and set of skills—you can throw shuriken in eight directions, control your jump height, and climb the trees. It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be much goal besides “kill lots of ninjas for a high score”, but this is pretty good.
jpfriction
(He, Him)
I rented Legend of Kage a few times growing up. Not much to it, as you say, and pretty easy to blow through in an hour, but pretty fun for a 7 year old or whatever who is bad at games.
There is in fact progression through Legend of Kage, it’s just not immediately obvious because the levels are all staggeringly long and also, IIRC, they scroll right to left instead of left to right.
Also, theres only two and they keep repeating with different colour schemes
Also, theres only two and they keep repeating with different colour schemes
112. THE LEGEND OF KA
The Legend of Kage falls under arcade/NES deep cuts that I’ve never played before, but are pretty decent. Kage has a really impressive range of motion and set of skills—you can throw shuriken in eight directions, control your jump height, and climb the trees. It’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be much goal besides “kill lots of ninjas for a high score”, but this is pretty good.
A lot of people really seem to hate Legend of Kage, but I always thought it was fine, if not a bit short. There's a pseudo-sequel, Demon Sword, on both NES and in the arcade which is largely considered better. There's a true sequel for the DS, Legend of Kage 2, which I recall people liking, but I slept on and still haven't played.
There are three stages, but one of them is just "keep jumping up."
It looks like a bootleg NES port of River Raid? @Beowulf, does it just scroll up, or in multiple directions, because the other thing I thought of was Raid on Bungling Bay.
It just scrolls up, as far as I could get.
Can you shoot? If so then it definitely sounds like River Raid to me. (It seems only slightly similar to the other Raid.)
The pretty grating conversion to 8-bit sound probably didn't do it any favors. It's a very screechy game on NES.
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113. TINY TOON
This is another weird one I couldn’t find mentions of online: I don’t think it’s related to Tiny Toon Adventures; it feels like an arcade game. You move to the right, collecting fruits that sometimes appear and throwing something (Bullets? A boomerang? Bananas?) at the various monsters. The “P” that starts at 9 appears to be a health level, as it decreases when you get hit by most enemies, but there are a few that knock you out in a single hit. There are also smoke clouds that raise it. The level seems set (not random), but I couldn’t get far enough to see if it has an endpoint or other levels.
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114. TWIN BEE
Vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up. I figured out that the bells you can bounce out of the clouds were points/powerups; I couldn’t figure out what the “bomb shot” was actually useful for.
115. HOT BOY
Master Higgins is a hot boy, definitely. It’s Adventure Island 3. Again.
I did some tallying: So far, we have 4 instances of Adventure Island 2 (the Mario hack, the actual game, and two glitchy copies) and 4 instances of Adventure Island 3 (the actual game and 3 copies). I don’t know if this indicates anything, but the instances of mislabeled 2 and 3 seem to alternate. We’re at 10 Adventure Island games so far.
Compare against 15 games that either originally starred Mario or have Mario hacked into them. 24-in-1 Contra is still winning, but I don’t think it’ll take the prize.
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116. VOLGUARD2
Horizontal-scrolling shoot-em-up, with a “power” bar that seems to increase from hitting enemies and decrease from missing shots, but can be refilled significantly by the zeppelins you can dock with. Collision damage doesn’t seem to decrease it but also doesn’t always instantly kill you. Man, I wish I had manuals for more of these.
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117. WATER PIPE
This is a vaguely Tetris-like setup for connecting the spigot to the bucket by placing randomly-dropped pipe pieces and trying to do it with the fewest pieces/with the most time remaining. It’s simple but pretty fun, actually.
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118. 4 MAHJONG
Yeah, that’s Mahjong. I have no idea how to play mahjong and I can’t read Chinese.
The Bomb Shot in Twinbee is for blowing up ground based enemies targets, as in Xevious. Point in fact the whole game is basically Xevious with a bit more going on in terms of having actual levels and weapon upgrades and the like.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
This sounds oddly similar to Adventure Island when you put it that way
This looks like a knockoff of Pipe Dream / Pipe Mania (or as most people know it nowadays - the hacking mini-game).
117. WATER PIPE
This is a vaguely Tetris-like setup for connecting the spigot to the bucket by placing randomly-dropped pipe pieces and trying to do it with the fewest pieces/with the most time remaining. It’s simple but pretty fun, actually.
I can't update today because Photobucket is being dumb, but my research did turn up something: Tiny Toon is a hack of Ninja Hattori-kun, a 1986 Hudson Soft game that wasn't released in the US.
How many of these games have been wholly original creations, and not just romhacks?
That Mahjong game doesn’t really scream having received the Nintendo Seal of Quality
That Mahjong game doesn’t really scream having received the Nintendo Seal of Quality
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Oh, so it is a Hudson game at least! Go figure.
I guess it's a thorough-enough change that I didn't recognize the game's graphics, which is sort of funny as it's the sort of game that really sticks in one's mind.
