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Mega
Duck - The games
Here you'll find reviews of the carts I have so far, so you know with what kind of pulp you're dealing when you pick one up. They're not in any order yet, and I still have to add some more titles, but I'm working on that. Check back by the next millenium-problem and they should be here. STREET RIDER Okay, this is quite a lousy game. It's a complete rip-off of Rally X - if you'd put "Rally X" on the label instead of "Street Rider", everybody would think it's an actual licensed version of Rally X (yet not as fun). For those who don't know this game, but also for those who *do* know the game, here's how this Mega Duck disaster goes: you're driving a unbelievably slow F1 car through a maze. On the biggest part of the screen you'll see the part of the maze you're in. At the bottom is a subscreen with a (very hard to see) map of the complete maze, including enemies and bonus stuff. Next to that you can read your score, and the amount of fuel that's left. Actually, this silly Taiwanese F1 car uses oil as fuel. The enemies are other F1 cars who try to run into you. If they're chasing you, you can confuse them by puffing out clouds of exhaust fumes. Just as with Rally X, this costs you some fuel. Eh, oil, that is. This game is also the only Mega Duck game with bugs, as far as I know. The collision check doesn't always work (sometimes the enemy's car will drive right through your clouds), and some bits of the screen get messed up while scrolling. FOUR IN ONE This one is a cart by Commin under their Sachen name (their most common used name in non-Mega Duck releases). It has got four games: Electron World, Dice Block (called "Dice Square" in the game itself), Trouble Zone and Virus Attack. When you turn the Mega Duck on, you'll see a Mega Duck logo instead of the usual Creatronic logo. You can choose each game from a menu, accompanied by a lovely duck and corny music. Hitting "select" and "start" at the same time during one of the four games will send you back to this menu. Okay, the first game in the list is Virus Attack. It's a very simple but effective Galaga/Space Invaders type of game, with Pokemon-like creatures you have to shoot down. Nice one if you're into classic videogames or to kill a few minutes with. Next one on the list is Electron World. You're a small ship in this up/down scroller, flying around (in a very slow manner) on a mainboard full of chips and one CPU. Also flying about are enemy crafts that shoot the chips in order to get to the CPU and shoot it. Once that happens, it's game over for you. Or, as the great Taiwanenglish line says: "Your mission is defeated". Your goal is to either choose paths free of chips, or blast chips away and create your own path to get to the enemies and blast 'em. Once they're all gone, you've achieved victory and you can move on to the next level. Like Virus Attack, it's a nice, simple game. Trouble Zone then. Before you start the game, you can choose the level you want to start in and three equally corny tunes. Once you've made your selection you'll start the game in a very Tetris-like screen. At the top of the playable part of the screen, two blocks appear, one on top of the other. A number is written in these blocks, and by pushing "A" or "B" you can move the upper number to the lower block, and the other way around. You have to line up all the blocks so that at least three of the same number touch eachother. Then follows a tedious explosion, the blocks disappear and any blocks that were on top of them fall down. Actually, the game is rather entertaining. Or so thinks my crazy girlfriend. Last one on he list is Dice Block. It's called that on the cart and in the menu, but the game logo says "Dice Square". Whatever it is called, I really don't get this game. I think it's some sort of Othello/Go-like game with dices. Ah well. SULEIMAN'S TREASURE Another one of Commin's usual aproach: take a classic game and just do a remake. Suleiman's Treasure is an Oil's Well-kinda game situated in Egypt. Out of your cool 4x4 truck, you let down a hose with a mouth at the end into the ground. With the hose you can move through tunnels and eat up the dots. Once you clear all the dots you proceed to the next level. The hose can't go through a tunnel it's already in, so when you clear one tunnel, you have to go back to a juncture and head into the other tunnel you wanna clear. By pushing "A" you go back one step, by pushing "B" you rush back towards your truck above the ground very quickly. This is sometimes neccesary because of the aliens that dwell underground (well, okay, they just slide across the screen). When they touch your hose (hihi) you lose a life. But when you eat 'em up with the mouth, they're gone. This continues for several levels. After a few levels you're given a password so you can start in that level when you wanna play again. THE BRICK WALL In Europe you would get this cart with the Mega Duck (except in Germany where the black Hartung Duck seem to came with the Four In One cart and Artic Zone). It's also the only cart not done by Commin/Sachen, but by Timlex. Timlex also produced and distributed the Mega Duck under their name. I have suspisions though that it's a Commin production anyway, released under the Timlex label. Anyway, The Brick Wall is a weird game where you have a tank shooting bricks out of a wall in front of you (you are a mobile brick). You can shoot bricks back into the wall, and fill up the holes again. You do that some more, the tank shoots some more, and suddenly it's game over. You lost. I know reading the manual for this game (which came with my boxed Mega Duck set) should make things more clear, but until now I never felt like doing so. ARMOUR FORCE This one's rather okay! It's a horizontal R-Type kinda space blaster, and it has the best graphics I've seen in Mega Duck games so far. Cool backgrounds, nice alien ships, end bosses and what not. Your goal is to make it to the end of the level. While your astronaut guy is flying about towards that end of the level, alien ships come from all directions and shoot at you. You can shoot back, at first with one bullet (or bomb, whatever it's supposed to be) and later - when you've picked up bonus items - with more bullets or a real big blob of enemy killin' stuff. You start with a "damage" level of 100. I guess those Taiwanese guys meant this to be "health", because when an enemy bullet hits you, your "damage" level goes down. When you reach 0, you're dead. When you're not being hit, and are just flying around shooting enemies, your "damage" level slowly recovers until it's back to 100 again. When you pick up power-ups when your "damage" level is 100, it adds another 20. With