There is a widely-held belief within NES fandom, not without justification, than unlicensed cartridges are, as a rule, somewhat… lacking. With the exception of Tengen, and some gamers might give you an argument about that, none of the companies that pumped out “unauthorized” NES carts (following the court decision that allowed them to be legally sold) seemed all that interested in making good games. Indeed, most were simple platformers or shooters with little imagination, terrible and/or glitchy graphics, monotonous sound, uninspired gameplay, or any or all of the above. Games like Menace Beach, Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, Bible Adventures, and, of course, the infamous Action 52 (previously reviewed in this series) seem to serve only to underline Nintendo’s contemporary propaganda that only games bearing the “Official Nintendo Seal of Quality” (i.e. authorized games) were worth buying.

Some companies decided that what they lacked in quality, they could try to make up for with quantity. Thus, multicarts soon became a popular gimmick in the world of unlicensed games. Thankfully, most did not go as overboard as Action 52 did, sticking to a more reasonable number of games in each cart. Unfortunately, this usually did not result in better individual games, as most of the individual titles were still, on the whole, pretty awful stuff.

Case in point:

Caltron 6-in-1 (NES, 1992): This is the only known NES title released by Caltron Ind., Inc. (going by their onscreen credit), and if this game is indicative of their abilities that’s probably for the best. The six games contained in this cart are uniformly awful, barely first-generation NES quality, and come off more like programmers’ test projects than full and playable games on their own.

The only good thing that can be said about Caltron 6-in-1 is that the games, if nothing else, are of much higher quality than the ones contained in, say, Action 52. However, this isn’t saying much, since a blind and arthritic orangutan is probably capable of producing a better video game than anything contained in Action 52. However, all six games in Caltron’s effort appear to run properly without crashing, which at least is more than can be said of Active Enterprises’s infamous cart.

Of course, once some of them are played for a while, you might be wishing for a crash or two…

Cosmos Cop: The NES is capable of far more than conventional wisdom and modern marketing might have you believe. However, even the most ardent NES fan would have to admit, 3D shooters are an area best left to the more advanced consoles. As demonstrated in this limp Space Harrier knock-off, the NES just does not handle first-person scaling all that convincingly, and there is a ton of image breakup as a result. Even getting past that, Cosmos Cop is a resoundingly uninspired effort, content to simply be Space Harrier with the serial numbers filed off and nothing more (though if you want to see real Grand Theft Arcade, read on…).

Magic Carpet 1001: Now here we have an example of a genre at which the NES always excelled – the horizontal scrolling shooter. Unlike Cosmos Cop, this one doesn’t tax the humble grey toaster all that much. It will, however, tax you far more than it needs to. Just look at the gameplay screenshot; see how busy it is. You have to get through all of this without taking a hit. And this is taken less than a minute after the game starts! At least the programmers gave you double the usual number of lives (6) to compensate for the difficulty, but this is still an example of how untalented game designers liked to define “challenge”; make the game resemble the Long Island Expressway at rush hour with how crowded it is with enemies, then make hit detection so picky that only direct hits count for the player, but you can just be grazed by an enemy and die. Not even Aladdin’s Genie could save this Arabian night. Next!

Balloon Monster: You shoot a giant bubble that turns into many smaller bubbles as you shoot it. The bubbles bounce around so wildly that avoiding their lethal touch is next to impossible, and for some sadistic reason the designers decided you should only be able to shoot up, not from side to side. Do I even have to say how stupid this game is? Let’s just move on…

Adam and Eve: Just look at that screenshot. Go on, take a good look. This game is an out-and-out clone of Balloon Fight, a first-gen NES game. This wouldn’t be so bad, if Balloon Fight wasn’t itself an out-and-out clone of Joust! And why is it called Adam and Eve, anyway? Other than the snakes that are your foes, I see no connection here to the Biblical story of creation; your characters more resemble cavemen than the popular image of the First Man and First Woman, and certainly there were no balloons in Eden. Seriously… what were these people thinking here? Were they, in fact, thinking?

Porter: Some know it as Soko-Ban, others Boxxle. Whatever the name, it’s one of the most basic (and frustrating) puzzle games out there – push the boxes onto their designated points without getting stuck. This is a fine game in and of itself; however, this being an unlicensed NES cart, Caltron is seemingly required by law to find some way to screw it all up. And this is how they’ve done it here: Your character can only push boxes around while you hold down the A button. Worse, where in most Soko-Ban games the secondary button is used to take back moves, in Porter the B button is the “suicide function” that restarts the level if you trap yourself. If you hit B by mistake, you don’t get a confirmation message, you just die on the spot. There’s no excuse for that. When you add a countdown clock to each level and some really uninspired puzzle design… well, what more do I need to say, really?

Bookyman: If you’ve ever wondered why unlicensed games get so little respect in the NES fan community, look no further than Bookyman, the sixth and (mercifully) final game in this collection. Not only is it nearly a pixel-for-pixel clone of Make Trax (a.k.a. Crush Roller, an unheralded and underrated Pac-Man clone from 1981), but this one has turned up in several pirate Famiclones and multicarts over the years, lumped in beside the endless hacks of Super Mario Bros. and Bomberman. When you lie down with dogs… The colors are eye-bleeding, the animation minimal, the enemy AI alternatively brain-dead or MENSA quality, the controls twitchy, the game especially unforgiving of slight errors (if literally one pixel of the maze hasn’t been painted, the game won’t go on to the next level!). And the artwork! A kindergartener could do better than some of these animals! (Is that supposed to be a penguin or a rabid eggplant?) Make Trax itself is pretty fun, and since it never got an official home conversion on any console (so far as I know) this one will have to do. It’s just too bad it wasn’t done by a company that could actually, you know, produce a game worth playing.

Caltron 6-in-1 is like a six-pack of Schlitz or Natural Ice; it is what it says it is, but it doesn’t taste good going down, nor does it do much for your image if you’re caught with it. Let’s face it – when the best thing that can be said about your game is “It’s better than Action 52,” that’s the very definition of “damning with faint praise.” Avoid at all costs.

Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about a good game next time; it gets tedious ripping on easy targets after a while. Fortunately, I have just such a game in mind already…

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: Action 52
2. Retro-Active: Action 52 (Genesis)
3. Retro-Active: Cheetahmen II
4. Retro-Active: Top 10 Retro Puzzle Games NOT Called “Tetris”
5. Retro-Active: NES “First Sequel” Syndrome

1 Comment »

1. 
   Captain N
   August 28, 2008 at 1:11 am

   I actually have this cart as well as Cheetha Men II. The games are a bit better then action 52 but not by much. If you have this cart it can go for $300 on ebay. I was lucky and got it for $8 at the Swap Shop.

   [Reply]

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