If yours is the same as mine, the volume roller is on the left side, near the bottom.
Bananas.
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119. GALAGA
For a number of winter holidays when I was young, my entire extended family went on an annual vacation to a resort in Barbados. When I was 11, they added a “computer room” with workstations you could rent time on (that had the horror rpg Don’t Go Alone, which is another story) and an arcade cabinet for Galaga. And boy oh boy, was I obsessed with that. I probably dumped $20 of quarters into in it in a week, which was a lot of money when my weekly allowance was something like $2. I don’t know why it was so enticing—I had my Game Boy with me, and we had an Atari 2600 at home, so Space Invaders style gameplay was nothing unusual to me. But I feel like I spent the majority of that tropical vacation begging quarters so I could spend time in a dark basement room.
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120. GALAXIAN
Seriously, this game is even moreso just Space Invaders. It’s fun, but why was I so obsessed?
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121. GOMOKU NARABE
I think this is Go? It’s clearly a board game and I clearly don’t know the rules.
122. JUNGLE EXPLORE
Adventure Island 2 without a title screen. (That’s 5 of them.) You do, in fact, explore a jungle!
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123. ICE CLIMBER
Clearly, if more 8-bit games had a mechanic for clubbing seals, they’d be in Smash Brothers too.
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124. JEWELRY
This is actually a really fun match-3 style of game, with the quirk that you can only drop vertical piles, but horizontal, vertical or diagonal matches all remove blocks, so you can set up some really cool chain reactions. Apparently the real name is “Magic Jewelry”, and it’s a unlicensed copy of Columns (which I think I may have played in an arcade?)
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125. LODE RUNNER
I was thankful for Octo’s useful instructions to pick up the gold while avoiding the Bombermans. The title also finally made sense to me, that I was running through a cave, trying to collect a rich lode.
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126. GHOSTBUSTERS
This is virtually the same as the Atari 2600 Ghostbusters game I remember from my youth, and honestly, they’re both terrible. You need to drive around town (dodging cars, because you lose money if you hit them), go buy ghost-catching equipment at the store, then search the various buildings for ghosts you can catch for cash. When the PKE meter gets high enough, you need to fight the Marshmallow Man.
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127. 1942
Vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up that I’m reasonably certain I’ve played the arcade version of.
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128. 80 DAYS
Apparently this game is about Puss in Boots and is a movie tie-in. (And apparently there was a US version called Puss 'n Boots: Pero's Great Adventure? I’ve literally never heard of this.) It’s a side-scroller with the usual jumping and shooting mechanics. Given the timer, I’m guessing you’re trying to get as far as you can? I was having a hard time telling the power-ups apart (they all look like shoes or flags) but one of them makes you jump higher and one of them clearly gives you a big speed boost. I was doing okay avoiding all the fish on the big bridge and then there was a dragon that toasted me and sent me back to the start of the level.
Whoa! Late to this party but I've loved reading all this stuff! What a cool lil device! Here are some stray observations...
I don't think this has been mentioned by anyone yet, but Adventure Island IV has the distinction of being the very last game officially released on Famicom in Japan. It's a little bit poetic, because Hudson was one of the earliest developers for the FC and Takahashi Meijin was one of the most recognizable parts of Famicom culture in the country, as I'm led to believe.
Field Combat is neat! It's one of a handful of early Jaleco games that didn't make it to NES. You'll probably see some of the others. The primary mechanic here that isn't super obvious is that your UFO can summon friendly troops to the battlefield, who will act independently of you, so the game has a mild RTS element mixed in with the arcade-style shooting. I believe you start with a set group of troops, and the UFO can actually capture enemy troops and add them to your stockpile. I also really like the cover art:
There are five stages in Legend of Kage! Granted, getting through them only takes about five minutes if you don't die.
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Stage 1: You fight off ninjas in a forest while a thunderstorm rages. The goal is to kill enough red ninjas that the boss (a fire-breathing monk) appears, and the stage ends when you beat him.
Stage 2: You fight off ninjas in the castle moat. The stage has a ninja counter that goes down as you beat them. If you beat them all with your sword only, I believe you get a 1-up.
Stage 3: You jump up the side of the castle wall. This is the one where you keep jumping up until it ends. I think the black ninjas in this stage drop something good, but I don't recall the specifics.
Stage 4: You run through the castle. The stage ends when you get to the princess at the end.
Stage 5: You escape back into the forest, but a ninja recaptures the princess and you have to fight a stronger version of the fire-breathing monk boss.
After stage 5, the game repeats in a new season. I think after several loops you get an ending screen of some sort.
Volguard II is a cool, weird game. 1985 was a strange year for the Famicom. You saw lots of developers trying out new stuff for genres that weren't fully crystallized, so it feels like a bit of a wild west. In Volguard you can transform into a robot and get all sorts of power-ups, but the progression system is obtuse and weird. I actually have a copy in-box with the manual - maybe I'll see if I can translate some of the gameplay for this thread? If you'd like?
