There's footage on Youtube here, but the short answer is: Not really. The mushroom is a snake, the flower is a sword, and koopas are little dudes.
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What the heck is on this $10 Retro Game handheld? Let’s find out!
- Thread starter Beowulf
- Start date
Kzinssie
(she/her)
oh shit i remember this as that one game on Neopets actually
ahahaha what the fuck. why would you make this
Also, didn't grab a quote, but that Air hack is weirdly fascinating to me. I think it's the decision to put Engrish poetry on the title screen? Maybe the way it takes advantage of SMB1-specific mechanical jank I've never seen before. I grew up on the All-Stars version, so even in the vanilla game the SMB1 physics feel strange and off-kilter to me - I don't even understand what half the glitches in this are, especially compared to the more straightforward glitches you see in, say, SMW Kaizo.
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143. TRUMP TANK
A 3D tank racing and/or fighting game. My attempts to turn up any information about it haven’t worked out given the title. One more thing that asshole has ruined!
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144. BATTLE CITY2
I’ve criticized other games as “Atari 2600-level”, and I think it applies here. You play that tank in the middle and you need to shoot the other tanks (and other things that appear) before they reach your emblem in the center.
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145. ANIMAL BLOCKES
This is a simple matching game: Click on a block, then another one with a matching animal, and they’ll disappear. Continue until all blocks are gone.
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146. ANIMAL CONTEST
This seems to be an entirely random game of arbitrarily comparing animals. You press the button, and two animals come out. Then they both go to either your side or the computer side and the total number for each changes appropriately. That seems to be the entire game. I think they’re being judged or something and the winner gets both?
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147. ARGUS
Apparently an obscure port of a vertical shoot-em-up that owes a lot of Xevious. (I thought it was another hack at first.) I did look ahead at the list, and I think actual Xevious is actually coming up in a hundred games or so!
148. JURASSIC PARK
This is Super Mario 16 (which we saw way back at #17), the hack of Joe & Mac. To be fair, it does involve dinosaurs!
That one is especially baffling since there IS a Jurassic Park NES game.
I just watched some footage of Mach Rider, and you're absolutely correct.
This time I agree - this looks to be just barely above what a 2600 could do (a 2600 couldn't display those two color brick walls). This also seems like a slightly more complicated version (gameplay-wise) of one of the games from Combat for the 2600.
144. BATTLE CITY2
I’ve criticized other games as “Atari 2600-level”, and I think it applies here. You play that tank in the middle and you need to shoot the other tanks (and other things that appear) before they reach your emblem in the center.
Is 2600 starting to lose meaning for anyone else at this point?
Is this just mahjong solitaire for kids?
145. ANIMAL BLOCKES
This is a simple matching game: Click on a block, then another one with a matching animal, and they’ll disappear. Continue until all blocks are gone.
As long as it's said "twenty-six hundred", I will always, 'til the day I die, think of the Atari system. Two thousand six hundred is not, in itself, a special number and the comma (2,600) makes it meaningless to me.
...I think, yes, that's what it's intended to be.
"Battle City 2" appears to be a reskin of another early Namco Famicom game, Warpman:
Both Warpman and Battle City are fairly primitive as far as FC games go, but they have just enough depth to be fun. When we talk about "2600-level" games, that is pretty much the only type of game the FC was capable of until developers started adding new chips into the carts in the post-Super Mario Bros years.
Both Warpman and Battle City are fairly primitive as far as FC games go, but they have just enough depth to be fun. When we talk about "2600-level" games, that is pretty much the only type of game the FC was capable of until developers started adding new chips into the carts in the post-Super Mario Bros years.
While there was a Battle City 2, it had a different name (I think TNK 3?) and it didn't get any home ports until it was included in a Namco Museum, and even then not until the Switch was released.
Yeah, you can just look at early stuff like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. that's missing animations, features, and sometimes even entire stages and see how much games and cartridge technology had advanced over a couple of years. I've no doubt Nintendo could've gone back to the drawing board and made much more faithful home ports* of its starting arcade line-up a few years later if it had really wanted to.
* I know about that one limited-edition version of the 8-bit game with 50m hacked in, but I mean Nintendo could've actually done the game better. Restoring animations that were cut, returning Pauline's missing hat, that sort of thing.
Though shrunken down to fit Game Boy resolution, Donkey Kong '94, having all four original stages with all the old flourishes as well as some new ones used as a prologue for a much larger game, really shows how much things had advanced over about a decade.
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149. ARKANOID
Classic arcade Pong-style action. I was never as good at this as I thought I was. It’s on the list of “arcade games I’ve wasted a LOT of quarters on without ever scoring well.”
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150. BLACK WHITE CHES
Othello is still not Chess. Also, this isn’t even in black and white, like the other version (#83) is!
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151. ASTRO ROBO SASA
This is entertaining: Sasa can only maneuver by firing its gun as propulsion. You need to collect energy tanks held up by balloons and hidden in scenery, but each shot (or getting hit) drains your energy.