the "B" button you can activate a shield. Not only will this protect you from the enemies and their bullets, it also gives you a temporary other kind of bomb, which appears to be extra strong. But be careful with this, because it'll cost you 30 "damage". When you reach the end of the level you'll get a real, big ass end-boss. Yeah! After finishing level one (called "Battle of moon") you proceed to a screen where you can select any of the three remaining levels. When you've finished those, you'll get a fifth level (if I remember correctly), and after that you've won the game. The game is quite easy, I finished it in two hours the first time, and now I could finish it in about 20 minutes. The trick is to just reach the end of the level with 90 or more "damage" which is easy enough. Then you activate the shield ("B"), which gives you the oppurtinity to shoot some powerful bombs at the boss without getting hit yourself. You can finish him off with two, maybe three of those shields - it's a piece of cake. You'll start in the next level with 100 "damage" anyway. All in all a good looking game, and it plays nice as well. It's just a bit easy. But in the Mega Duck range, this is probably the biggest game with the best graphics. ARTIC ZONE Called "Arctic Zone" in the titlescreen, this is another simple, one-screen game that just doesn't entertain for long. The object of the game is to move your funky dancin' bear up and down at the right side of the screen, and fire blocks towards the left side of the screen. On that side, shapes occur and slowly move toward you. You have to shoot blocks in order to fill the shapes in such way that they form a solid square or rectangle. Then they dissapear and you can go on and shoot at the other shapes. I know this is again based on a better known arcade game but I can't recall just what that was called. Anyway, it's pretty boring and if you'd wanna play it, you're better off buying one of those cheap 300-In-One "Brick Game" handhelds. RAILWAY This one's again released under the Sachen label, and starts with the Mega Duck logo instead of Creatronic's logo. After a cute little intro screen, you start the game in a 7x9 field of squares. One of those squares is the starting trainstation, and one is the destination trainstation. At the top of the screen you see four pieces of railroad track (left turns, right turn, straight ahead, junctions, etc.) You have to put them in the field in such a way, that a train leaving the starting station can ride to the other trainstation without riding off the track. By pushing "B", you put down the piece of track at the position you're standing - this is the most right one of the four shown at the top of the screen. Then the other three move to the right, and a new piece is added at the left (which you'll have to put in the field three turns later). After a certain amount of time has passed, the train starts riding. When you've succesfully put a good rail between the two stations, you can push "A" to have the train hurry up. If you're not finished putting down a decent rail for the train to ride on, you better hurry! Again this is a nice game to kill a few minutes with, but like the rest it's nothing you'll pick up the Mega Duck for again and again to play it. Basically it's a stripped down version of the old Loco-Motion game by Konami. THE MAGIC MAZE Wow, this even has some real life Asian stuff scribled above the game logo! Okay, so far for the interesting stuff about this game. Again a one-screen game, in which you are a cube. On the screen are a few stones (or something) and a few bad ass enemies. The object of the game is to roll over your cube on top of the stones after which they then dissapear. When all stones are cleared, you go on to the next level. You can shoot at the enemies as well, though it's pretty hard to say how to aim. In the little time I spent on this game, I think I figured out it has something to do with which side of the cube is facing which way. Anyway, I don't know this game myself, so it might be that Commin finally came up with an original idea, though I just as well expect it to be based on some old acrade or computer game. PILE WONDER Another game we've seen before. You're a little guy running around in a small maze (the maze gets bigger in later levels). On certain places in the maze you'll find dots, and on other places you'll find boxes. To finish the level, you have to push each box on top of a dot. Now, the tricky part is that the passages in the maze are as wide as the boxes. You have to be careful and choose which box to move first, otherwise you might trap yourself or make it impossible for the other boxes to be pushed to where the have to go. You can only push a box forward, you can't pull it back and you can't push two boxes at the same time. It's pretty basic game and requires very simple graphics (which is an ideal game in Commin's eyes, so it seems) but it's okay entertainment. If you really have got nothing else to do. BLACK FORREST TALE Being one of the few Mega Duck games I finished, Black Forrest Tale is pretty okay. It has decent graphics (though corny sometimes, just as the music) and gameplay which doesn't bore you right the first minute. It's a (more or less) top-down view game which scrolls in four directions, somewhat like the old C64 game Druid or the walk-around parts of the Gameboy's Gargoyle's Quest. You're a girl, armed with a big ass walking stick, and you walk around in worlds clubbing enemies to death with your stick. They then turn into stone and you're able to kick them away. When they hit trees, buildings and other parts of the screen (or the side of it), the stone falls apart and a coin is revealed which you have to pick up. When the stone hits another enemy, they're killed as well. Kicking two stones against eachother will give you an enterance to a bonus level where you can pick up extra coins. When you've picked up 20 coins, you can buy a key in one of the shops that are scattered around the level. Once you've picked up that key, some geezer appears at a door which is the way out of that level. Knock down the guy and you can walk though the door, back to the level-picking part. This part shows about eight worlds (village, forrest, river, etc.) which you all have to finish in order to get to the last level. You can make your life easier in the shops: you can buy various things, like shoes to walk faster with, and you can even gamble to increase your number of coins. You can also buy lives and time, and some sort of fishing bowl that I don't see the use of. It's a pretty okay game in the Mega Duck league. I enjoyed playing it for a few hours, and it's pretty easy to finish it.
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