You're probably aware of this, but the Japanese arcade scene in the era of Space Invaders was basically seas and oceans of Space Invaders clones. Galaxian was Namco's attempt at their own Space Invaders, and Galaga was their improvement on Galaxian. Also, Namco was an extremely prolific publisher for the Famicom, and Galaxian was their first title released on the system. When the NES came out, and Nintendo of America clamped down on third-party game developers, Namco felt snubbed hard, which is why many of their arcade game titles either never had an NES port, or in the case of Galaga, were published by a different company.
Oh yeah, and Gomoku Narabe is a simplified variation of Go and was one of the original set of Famicom games released by Nintendo in 1983. All of these 14 titles had a consistent label design which fans call the "pulse line":
More information than you probably wanted, but I always like to share these beautiful carts.
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31. ADVENTURE ISLAND
I didn’t actually remember the existence of this game, so I looked it up: Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima IV was never released outside of Japan, so I guess the title screen was hacked. And at least part of it was translated? Maybe a fan translation? I have many questions.
I don't think this has been mentioned by anyone yet, but Adventure Island IV has the distinction of being the very last game officially released on Famicom in Japan. It's a little bit poetic, because Hudson was one of the earliest developers for the FC and Takahashi Meijin was one of the most recognizable parts of Famicom culture in the country, as I'm led to believe.
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86. FIELD COMBAT
This is a weird one that isn’t what I expected: you’re playing a UFO that’s fighting various soldiers, tanks and encampments to take control of each field. There’s a faux-3D thing going on, in that the target determines were your bullets and tractor-beam hit, but only that spot and nothing in-between. And the soldiers/tanks keep coming, so you really need to go on the offensive right from the start and get up to the turrets before you get swarmed.
Field Combat is neat! It's one of a handful of early Jaleco games that didn't make it to NES. You'll probably see some of the others. The primary mechanic here that isn't super obvious is that your UFO can summon friendly troops to the battlefield, who will act independently of you, so the game has a mild RTS element mixed in with the arcade-style shooting. I believe you start with a set group of troops, and the UFO can actually capture enemy troops and add them to your stockpile. I also really like the cover art:
There are five stages in Legend of Kage! Granted, getting through them only takes about five minutes if you don't die.
.
Stage 1: You fight off ninjas in a forest while a thunderstorm rages. The goal is to kill enough red ninjas that the boss (a fire-breathing monk) appears, and the stage ends when you beat him.
Stage 2: You fight off ninjas in the castle moat. The stage has a ninja counter that goes down as you beat them. If you beat them all with your sword only, I believe you get a 1-up.
Stage 3: You jump up the side of the castle wall. This is the one where you keep jumping up until it ends. I think the black ninjas in this stage drop something good, but I don't recall the specifics.
Stage 4: You run through the castle. The stage ends when you get to the princess at the end.
Stage 5: You escape back into the forest, but a ninja recaptures the princess and you have to fight a stronger version of the fire-breathing monk boss.
After stage 5, the game repeats in a new season. I think after several loops you get an ending screen of some sort.
116. VOLGUARD2
Horizontal-scrolling shoot-em-up, with a “power” bar that seems to increase from hitting enemies and decrease from missing shots, but can be refilled significantly by the zeppelins you can dock with. Collision damage doesn’t seem to decrease it but also doesn’t always instantly kill you. Man, I wish I had manuals for more of these.
Volguard II is a cool, weird game. 1985 was a strange year for the Famicom. You saw lots of developers trying out new stuff for genres that weren't fully crystallized, so it feels like a bit of a wild west. In Volguard you can transform into a robot and get all sorts of power-ups, but the progression system is obtuse and weird. I actually have a copy in-box with the manual - maybe I'll see if I can translate some of the gameplay for this thread? If you'd like?
120. GALAXIAN
Seriously, this game is even moreso just Space Invaders. It’s fun, but why was I so obsessed?
121. GOMOKU NARABE
I think this is Go? It’s clearly a board game and I clearly don’t know the rules.
You're probably aware of this, but the Japanese arcade scene in the era of Space Invaders was basically seas and oceans of Space Invaders clones. Galaxian was Namco's attempt at their own Space Invaders, and Galaga was their improvement on Galaxian. Also, Namco was an extremely prolific publisher for the Famicom, and Galaxian was their first title released on the system. When the NES came out, and Nintendo of America clamped down on third-party game developers, Namco felt snubbed hard, which is why many of their arcade game titles either never had an NES port, or in the case of Galaga, were published by a different company.
Oh yeah, and Gomoku Narabe is a simplified variation of Go and was one of the original set of Famicom games released by Nintendo in 1983. All of these 14 titles had a consistent label design which fans call the "pulse line":
More information than you probably wanted, but I always like to share these beautiful carts.