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152. BABEL
I expected this to involve a tower; I wasn’t expecting an action-puzzle game where you need to rearrange the staircases in a limited number of moves (indicated by your remaining “power”). It’s clearly got some rules of how you can flip or drop things that I didn’t fully get a handle on. According to Wikipedia, this game is the story of fabled explorer Indiana Borgnine trying to find the Hanging Gardens of Babylon by climbing the Tower of Babel.
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153. BACKSTROKE
This has no title screen and jumps straight into the game, which is, in fact, attempting to win at the 100-meter backstroke. It plays like a track and field game. (I wonder if it's a piece from a many-in-one set?)
154. NIX
Adventure Island 3, copy #7.
Really figured that OG Adventure Island would be the one to be repeated so often; 2 and 3 have to take up more space if the goal is to cram as many games as possible into the thing
I had thought of that, but the fact that there are three games we keep seeing (Adventure Island 2, Adventure Island 3, and Super Mario 16) makes me think it's not just a "There's no rom here, point to that one instead." I think they're copies.
For that matter, Adventure Island 2 is 257 KB. Even a huge NES rom like Dragon Warrior 4 is only 1,025 KB. 500 big nes roms still would barely fill a gig. I can buy a 1 gb SD card for less than $4--I can't imagine that in China, where you're down the road from the foundry and buying everything at cost, the price of memory is a real factor for nes roms.
Sasa is a fun lil game that I learned about from watching Game Center CX. It was fairly popular in Japan, as I understand. Babel is definitely worth a spin if you like action puzzlers of its ilk. It's a lot of fun.
I also love Arkanoid, but I've also never gotten particularly far, particularly in the NES version.
I also love Arkanoid, but I've also never gotten particularly far, particularly in the NES version.
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155. BACKTOTHE FUTURE
I remember reading a review of this game decades ago (when it was relatively new) saying that it was like Paperboy but without the fun. And, I’m mean…that’s not far off. It’s a primitive runner game; you need to dodge your way through the streets of Hill Valley, collecting clocks (which prevent the picture of your siblings from fading) and avoiding birds, trash cans, hula-hoopers, guys holding glass windows, fat guys in pink shirts, and the like. There are multiple stages, but the first four (at least) are all basically identical. This is the epitome of bad media tie-in games.
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156. BADMINTON
Exactly what it’s supposed to be: A badminton game with a bunch of different modes/difficulty levels.
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157. BALTRON
Hey, it’s a horizontal-scrolling shooter! It’s got a cute little mini-map that reminds me of Defender, you start with the forward and downward attacks (though I couldn’t find any power-ups) and there appears to be a distinct map to the levels.
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158. BANANA
I have no idea why this is named “Banana”. It’s a Dig Dug-style puzzle game where you play a mole and need to collect all the (Fruits? Nuts? Seeds?) and rescue the girl and get to the exit without trapping yourself under rocks or at the bottom of the screen.
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159. BATTLE
Hah! This is a hack of Galaga (#119), redone as a tank battle thing. I actually realized when the opening music played, and then the enemies started floating in.
For a game called Banana those sure look like sweet potatoes.
158. BANANA
I have no idea why this is named “Banana”. It’s a Dig Dug-style puzzle game where you play a mole and need to collect all the (Fruits? Nuts? Seeds?) and rescue the girl and get to the exit without trapping yourself under rocks or at the bottom of the screen.
I’m at the point where I can only tell if a game is home brewed or just an obscure Famicom release by the copyright date.
Or if it’s Adventure Island with a different name
Or if it’s Adventure Island with a different name
I’d have guessed wrong about Baltron then
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I just saw pink bananas in a seed catalog so they do exist at least.
They actually did this with Mario Bros., just not in North America. It hit the Famicom Disk System as Kaette Kita Mario Bros. and Europe in 1993(!) as Mario Bros. Classic Series.
153. BACKSTROKE
This has no title screen and jumps straight into the game, which is, in fact, attempting to win at the 100-meter backstroke. It plays like a track and field game. (I wonder if it's a piece from a many-in-one set?)
I thought at first it might be the swimming from Track and Field II, but that's top-down. Upon further inspection, it looks like a slightly-hacked version of the swimming event from Capcom's Gold Medal Challenge '92.
That doesn't seem quite right, but I can't find anything that's any closer.
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160. BATTLE BEASTS
This is a hack of Donkey Kong 3, but there’s a whole article about the hack to turn it into Battle Beasts.
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161. BATTLESHIP
This is the Battleship board game, officially licensed and everything. At first I thought that the AI inexplicably got multiple shots to your one, but there’s actually a variety of “shaped” missiles you can press Select and use once each. (Another case where the manual would be useful!)
This led to a discussion with my wife about how that would speed up the actual physical game and make it more fun, with her countering that the purpose of Battleship is for your kids to waste time and you don’t want to speed it up. (She played a lot of Travel Battleship with her brother growing up, mostly on car trips and in restaurants.) I didn’t have a good response to this, because while there must be people who play Battleship for fun, I don’t know any.
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162. BATTLE TANK
First-person tank simulator. I appreciate the radar; I wish I could figure out how to actually move the tank.
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163. BENTHAL
This is very Tetris-like, except the blocks all have angles and you’re trying to fit together a lot of spiky pieces and different-sized triangles into perfect lines. It’s difficult, especially if you have Tetris reflexes.
